By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Do you know what coup plotters do? They plot coups.
In the modern context, that looks less like tanks in the
streets and more like—see if this part sounds a little bit familiar—the
nullification of elections on pretextual grounds ranging from fictitious
electoral fraud to vaguely defined national emergencies.
With the plotters of the attempted coup d’etat of
2020-21 installed in the White House, the January 6 rioters pardoned, and
reliable allies seated in the Department of Justice, the FBI, the State
Department, many state and local election offices, etc.—and with Republicans on
the brink of what looks to be a humiliating rejection at the polls—the fact
that coup plotters plot coups is, or ought to be, top of mind for Americans.
Americans might consider rousing ourselves for long
enough to notice that the outlines of the next coup attempt—which will be one
of the most predictable crises in all of American political history—are already
being limned, beginning with the preemptive lawsuit challenging the results of
the Alaska Senate election (but only if the Republican loses),
the DOJ litigation aimed at sticking the administration’s snout into elections
in 30 states and the District of Columbia, and the dry runs
for various modes of federal intervention that already have taken place in
states including Idaho, Montana, and California. Demands for voter data are obvious preludes to
claims that elections, should they go against Trump and his allies, were swung
by ineligible votes. Trump already has contemplated challenging the results in
Texas if he is not convinced they are “honest,” a very funny word to put into
the service of Ken Paxton.
The main action of the failed coup d’etat of 2021
was not the shameful and imbecilic scene at the Capitol—it was the attempt to
build a legal pretext for nullifying the election of Joe Biden and illegally
installing Donald Trump in a second term as president. The dope in the buffalo
suit was never going to overthrow the government of the United States—Rudy
Giuliani, Cleta Mitchell, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and a whole lot of
criminals and misfits who are for some reason licensed to practice law in these
United States were the ones trying in a more serious way to do that. Look for
the same figures, or similar figures, to lead the way the next time around.
Having a riot at the Capitol was convenient for the coup
plotters. For one thing, it provided a means of intimidating (and very possibly
murdering, if the rabble had had its way) political opponents; for
another, the riot still functions as a legitimizing device for the actual
crime—a mostly peaceful coup attempt: “Yes, that scene at the Capitol
was regrettable,” you’ve heard a thousand Republican apologists say, “but
surely Trump had a legal right to challenge the election results peacefully
in a court of law. What’s wrong with that?”
What, indeed? The same question must have been on the
lips of those who found ways to justify the coups that brought to power such
figures as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet.
It is worth remembering that the claims of fraud in the
2020 election involved a great deal of wildly fanciful nonsense about Venezuelan secret agents,
Italian spy satellites, and a gun battle (entirely fictitious, of course) at a
German server farm. There is no reason to treat the idiotic hunt for a pretext
in 2020-21 as though it were a legitimate exercise in litigation or the defense
of democratic foundations—this is not a middle-school debate class, and we are
under no positive moral obligation to pretend that bulls—t isn’t bulls—t.
Citizens of free societies know that it is possible—indeed, common—for the most
unprincipled and vicious kinds of malefactors to use the instruments of law,
due process, and transparency against the institutions of free societies. This
often comes up in the European context of streitbare Demokratie, the
constitutional principle under which the democratic process excludes certain
antidemocratic elements, the idea being that the people who would get rid of
parliaments do not get to sit in the very parliaments they wish to dissolve or
overthrow. This stands in contrast to the American practice of relying on the
electorate itself, along with politically neutral constitutional protections,
to police those who wish to eliminate liberal democracy per se. The
American model has worked pretty well—so far. But it is not foolproof—indeed,
given the character of the malevolent fools we are talking about here, there is
no proofing against them.
Some modern autocrats remain shameless jackboot men of
the might-makes-right variety, but a very large share of them, a majority in
the Western world, feel it necessary to pretend that they are acting under the
color of law. Donald Trump and the seditionists who support him follow that
model rather than, say, the Saddam Hussein model. All successful parasites
evolve to better fit themselves into their local environments.
This is, or should be, familiar stuff to those acquainted
with the sorry history of the 20th century.
After the attempted overthrow of the Spanish government
in 1936, an event that produced the Spanish Civil War and ultimately led to the
dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the men behind the coup went to great lengths
to establish, post facto, a legal justification for what they had done.
There were claims of election fraud, of course, exotic and preposterous new
legal and constitutional theories including the notion that those who had
resisted the coup were the criminals (la justicia al revés, as
the Spanish called it, “inverted justice”), promiscuous use of the law and
rhetoric of treason, etc. The Francoists tried another coup in 1981 against a
background of political crisis, framing it as a legal and legitimate action
under a different pretext. There is a reason so many Trump admirers are also
admirers of Franco and his junta.
After securing power, the Franco regime duly empaneled a
blue-ribbon commission to “study” the coup and the events leading up to it, and
the panel duly produced a report titled Dictamen de la Comisión sobre
ilegitimidad de poderes actuantes el 18 de julio de 1936, known to students
of the Spanish dictatorship simply as the Dictamen.
Translated into stilted English by Google, the Dictamen could almost be
a contemporary Republican social media post, claiming that there was “authentic
evidence of the great parliamentary fraud of the popular front [and] the
falsification of suffrage to the detriment of the counterrevolution and for the
benefit of Marxist forces to such an extent that it subverted the result of the
electoral contest.” Remarkable how much Francoist propaganda from the 1930s
reads like Rudy Giuliani after cocktail hour.
