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Trump 2.0
Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, and while he has held a mysterious meeting with the MyPillow CEO and the rumors abound about where he will flee to before Air Force One is no longer his personal jet, he is for the moment at loose ends. He and his cult are having to work out what comes next.
For the rest of the country, there are a couple of lessons that we must learn here. The first is the obvious parallel with the Beer Hall Putsch of the Nazis against the Bavarian government in 1923. A coup attempt is no less a coup attempt for being a poorly carried out exercise in wild optimism. Much like the way in which Hitler and his followers confused enthusiasm and doctrine with likelihood of success, Trump’s crew believed that they could overturn the results of an election — one that they claim without good evidence was stolen from them — by storming the Capitol building, with some of them hoping to seize Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi — the next two officials in the line of presidential succession after Trump — and others, perhaps to hold them hostage or possibly to kill them. And just as with the failed 1923 coup, the attack on the 6th of January ultimately flopped — in the latter case the result of a lack of competent leadership.
The German Putsch resulted in sixteen dead Nazis and light sentences for the leaders that got reduced even further in short order. Hitler himself was given a cushy time in…
