When they said they were “crossing the Rubicon” they may not have known what they were saying and the president certainly didn’t but it was strangely apt anyway. As this NYT op-ed points out, Trump’s cri de guerre, while a clear call to overturn an election and install the loser, also an effort to annul the power of the Congress:
It is tempting to try to run out the clock on the Trump presidency. President Trump has already been impeached once and congressional leaders may assume they still lack the necessary Republican votes to convict and remove him in the Senate. Lawmakers concerned about the possibility for new abuses of power before Jan. 20 have been tempted to settle for urging the president to resign. But more is at stake than what the president might do in the next few days. If Congress declines to impeach and convict the president for his actions on Wednesday, its failure to act will weaken the basic structure of the Constitution.
The key issue is this: One of the three branches of the federal government has just incited an armed attack against another branch. Beyond the threat to a peaceful transition, the incident was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers. Prompted by the chief executive, supporters laid siege to, invaded, and occupied the Capitol building, deploying weapons and subjecting members of both chambers of Congress to intimidation and violence in an effort to produce a particular decision by force.
We have all been taught about “checks and balances” in school. The Constitutional strategy for limiting power requires that officeholders defend the institutions they occupy against what the framers called “encroachments” by the other branches. Usually encroachments are understood metaphorically, and there is time to allow the branches to work out their differences in the back and forth of political negotiation and occasional court battles. The president’s attempted encroachment on the constitutional rights of Congress this past Wednesday was anything but metaphorical.
The president aimed to reverse the decision that Congress was making on a question that the Constitution expressly reserved for the legislature. The specifically anti-congressional animus is most obvious in the fact that the only other elected member of the executive branch, the vice president, was specifically targeted in his role as president of the Senate.
At Wednesday’s rally, Mr. Trump gave some prepared remarks on the so-called evidence of election fraud, but he worried aloud that the crowd would be bored by those details. The more powerful thread running through his speech was an argument that constitutional constraints were forms of weakness, that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress should not be allowed to certify the election, and that it was time to take the gloves off and fight.
After Rudolph Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, exclaimed, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and Donald Trump Jr. said of Republican members of Congress who did not support Mr. Trump, “We’re coming for you,” the president took the stage. He praised his son and Mr. Giuliani, and then delivered a speech full of inflammatory implications. He stated: “We will never concede. We will not take it anymore.” He condemned the Republican Party for fighting like “a boxer with his hands behind his back,” urged Mr. Pence in his capacity as presiding officer in Congress, to “come through for us,” said it was up to Congress to refuse to certify the election, and then announced that he would lead the crowd down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol just after the speech. About the possibility that Mr. Pence and Congress would fail to block certification of the election on Wednesday, he said, “We’re just not going to let that happen” and then remarked on the size and devotion of the crowd.
In a way, it was also an attempt to anul the power of the Judicial branch as well since it had ruled against Trump’s election fraud cases 60 times and he refused to accept their decisions.
The separation of powers is one of the foundations of the system. What Trump has done, first with refusing to accept the results of the election then attempting to usurp the power of the Judiciary and the congress, is taking first steps to dictatorship. Unless we find out that Trump has been pretending to be the uneducated dipshit we’ve seen all these years, it’s highly unlikely he has thought this through in any conscious way. But what’s the difference? His actions have led to the same place.
And while it was all just an academic argument until now, his setting loose that mob of thousands of rioters to storm the Capitol while it was in joint session to threaten the congress with physical harm to stop the vote takes it beyond academic. It didn’t work. But it was, without a doubt, an attempted putsch which, if successful, would have ended with Trump as a de facto dictator. After all, it is highly doubtful he would ever agree that had lost an election in the future any more that he admitted it this time.