Why Is The Left Suddenly Talking About A ‘Coup’ At The Ballot Box?
For the past three years, the left has claimed Donald Trump lied about the 2020 election and then attempted an insurrection on Jan. 6 to overturn the results. But now that Trump is leading in polls, the left is talking ominously about a “coup.” Pay attention, because if Trump wins in 2024, this will be how the left tries to stop him from getting anything done.
At a protest in Washington, D.C., a week ago – organized by a group that calls itself “Stop the Coup 2025” – Markus Batchelor, the national political director of People for the American Way, told the crowd that “Jan. 6 was just a dress rehearsal.”
So is this group predicting Trump will try to take over in 2025 even if Biden wins reelection?
Not exactly. He went on to say that coups “don’t need weapons to succeed.” He said that “coups can be committed by pen and paper,” “coups can be committed at the ballot,” and “coups can be committed by seemingly democratic processes.”
Come again?
The definition of “coup d’etat” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary is “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”
What is Batchelor saying? That if Trump wins in November it will be the equivalent of a violent overthrow of government?
Basically, yes.
The Stop the Coup website says that: “The GOP plans to install a Day One Dictator and dismantle our democracy.”
So, all this “coup” talk is about what Trump would do if he were elected. That’s why the Stop the Coup rally was held outside the headquarters of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which last spring published a 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” – a book updated every four years – that contains a truckload of policy proposals to rein in Big Government.
Stop the Coup describes it as “the Republicans’ blueprint attack on labor, gender, immigration, racial equality, climate, media, education, health care, democracy, and more.”
At the rally, one of the speakers went so far as to say that leftists should “bird dog” Heritage employees. “We need to go find out where they live, where they go to church, who they hang around with, and bird dog they asses.”
The rally was a bust. It attracted only a handful of attendees and, aside from Breitbart and this editorial, doesn’t appear to have generated any press attention. But don’t let that fool you.
According to Breitbart:
The ‘Stop the Coup 2025’ coalition is only one part of a vast and well-funded network of radical far-left organizations … The titular head of the leftist network is a group named ‘Indivisible’ [which] is backed by George Soros, Reid Hoffman … as well as other donors such as San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman, and oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.
If we didn’t know any better, we’d say this coalition now runs the Democratic Party, given that Democrats routinely call Trump a fascist, a wannabe dictator, a “threat to democracy.” They always overlook the fact that Trump would first have to win a free and fair election.
Biden’s reelection campaign is nothing more than an attempt to scare voters about the horrors to unfold if Trump did legitimately win back the White House.
CNN recently reported that Biden’s reelection campaign “will largely be about carefully ratcheting up the intensity against Donald Trump,” with the only question being “when to go ‘full Hitler’ … rather than couching their attacks by saying Trump ‘parroted’ him.”
One way to look at all this “coup” talk is that the left really is worried that Trump will beat Biden in November. And by the looks of recent polls, that’s increasingly likely. So the rhetoric is about stopping him from getting anything done, much like the Russian hoax was meant to do in Trump’s first term.
But this is even more worrisome than a phony scandal, because calling whatever Trump tries to do as president a “coup” paves the way for extreme, violent action should Trump win.
After all, if the left wants to stop a “coup” from succeeding – even one supposedly committed at the ballot box – they are almost certainly going to use the dictionary definition of “coup”: “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”
That will make Jan. 6 look like a garden party.
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