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What more could Trump have done?

Mithrae

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I know everyone's already made up their minds about the 6th by now, but I'll post this on the off chance of anyone being willing to rethink: Not just on the question "Is Trump responsible for 'inciting insurrection,'" but also the question of how much responsibility (if any) he bears for the riot.

First question: If he did want a riot/violence, what more could Trump have done to cause or incite those events assuming he wanted to retain some plausible deniability that, at least in his mind, would keep him off the hook with his other supporters and in the courts?

Second question: If he did not want a riot/violence, what more could Trump have done to prevent or mitigate the outcome which occurred?




Personally, I can't really think of a positive answer to the first question. In the months beforehand, Trump had
- tweeted calls to "liberate" regions from Democratic governance (in one case followed by an actual plot to kidnap Michigan's governor),
- constantly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power,
- repeatedly used extreme and sometimes violent rhetoric to "stop the steal" and "fight" the election results,
- raised the possibility of using military force/martial law to retain his grip on power, and
- signalled violent far-right groups to "stand back and stand by"

His single, sole token gesture towards 'plausible deniability' - the only instance I've been able to find of him encouraging peacefulness over the prior two months - was a single line on the 6th, buried a quarter of the way into his hour-long speech so that even those still listening with both ears after eighteen minutes would probably forget it by the end. By contrast near the start and end of his speech he invoked much more extreme imagery, both suggesting justification for violent action and for the umpteenth time ruling out any kind of peaceful transition of power:
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. . . .

I said, "Something's wrong here. Something's really wrong. Can't have happened." And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
And as if all that were not enough, when requests came through for help from the national guard during the riot, Trump delayed and didn't provide authorization... it was left to Pence to undermine him by providing authorization instead!

What more could he have done? My imagination fails me; I can't think what else he could have done. As far as I can tell he went far beyond the 'plausible deniability' line with what he did do, and I suspect that the same will be found in the courts. But granted, he gauged his supporters well: It seems most of them insist that he didn't really incite a riot and shouldn't have had his pardon option removed through impeachment. So maybe those supporters can tell us what more could he have done, if he really did want to incite violence while retaining some shred of plausible deniability?


As to the second question, if Trump did not want violence it's quite obvious that he could and should have done much, much more to prevent it. The plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan was already ample proof (if it weren't obvious already) of how extreme rhetoric can inflame fringe elements in a large population. Stochastic terrorism it's called: You can't always be sure when or where or by whom violence will be ignited by constantly fanning the flames of anger and division, but with a large enough population and a big enough platform you can be sure that it will happen.

If Trump had repeatedly and consistently emphasized peacefulness and repudiated violence throughout his speech on the 6th, the militias and whatnot who'd come to his "wild" rally looking for trouble may or may not have been deterred, but any hangers-on and less radical folk in the crowd would likely have held back and not been drawn in. But more to the point, a month earlier after all of the 60ish lawsuits had failed and his own Attorney General had informed him that there was no real evidence of fraud, if Trump had followed the bare minimum of decency and respect for lawful process by conceding his defeat, however grudgingly - as Clinton had done in 2016 and every other contender in every election before this one - even those radical militia types would have known it was pointless to risk their necks with such recklessly illegal behaviour.

Might there have been some violence, even then? It's possible of course; there's so much that Trump could have so easily done to prevent it, if he'd wanted to, but I'd say that he is 'only' 90-99% responsible for what happened.
 
It seems no defender of Trump is able to imagine anything more he could have done to incite violence, if he wanted to preserve even the flimsiest pretext of plausible deniability. I guess we must therefore conclude that violence is what he wanted?
 
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