“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough – until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
-- President Donald Trump, March 13 in an interview in Breibart.
The threat Trump is referring to is not antifa in the streets or even refugee families at the southern border. It is, as he puts it with his characteristic eloquence, the Democrats in the House of Representatives: “all the nonsense that they do in Congress …with all this invest[igations]… that’s all they want to do is – you know, they do things that are nasty.” (Marlow, Alexander, et al, 2019) The President of the United States is threatening to have the Bikers for Trump and his supporters in the police and military get “tough” with the investigating Democrats and it would be “very bad, very bad.” Now, is this the threat of a flurry of law suits from Bikers for Trump or perhaps large, legal nonviolent marches of his supporters in the military and police? Or is this just a nasty, naked, call for extralegal violence? Is this a trial balloon for justifying a coup?
Six months after Trump took office (June 2017) I wrote an article asking “Is a Trump Coup Possible?” and the answer was yes, and it might even succeed. To better gauge it chances, I also created a Trump Coup Scorecard to track his chances of a successful coup, which includes refusing to leave office. Fifteen months later (Sept. 2018) I asked “How Will Trump’s Presidency End?” which included calculating out the chances of an attempted Trump Coup (10%) and a successful one (5%). If anything, Trump’s chances of a successful coup are lower now, thanks to his hard work alienating the military, both its leadership and rank and file. But, if there was a war, maybe with Korea (“What are the Chances of a 2nd Korean War? Everything you need to know but were afraid to ask” the odds would shift drastically. A new war (for we have a number going on already) with perhaps North Korea, Iran, or Venezuela would energize Trump’s base, mobilize independents and the media to support him in a time of “national emergency”, and confuse the military enough to make Trump’s odds for achieving dictatorship go up considerably.
So we all need to ask, What will you do if Trump stages a coup?