Attempts at a coup

I've tried, with some success, to avoid any mention of the previous president in posts for this blog (nothing in that category for the past 6 months), but just ignoring something doesn't make it go away.  So as a nod to the elephant in the room, here are some brief excerpts from a detailed article in The Atlantic:

Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.

1. Trump tried to pressure secretaries of state to not certify.

... the Trump campaign attempted to pressure secretaries of state to either not certify the results or “find” fraudulent ballots. In some states, spurred by the president’s fictions, pro-Trump mobs showed up at vote-counting sites and attempted to disrupt the proceedings.

2. Trump tried to pressure state legislatures to overturn the results.

...In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia, Trump publicly urged Republican-controlled statehouses to “intervene to declare him the winner” ... the Trump campaign discussed “contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

3. Trump tried to get the courts to overturn the results.

...Trump attempted to coerce the Justice Department into providing him with a pretext to overturn the results, but his attorney general, Bill Barr, refused to do so. Had DOJ leadership acquiesced, it would have lent credibility to Trump’s other corrupt schemes to reverse his loss. In a meeting with the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, according to contemporaneous notes taken by Rosen’s deputy, Trump said, “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me.”

4. Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the results.

It is hard to pick the most ridiculous means of executing a coup, but insisting that the vice president has the power to unilaterally decide who won an election is up there. Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress, and Pence reportedly took that demand seriously enough to seek advice from Dan Quayle on the matter...

5. When all else failed, Trump tried to get a mob to overturn the results.

At the rally prior to the vote count in Congress, Trump urged the crowd to act, saying, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The explicit goal of the rally and subsequent riot was to pressure Congress, and Pence in particular, into overturning the election results. Trump told his followers, “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”

This scheme didn’t work on its own, but it certainly could have helped one of the others: Imagine if Pence had gone along with Eastman’s absurd plan, and a mob had been present at the Capitol to help enforce the decision and menace lawmakers who tried to oppose it—then what? As it stands, the mob ransacked the Capitol and forced lawmakers to flee. Had the mob succeeded at reaching any actual legislators, the consequences could have been catastrophic.