Thank you so much Umair for your interesting and excellent analysis. I would like to add something to it: If we place it in a wider global and historical context, the Capitol Hill insurrection also reflects a pattern from recent American history, when the USA Government incited a coup if they didn’t agree with an elected president. Just to mention some examples: In 1954 the USA organised coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Juan José Arévalo, because the United Fruit Company didn’t agree with his agricultural reform programme. In 1973 the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende was removed from office by a military coup led by General Pinochet, who was supported by the government of the USA, and who dissolved the Congress and suspended the Constitution of Chile.
Trump’s coup feels to me like a boomerang of US coups incited to wipe out unwanted democratically elected governments in other countries, because they were labelled socialist or communist. Trump’s labelling of Biden’s government fits in this pattern of the past. The difference is that Trump had to resort to paramilitary groups such as ‘Proud Boys’ and ‘Cowboys’, because the strong institutionalisation of democratic ethics among the military and civil servants, didn’t allow him to use them for his own power game. Fortunately, his coup failed, because – as you say Umair - then indeed fascism would have taken over.
It is of course an act of weakness and opportunism of those Republicans who voted ‘not guilty’, as nobody could deny the evidence of his guilt. Nevertheless, the impeachment procedure has been a masterclass in democracy for a broad audience in the USA and worldwide. Let’s hope that it will have impact in people’s political insights, and that it also be a mirror and lesson learned for the future international policy of the USA.
The criminal behaviour of Trump and his rioters will hopefully get follow-up by criminal justice. Trump often bellowed about his opponents, that he or she should be “put in jail!”. If this exclamation will also come back to him as a boomerang, and Trump is put in jail, the Republicans will finally be liberated from their dictator.
