Despite the bloodshed in the U.S. capitol, Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, is often portrayed as a clown show. The capitalist media showed countless pictures of the bare-chested Jacob Chansley wearing a fur hat with horns.
Many people still question why it took over three hours for the Pentagon to send troops to stop the insurrection.
Gen. Charles Flynn, then deputy chief of operations, was one of those responsible for the 187 minute delay. He’s the brother of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who wanted the U.S. military to overturn the 2020 election results.
Col. Earl Matthews claims that Charles Flynn lied about the delay. The former D.C. National Guard officer sent a 36-page memo to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.
Because Washington, D.C., has been denied statehood, Mayor Muriel Bowser ― unlike a state governor ― couldn’t call out the D.C. National Guard herself. Bowser had to ask the Pentagon to do it.
The spotlight is now on the U.S. Secret Service. Almost all of the agency’s text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, were lost.
The alleged reasons for these deletions are as phony as the excuses given for the 18.5 minute gap in one of Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Rep. Jamie Raskin exclaimed, “I smell a rat.”
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi is claiming that the destruction of this evidence was simply a technical screw-up. Guglielmi said the same when he was a public relations flack for the Chicago police department.
He tried to explain the lack of sound — in five police tapes that showed the murder of Laquan Mcdonald — as operator error. Convicted police officer Jason Van Dyke had shot the Black teenager 16 times.
It was very convenient that the conversations Van Dyke had with the other cops on the scene were lost.
Inspector General Joseph Cuffari of the Department of Homeland Security knew of the Secret Service erasures of the Jan. 5-6 text messages back in February of this year but he failed to inform Congress. His office was ready to issue a warning in October 2021 that the Secret Service was refusing to disclose texts and other records but failed to do so.
The Secret Service and the coup
A year before the news broke about the lost texts, a book revealed an important part of Trump’s coup attempt. “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, was published in July 2021.
The authors disclosed that Vice President Mike Pence refused to be driven away from the Capitol by Secret Service agents, saying “I’m not getting in the car.”
Pence is a bigot, not a hero. But he knew the Trump conspirators were trying to prevent him from counting the electoral college votes. Secret Service official Anthony Ornato, who was then serving on Trump’s staff, wanted to take Pence to the Andrews military base.
While jokers like Rudy Giuliani and pillow salesman Mike Lindell were getting publicity, the Secret Service was going to kidnap the Vice President. At the same time Gen. Charles Flynn and other Pentagon officials were preventing the National Guard from clearing Trump’s lynch mob from the U.S. Capitol.
With the support of a section of the “deep state” and Vice President Pence removed, Trump was to declare the election invalid and try to remain in the White House. Secret Service agents deleted their text messages as part of the cover-up.
The Jan. 6, 2021, coup failed for the same reason that Trump’s earlier June 1, 2020, coup attempt flopped. (That was a week after George Floyd was murdered, when Trump wanted to declare martial law against the Black Lives Matter movement. His consolation prize was having demonstrators attacked with pepper spray and tear gas in Lafayette Park across from the White House.)
Most of the “deep state” ― which is the real state’s repressive apparatus of the Pentagon, cops, courts and prisons ― failed to back the coup.
It’s one thing for Kenosha, Wisconsin, police to welcome fascist vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse. It’s a different matter when the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff considered whether to help overturn the 2020 election or not.
The generals and admirals fear hundreds of thousands of GIs would refuse to carry out such orders. While 26 million people marched in 2020, demanding Black Lives Matter, many more millions would take to the streets if Trump tried to stay in office.
Regime change in Dallas
“It can’t happen here” has been a typical media response to claims of political conspiracies in the United States. This attitude has been evaporating because of Trump’s attempted coup and the disclosures of the House of Representatives Jan. 6 committee.
The history of capitalism is punctuated by conspiracies. The African Holocaust and the Holocaust of Indigenous peoples in the Americas jump-started the world capitalist market.
Capitalism’s bloody record includes trampling on its own laws.
Karl Marx quotes the British trade unionist T. J. Dunning:
“With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent, positive audacity; 100 percent, will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”
Capitalist climate change’s high temperatures are killing thousands of people. That didn’t prevent the world’s 60 biggest banks from lending $742 billion last year to fossil fuel outfits, according to the Rainforest Action Network.
Big profits are why the banksters are helping to cook the earth. The $6 trillion the U.S. spent on atomic weapons were also very profitable, even if capitalists would be incinerated in a nuclear war.
Lyndon Johnson became president because of a successful coup d’état. The Secret Service stood down, allowing John F. Kennedy to be assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.
Secret Service agents were told to get off the rear of JFK’s limousine just before it made the fatal turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository. On Kennedy and the Secret Service, Abraham Bolden, the first Black member of the president’s Secret Service detail, was framed so he couldn’t testify before the Warren Commission. Bolden was pardoned by President Biden on April 26.
JFK shouldn’t have trusted the Secret Service. Neither should we.
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