That really is the question
Ed Kilgore asks one of the big lingering questions about January 6th. What did Trump see happening at the Capitol on January 6th when he sent in the mob?
So what was the idea? Trump knew the votes weren’t there for his backers in Congress to reject Biden electors (it would have required a majority vote in both Democratic-controlled chambers). Pence wouldn’t play ball. And even if the rioters temporarily halted the count of electoral votes (as they did), Trump knew they would soon resume (as they also did, that very evening).
That leaves two possibilities, both of them damning: (1) Trump planned to use the violence to assert some sort of emergency powers that would have more definitively halted the congressional proceedings and/or kept him in office past January 20, or (2) Trump simply incited violence for the sheer disruptive hell of it without a scintilla of a strategy.
I think there are some other possibilities. He knew there were armed militants in the crowd and thought they might actually take Mike Pence hostage (or worse), thereby delaying the count. I wouldn’t put it past him. But now that we know he really did want to go down to the Capitol himself — and that Rudy had told Meadows he planned to go in and “stand next to the Senators and look strong” — it’s also possible that he thought such a show of strength with a huge crowd outside chanting would change Pence’s mind and that the congressional Republicans would back him up. He’s delusional. As I have mentioned dozens of times, when Pence said he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election, he did gesture to the crowd outside the White House on January 5th, and ask him, “what if these people say you do?”
But Kilgore may be right that he just incited the violence for the sheer, disruptive hell of it and sat back to see what would happen. I am also reminded of this from just before the election in 2018:
Days before the election, the president appeared to admit for the first time that Republicans might lose the House. “It could happen,” Trump said. “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’” Trump said.
He may very well have had no idea what would happened when he sicced the mob on the Capitol. He just assumed he’d figure it out. He’s been winging it his whole life and it’s worked out for his so far.