Commentary

In my November 6, 2021 blog, I wrote of Fiona Hill’s effort to bring down the Trump presidency with her impeachment testimony against him.

Obviously disgruntled that the Republican-controlled Senate voted to acquit the president, she bitterly stated that the impeachment “came down to political mud wrestling.”

Space didn’t permit me to include her published opinion that the January 6, 2021 breach of the Capitol was a self-coup by Trump.

Hill wasn’t satisfied that her colleague at the left-leaning Brookings Institute, Charles T. Call, who authored a piece for the think tank’s blog, “No, it’s not a coup – it’s a ‘self-coup’ that will undermine US leadership and democracy worldwide,”  had sufficiently damaged Trump.

Looking for wider circulation of the ‘self-coup’ theory, she wrote an opinion piece, “Yes, It Was a Coup Attempt.  Here’s Why,” that appeared in Politico’s online magazine.

For the benefit of we uneducated rubes, both Call and Hill cited examples of other self-coups, including the 1851 attempt by Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in France, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in 2017, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s 2015 attempt in Turkey.

While Hill continued to tie Trump to the Big Lie, his belief that there were irregularities in the 2020 election, she perpetrated the left’s lie that January 6 supporters of Trump caused the deaths of five people when they stormed the Capitol.  Not true.  Except for the needless killing of supporter Ashli Babbitt by Capitol policeman Michael Byrd, the other deaths were by natural causes.

Hill went to great lengths to explain her “checklist” to assess the validity of a coup, citing far-fetched use of the military, the media, the judiciary, his cabinet and the legislature, asserting that Trump “stress tested” the democratic system to see if anyone would rein him in.

In the end, however, she conceded that Trump’s self-coup failed.  “The military and other parts of the government resisted Trump’s efforts to personalize their power (Whatever that means). Major media outlets reported the facts truthfully (not true). The judiciary and the courts held firm. Trump’s judges, all the way to the Supreme Court, respected their oath of office (That shouldn’t have been a surprise since Trump said they would when he appointed them).

“The good news for the United States is that Trump’s self-coup failed,” she sorrowfully concluded.

Like the House select committee on January 6, Hill wants to perpetuate Trump’s coup attempt.  “Congressional Republicans,” she believes, “will have to take personal responsibility for their actions in support of Trump’s coup attempt. They owe it to the people they represent as well as the country they serve to tell what the president tried to do in January 2021.”

The American people, however, have learned a great deal of what actually took place at the Capitol since Hill wrote her opinion of the self-coup on January 11, 2021, just five days after the breach.  Many have viewed some of the 14,000 hours of video tape.

Hill was unable to resist taking another slap at Trump, though she didn’t mention him by name.  In the conclusion of her May 2020 Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies commencement address, she quoted from “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” noting that the lyrics captured “our moment in time.”

It’s a Barnum and Bailey world, just as phony as it can be, but it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.”

On January 27, 2021, researchers at the University of Illinois’ Cline Center Coup D’état Project, where they claim to maintain the world’s largest global registry of failed and successful coups, originally classified the January 6 breach as an “attempted coup,“ but later changed it to an “attempted dissident coup” due to a lack of evidence at the time.

That designation was assigned by Cline researchers noting that the protest group was infiltrated by small organized groups, that wanted to do more than temporarily disrupt the normal operations of Congress.

If further investigation were to reveal clear evidence of executive branch involvement, then the event might be considered an “attempted auto-coup,” according to Cline.

To determine if the events of January 6 fit the definition of a coup, Hill had her “checklist” and the Cline Center had its “criteria,” and neither was decisive.

As we now await the House hearings, I found this attempt by David Harsanyl to clarify what the January 6 event was unsettling, but humorous:

“It wasn’t the ‘worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.’  Nor did it veer anywhere near the vicinity of being as dangerous as 9/11.  Nor was it a ‘coup’ or an ‘insurrection’ – not in any way we commonly understand those words.  It wasn’t a ‘putsch.’ Nor did it, as the chairman of the Jan.6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, claimed, come ‘dangerously closely to succeeding’ in upending ‘American democracy.’  That’s all a myth.  It was not a riot.  Or, as Christopher Caldwell more forgivingly call it in The New York Times, perhaps ‘a political protest that got out of control.” – David Harsanyl, New York Post

More on Brookings …

In “Six Degrees of Brookings,” a piece published Monday in Ben Domenech’s The Transom, Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University law school, writes of Brookings role in the alleged effort to create the false Russian collusion scandal.

While I described Brookings as a branch of the Deep State, Turley views Brookings as “a parking lot for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new administrations.”

“(John) Durham is detailing how the collusion strategy was carried out,” writes Turley, “and many of those referenced are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.

In addition to the indicted Russian, Igor Danchenko, Turley surfaces the names of others at Brookings, including Susan Hennessey (now a national security advisor in the Biden administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos), Norm Eisen (counsel in the Trump impeachment effort), and Victoria Nuland (assistant secretary of state under Hillary Clinton), Strobe Talbott (deputy secretary of state under Clinton) who reportedly was Danchenko’s boss at Brookings, and Cody Shearer (Talbott’s brother-in-law and long time Clinton operative) who allegedly authored the dossier.

“Brookings looks like the mothership for this scandal,” says Turley.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.