Trump's coup attempt

Greg Sargent in the Washington Post:

In his new book, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows offers up a version of Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 that is almost comically sanitized. In his telling, the rioters attacked the Capitol with “absolutely no urging” from Trump, and the notion that Trump sought to incite them to disrupt his loss is purely an invention of the “Fake News.”

In a passage that would embarrass a North Korea disinformation specialist, Meadows writes that the mob assault left Trump “mortified.” But, Meadows piously insists, this didn’t distract Trump from focusing only on the welfare of the country in his final days as president, a noble and selfless impulse that “never wavered.”

The House select committee examining Jan. 6 has just released its report recommending contempt charges against Meadows for defying its subpoena. It blows a big hole in Meadows’s pleasing little propaganda piece.

More broadly, the report will render the various GOP whitewashing devices we’ve heard — Trump didn’t really want to overturn the election, Trump never countenanced the violence, the violence was no biggie anyway, and so on — much harder to sustain.

The report reads like a blueprint for a coup — not just for the attempt that just happened, but also for a future one. It provides a glimpse into the story the committee is piecing together about this effort to thwart a legitimately elected government from taking power, first through almost unimaginably corrupt pressure on many government actors, and then through mob violence.

First, the report demonstrates how frantically Meadows and Trump’s other co-conspirators are covering up Trump’s own reaction to the violence as it unfolded. It shows this by describing documents the committee obtained from Meadows before he decided to refuse cooperation....

From today's NY Times: Trump loyalists turned election lies into action.

See also Fox News Hosts About Texts to Meadows.