Patrick Moreau laid eggs in The duty an astonishing text, in which he questions the well-established fact that former President Donald Trump and his supporters planned, then unsuccessfully attempted, a coup d’etat in 2020-2021, in order to maintain the would-be autocrat in power (“A Coup Attempt,” June 17).
The entire text of this collaborator deals with a truncated and reductive definition that he gives to the concept of “coup d’etat”.
Take out your dictionary and say that what you observe is not exactly defined in this way in The Larousse Where Robertis to forget that the concepts evolve, in particular because of the historical context and the type of political regime.
A coup in Chile in 1973 or in Romania in 1989 will not have the same face as an attempted coup in the heart of the oldest liberal democracy.
A coup does not necessarily involve the security services, the army or brutal repression. Basically, it refers to an illegal seizure of power and overthrow of the constitutional order by a small group of individuals in a position of authority. This seems to me to correspond well to what we observed in the United States.
Indeed, the forces behind defeated President Donald Trump aspire to nothing more or less than overthrow the American constitutional system as we know it, by distorting the rules of the game, to concentrate power in the hands of the future autocrat, without receive the sanction of the polls. The current president (Trump), members of the government, several elected Republicans and far-right militias have worked together to achieve this result. It’s called a coup attempt.
In the United States, those who deny that there was a coup attempt and who refuse to label the storming of the Capitol as an insurrection strangely all find themselves in the Republican Party, several of whose members have supported the illegal and perfidious maneuvers of Donald Trump.
To refuse to name the reality is to minimize the danger that threatens American democracy.