The architects of the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet
to power in Chile similarly felt the need to make a quasi-legal case for themselves beforehand, and, as
they set upon a course of murdering and torturing the opposition into
submission afterward, they created a new body of sham legal procedures and principles to justify
their doing so.
The story repeats itself: The Preußenschlag in
Prussia that ultimately helped bring Nazis to power nationally in Germany was
justified by a flimsy legal argument. The Honduran coup of 2009 involved a
tendentious interpretation of the constitution and a counterfeit letter of
resignation from the incumbent president. The removal of Mohammad Mosaddegh as
prime minister in Iran was notionally legal in that the shah had signed a
decree purporting to dismiss him. What happens after any given coup may be
similarly lawful: Innovations of the Pinochet regime included extensive use of la
parrilla, “the grill,” meaning a metal bedframe to which prisoners were
attached before being soaked in water and having electrical cords attached to
their mouths, genitals, and anuses—or inserted into open wounds—for the
purposes of interrogation or simply as torture for torture’s sake. Pinochet and
his men felt the need to make this procedure notionally lawful—as a
matter of law, what Pinochet’s torturers were doing was every bit as lawful as
what the Nazis did under the Nuremberg racial laws.
It is easier to see this sort of thing more clearly when
one has some distance from it. My friends over at National Review’s The
Editors podcast recently castigated Michigan Senate candidate Abdul
El-Sayed for “playing the Islamophobia card.” There are serious reasons to have
reservations about El-Sayed, his ideology, and his associations. You will not
hear those from the leader of the Republican Party, who recently said of
El-Sayed: “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and
invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and
terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” No Christmas! Islamophobia is
not only a convenient political card.
More to the point, the gentlemen of The Editors
argued that El-Sayed cannot be entrusted with the power of a Senate seat
because he wrote a letter in support of Mohamed Morsi, at that time the recently
elected president of Egypt, calling on him to purge the Egyptian media and
police.
What my friends at National Review did not
add—because it is so eternally difficult to see what is in front of one’s
face—is that the Republican candidate in the race, Mike Rogers, also
supports a president—an American president—who has made efforts (with limited
success) to purge the media, who surely would do more against a press he labels
“an enemy of the people” if he could. More consequentially, that same president
has successfully purged the federal police agencies, installing an
irresponsible political henchman at the FBI and carrying out mass firings
directed at political enemies, including career FBI agents who had been
involved in investigating the criminal wrongdoing of Trump and his associates
in matters ranging from the mishandling of classified documents to the 2020-21
coup attempt. The FBI set aside corruption investigations into Trump’s
political allies, including Sens. Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, and Trump’s
operatives went as far as to target the family members of political enemies,
notably Maurene Comey, daughter of the former FBI Director James Comey. I do
not care much for Abdul El-Sayed and his brand of politics, but it is a mystery
to me how his enthusiasm for purging the Egyptian police is disqualifying while
Mike Rogers’ reliable support for an American president actually purging
American law enforcement agencies somehow does not even merit passing
mention. I am afraid that my friends are standing athwart history with one eye
closed.
Of course, as a legal matter, Donald Trump has the right
to nominate any boot-licking misfit he likes to head the FBI, the DOJ, the DOD,
etc. And he has the legal right to prioritize or deprioritize this or that
investigation or class of investigations. There may not be an applicable law
under which to charge Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth for their campaign
of mass murder in the Caribbean. Do not wait for the Supreme Court to make a
formal ruling that Trump’s war in Iran is unlawful, even though it is
being conducted with no plausible constitutional authority whatsoever. And
Heinrich Himmler had every legal right to operate Nazi death camps.
Formal lawfulness covers many kinds of abuses, crimes, and illegitimate
actions.
“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage
in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in
elections,” Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state in Maine, told the New
York Times. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the
states.”
It does, indeed, seem that way.
There is the aforementioned matter of the preemptive
challenge to the Alaska election results. There is the matter of the Trump
administration’s attempt to seize
ballots in Georgia. There is the matter of the administration’s attempted
interference with vote counting in California. Authorities in Republican-leaning states such
as Utah are preparing for federal interference in their elections—elections in
which the president of the United States and the executive branch he leads have
no legitimate constitutional role except where narrowly defined by law. It
isn’t a crime—in the narrow legal sense of that word—for the
administration to file pretextual lawsuits or to attempt to use the DOJ in
unconstitutional ways. But what is under way—right here, in public, under our
noses, not in the shadows or in secret—is immoral, illegitimate, and a crime in
the profounder sense of that word.
We are less than one week away from the midterm
elections. The specific pretext for setting them aside, should the results
prove inconvenient to Republicans, has
been in the works for months, and the political justification for doing so has
been under construction for years. The supposed champions of the Constitution,
such as Sen. Ted Cruz, are utterly silent on the matter. The House of
Representatives is led by the obsequious Mike Johnson; in the Senate, majority
leader John Thune is effectively a nonentity, and we can be sure that J.D.
Vance, a man who believes in nothing and who will say anything, will avail
himself of the chance to preside over the upper house, in the role of chief
sycophant, if the opportunity presents itself. Mike Pence’s honor was a very
thin reed upon which to hang the legitimacy of our government in 2021, and now
we are deprived of even that.
Whatever happens probably will be legal. More or less.
But the question is not what the law will permit—it is
what we will permit, as Americans. Cruz and Thune and Vance and Rubio have all
answered that question, giving the same answers heard in Germany and Spain in
the 1930s, in Chile in the 1970s, etc.
It is not very difficult to imagine that, when the time
comes, they will plead: “But we were only following orders!” Lawful orders, no
doubt.
