Is Trump Laying the Groundwork for a Coup in 2024?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, returning now to tomorrow’s January 6th anniversary. It’s not just what happened that day that’s harrowing, it’s also the conflicting ideas of what democracy is in America. 30-time Emmy award-winning journalist Bill Moyer shares his views and concerns in the new PBS documentary “Preserving Democracy,” which airs tomorrow. He spoke with Hari Sreenivasan, alongside Historian Kathleen Belew, who also features in the film about the day and the danger of another insurrection.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Professor Belew, Bill Moyers, thank you both for joining us. First, I want to start off, here we are, about a year ago, and given the information that we have now on what happened on January 6th, who took part, how close we came to the insurrection succeeding. I just want kind of your overall thoughts on maybe where we’re at, what you see. Professor Belew, let me start with you.

KATHLEEN BELEW, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: I think what has become very clear is that the challenge of January 6th is complex because we have to confront two very distinct but equally dangerous threats to our democracy and to people who live in the United States. One of these is the threat of extremist violence coming from the white power and militant right groups that comprise a small percentage of people who attended the rally and broke into the capitol on January 6th. Things like mass casualty events, infrastructure attacks and assassinations. The other issue is a thread that is, I think, quite new, which is these groups are making entry into our mainstream media. The ideologies are coming into our media, into our politics and even into our elected office holders. That means that we also have to confront the threat of authoritarian governments.

SREENIVASAN: I want to get a reaction from both of you to a clip that I’ll play here with Adam Kinzinger at office. You see all the rioters come in and really are kind of standing outside of the House floor at that point, and that’s when I realized this whole place is breached.

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REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-IL): I had been targeted on Twitter. People say, we’re going to get you. We’re going to find out where you are. And so, the only thing that can go through your head is, they’re going to know where my office is and I may have to defend myself.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: From your office here, this window looks out on part of the mall. What could you see?

KINZINGER: I could see people all through there. I open this window. And when you open it, you can hear nothing but screams, shouts. And the thing that stood out the most is like explosions, and it was the non-lethal ammunition that was being used. This has only happened to me probably twice in my whole life, but I had a real sense, like there’s just a sense of darkness over the place, like a sense of evil that descended over the place. And I just remembered looking out the window and like, this is one of the worst things I’ve ever been part of.

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SREENIVASAN: The scenes that we saw there with Adam Kinzinger, Congressman Kinzinger, was describing is what a lot of us are remembering from January 6th. What sticks in your mind from the events of that day?

BILL MOYERS; JOURNALIST: I watched that. I’ve watched (INAUDIBLE). I watched all of the events on January 6th and I kept shuttering, frankly, shivering when I saw the confederate flag in the state — in the U.S. Capitol. It had never been there before. They got very close, the rebels, the descenders, the secessionist, got very close when they were pushing against the Union troops in Virginia and Maryland, but they were never able to put that flag on the capitol of the United States of America. And I kept — you know, I closed my eyes that night and thought, I come from a part of the south that drove the truth about slavery from the newsroom. They drove the truth about slavery from the classroom. They drove the truth about slavery from the newsroom pulpit. They drove the truth about slavery from the classroom. They drove the truth about slavery from the pulpit. And the next thing we know is that that confederate flag through over 13 states of the United — once United America. We can’t let that happen again. We have to fight honorably. We have to fight fairly. But we have to fiercely to make sure that flag and all its symbol, all its symbolism, white supremacy, slavery, inequality do not take root, because I believe that insurrection on January 6th was the first flawed effort of what can happen again, even next year in state capitols around the country. Imagine that scene in the Michigan State Capitol, the Georgia State Capitol, the Texas State Capitol, the Arizona State Capitol, the Pennsylvania State Capitol. It’s too late then to do anything but call on armed forces to try to save us. We don’t want to get there. We can save ourselves if we create that sense of belonging to the most important but precarious experience in human history, which is the effort of people to govern themselves.

SREENIVASAN: Bill, you know, some of the polling that have happened with Republicans post-January 6th and then, later on paint a very interesting trend. 56 percent of Republicans characterized what happened as “defending freedom.” And 47 percent characterized it as patriotism. I mean, the ideas of what democracy is in America seem to be in question well beyond the specific events of January 6th, and by a huge proportion of the people who are one of the two largest parts of America right now.

