Don’t Mess With The Narrative!

This is a priceless exchange, and it seems that John Bolton has a point: pulling off a successful coup isn’t a walk in the park… https://t.co/UJtl8cWaqi

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 12, 2022

Bolton's probably padding his résumé, but he’s not wrong. Coups are not simple things.

Which explains some of the reactions to Bolton’s braggadocio: if Trump wasn’t close to pulling off a coup, was democracy ever in danger?

Trump could have easily sparked a crisis, but we’ve had worse before (where do you think the 12th Amendment came from? A gentleman’s disagreement? Or the Electoral Count Act? Or the Civil War, for that matter.). What he couldn’t do was get the states, the courts, and the federal government, to acknowledge he’d won after all. As the J6 committee pointed out yesterday, the question of the victor was settled with the electoral college vote on December 14, 2020. Even the infamous December 18 meeting in the White House was already too late.

Trump did all he could to discredit the democratic system. But he really couldn’t do much.