Coup complete

Today, Donald Trump took the oath of office inside the Capitol his supporters ransacked four years ago, backed by every living former president and the gazillionaire CEOs of every major U.S. tech platform. But one powerful ally who’d really liked to have been there was not in the crowd. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, was stuck at home, under arrest and indictment for a raft of alleged offenses, including money laundering and trying to instigate a January 6-style coup attempt of his own¹ . The Brazilian Supreme Court denied a plea to reinstate Bolsonaro’s passport; his wife was expected to attend instead.

Meanwhile, in South Korea, another Trumpy president—Yoon Suk Yeol² —is also in custody and facing trial for his declaration of martial law in what appeared to be yet another failed self-coup. Yoon was, unlike Bolsonaro but like Trump, the sitting president at the time of his attempt. In fact, he is still the president, though his powers have been suspended and he is facing possible removal. In South Korea, trying to overthrow democracy in plain sight is considered a grave enough threat to justify throwing a sitting president in jail. How quaint.

When Joe Biden was inaugurated four years ago, he pledged, among other things, to “defend our democracy.” As I wrote at the time, the most important—the most necessary, if not sufficient—way to do that was to hold the ex-president accountable for his crimes, particularly his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. Biden put it this way: “We will be judged, you and I, for how we resolve the cascading crises of our era. Will we rise to the occasion?”

We — or, better said, he — did not. Biden appointed a #Resistance meme as attorney general, who proceeded to dither and dally until it was too late. (Merrick Garland seemed to be going off an erroneous assumption that Trump was finished politically after Jan. 6. He waited until November 18, 2022 — exactly three days after Trump officially announced his reelection campaign — to appoint Jack Smith as special counsel.) He hemmed and hawed as Trump’s illegitimate Supreme Court rolled back established rights, then shrugged as it ignored the Constitution, allowing Trump not only to appear on ballots in plain contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment but also declare him immune from prosecution for most elements of his attempted coup (and likely most other future crimes he’d like to commit in office). Though Smith tried gamely to find ways around that, the mere fact of the delay Trump’s justices had granted him was enough, thanks to Garland’s initial delays, to run out the clock.

What specifically Biden could have done to push, cajole, demand legislation when he had the congressional majorities, expand and investigate the Court for its open corruption, etc., is a matter for future historians to argue. Whether he could have prevented this politically by recognizing, earlier on, his unfitness and unpopularity in the eyes of millions of Americans, we’ll never really know.

But the simple fact is this: Other countries have found ways to hold their anti-democratic presidents accountable and prevent them from taking office again. America did not. So now, here we go.

1  From my newsletter at the time: “There are telling differences between January 6 and the 8 de janeiro that shouldn’t be missed … Trump led the rally that resulted in the storming of the Capitol building … [whereas] Bolsonaro was three thousand miles away in Orlando … There is also a difference in strategy: The MAGA rioters were trying to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden by halting the congressional certification of the vote. Bolsonaro had already lost power: The results of the October election had long since been certified. Lula was inaugurated on Jan. 1. It seems the Brasília rioters wanted to inspire the military to join them in overthrowing the government — an “especially stupid” strategy, as [Vincent] Bevins notes, though one that makes more sense in a country with a recent history of a military dictatorship … In that sense, the January 6 siege was more explicitly an attempted coup (a self-coup, technically) in itself, though it is not clear else what the Brazilian rioters might have planned.”

2  Korean commentators termed his style of far-right populism “K-Trump.”