If you disagree with the conclusion that the United States government has already fallen to a coup, then you might want to skip today’s post.
It probably wouldn’t be good for your blood pressure.
Now that they’re gone let’s just be clear about this: they’re wrong, it has and there’s no value to burying their heads in the sand about this.
So, moving on.
When did the coup actually start?
The difficult thing about a coup like this, other than the whole “your government is taking orders from fascists now” part, is dealing with the boundaries between “a coup is coming“, ” a coup is happening” and “a coup has happened“.
This isn’t an old-school “troops in the presidential palace” kind of coup; those are easy to date. That kind of coup “has happened” when the organs of State are in the hands of the junta and taking orders from the new bosses. The period of uncertainty is usually only a few days long.
The timeline is simple: first one dude is in charge, then there’s a bunch of shooting after which another dude is.
The Trump, damn his name, coup isn’t like that.
It’s sneakier, and more complicated.
Because he’d already failed at couping the simple way.
I first started using the work “coup” here on January 31st, 11 days after the inauguration, when it was publicly obvious that members of the new administration were installing Musk’s kids around the federal bureaucracy.
Private citizens taking direct control over the functions of the State without legal authority is a coup, so by that date clearly a coup was happening.
But it didn’t start there.
Because while Trump, damn his name was actually elected, he never should have been on the ballot in the first place what with very blatantly having been involved in setting up the earlier coup attempt on January 6th of 2021.
And the Constitution is very clear that having “engaged in insurrection” makes a person ineligible to be President.
So, the first concrete action I can think of that had as it’s goal installing Trump, damn his name illegally as the President was the Supreme Court decision in the case called Trump v. Anderson in which it ordered Colorado to allow Trump, damn his name to be listed on the ballot for the 2024 Presidential election.
That would date the first action of the coup to March 4, 2024.
So it’s been going on for a while, then.
And, while it’s clearly still ongoing across many parts of the State, it’s probably reasonable to say it “had happened” when the military accepted orders from Trump, damn his name to deploy illegally to Los Angeles on June 8th, 2025.
Meaning it took 461 days from the first public action of the coup to the military accepting illegal orders from an illegally-installed President.
I suspect it will take us much longer that that to recover from it.
