Is It Still a ‘Coup’ If Democrats Do It?

There was a lot of talk about how Donald Trump’s challenges to the election amounted to a “coup.” Some of that was just a confusion of methods: It’s not a coup to have an election resolved through the legal process of recounts and court challenges — at least, not unless the judges themselves abandon the path of applying written law, something conservative judges have been quite unwilling to do. (This would be my quibble with Jason Steorts’ response to my earlier column on Trump-coup rhetoric — a court process is not the same as asking a legislature to override the vote counts, and it’s important to distinguish the two.) Trump’s apparent, generally unspoken strategy of seeking a legislative override has been deeply improper and damaging. But it was never a realistic plan.

As my prior column noted, it was fanciful to think that Republicans would cooperate, in numbers sufficient to make such a scheme possible, in simply handing Trump the election through legislative action without Trump having made a successful case in court that he was actually robbed of the election by fraud. There just are not enough Republicans willing to take that step — not when you have Attorney General Bill Barr stating publicly that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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There was a lot of talk about how Donald Trump’s challenges to the election amounted to a “coup.” Some of that was just a confusion of methods: It’s not a coup to have an election resolved through the legal process of recounts and court challenges — at least, not unless the judges themselves abandon the path of applying written law, something conservative judges have been quite unwilling to do. (This would be my quibble with Jason Steorts’ response to my earlier column on Trump-coup rhetoric — a court process is not the same as asking a legislature to override the vote counts, and it’s important to distinguish the two.) Trump’s apparent, generally unspoken strategy of seeking a legislative override has been deeply improper and damaging. But it was never a realistic plan.

As my prior column noted, it was fanciful to think that Republicans would cooperate, in numbers sufficient to make such a scheme possible, in simply handing Trump the election through legislative action without Trump having made a successful case in court that he was actually robbed of the election by fraud. There just are not enough Republicans willing to take that step — not when you have Attorney General Bill Barr stating publicly that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”