MOYERS: Exactly. I’ve long said that democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. Because it is possible, we have seen in the past for a minority of an electorate to determine the outcome even if it doesn’t match what the majority would have approved of. You take over a party by starting, as we learn from people who have done it before, with seizing control of the press. Now, the right-wing in this country has created its own media as equal in force as any other we have in the country. They’re writing election laws that favor them. They’ve got a grip on 20 to 25 state legislators and governors around the country. Irrespective of what the majority say in onetime poll taken at a particular moment, they have what it takes to mount a larger insurrection, a larger sabotage, a larger claim to controlling the instruments of the party, and therefore, being the opponent of whomever the Democrats put up in 2024.

SREENIVASAN: Professor Belew, you have researched extensively how white power movements in the United States, how they basically intersected with politics, how powerful they’ve been at times and how seemingly weak at other times. What is the reason why there seems to be a resurgence now?

BELEW: So, in addition to many contextual factors that we face today, ranging from COVID to economic crisis to Black Lives Matter protests, to all of these things that act as push factors for activists to enter these groups, we’re also living through a sort of cyclical of relationship with vigilante and white power activity. If you look back through the long run of American history, the peaks in clan and other groups, similar groups, in peaks in memberships align more consistently with the aftermath of warfare than they do with any other factor more consistently than they aligned with poverty, immigration, civil rights gains, economic distress, populism, any other number of explanations that we might test out don’t hold up as well as the aftermath of war. Now, it turns out that that phenomenon cuts across simply people who have served. It’s not just about returning veterans. Although returning veterans and active-duty troops have played an outsize role in escalating the violent capacity of white power groups over time. But what we find is that all of us are more violent in the aftermath of warfare. That measure goes across men and women, across age, across who did and did not serve in war. So, there is this moment of opportunity after warfare these groups capitalize on in order to recruit and radicalize. Now, we are now in the aftermath of the longest war, our latest longest war, as one historian called it, the war in Afghanistan. And what we have seen is a very prolonged sort of combat where the people fighting this war have come home and been largely not acknowledged within our culture. We have not watched coffins draped in American flags coming home. We have not followed the war on television the way we did in prior combat. So, what does that mean? Are we going to see a sort of delayed surge that then peaks all at once? Are we going to see all of these people come together in peak? We don’t know. But certainly, we are in the middle of a rising ground swell. And certainly, we are experiencing one of these historical peaks.

SREENIVASAN: But, Bill, do you think that there is any scenario where the forces from within the United States seem to be more powerful in destroying the Union than forces from outside? By that, I mean, not just questioning the voracity of our elections, suppressing the rights of people to vote. I mean, these are not things that an external is foisting upon us, these are things that we are choosing now to change the nature of what we consider democracy.

MOYERS: Yes. One of the presidents who experienced backlash, Grover Cleveland, wrote a letter to a friend of his and said, the great ship of democracy, like other vessels, may be sunk by the mutiny of those on board. And that’s where the danger has always been. The shades rebellion, the secession of the south, didn’t come abroad, it came from people who wanted to keep slavery and keep — and wanted to destroy the Union. And we still have — these are secessionists by other means, and they really don’t really like the Union. I don’t cover my wall in nice wallpaper of paintings, I cover it in clippings. I keep the clippings taped to the wall and the clippings are astonishing. Our constitutional crossing is already here. The shining city on a hill is ready to ignite. America is closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe, CIA advisor says. Democracy on the edge. On and on. It’s frightening. Trump is systemically laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 election. Trump’s next coup has already begun. Republicans are erasing decades of voting rights gains before our eyes. And assaults on democracy state lawmakers target the courts. Georgia Republicans purge Democrats from county election boards. We received these in the media in bits and pieces. We see them in segments, but they constitute a critical mass of change determined by people who want to take this country back as they say, take it back with people of color, take it back from progressives, take it back from advocates of civil rights, equal rights. And it’s very, very dangerous.

BELEW: I think that’s absolutely right. And I wish that there was a feature on Twitter or TikTok or somewhere where people get their news that’s just you reading these headlines because it’s the aggregation of all of these stories that really sound the alarm. And, you know, one question I get asked a lot, because I’m a specialist in the violent extremist part of what we saw on January 6th, is about, you know, relative amounts of danger. But you could subscribe to every story about, say, the Proud Boys and only be reading a tiny fraction of the problem. Because it’s not just that, it’s the entire ground swell of white power and militant right activity. Plus, the attack on voting rights. Plus, the chain of command issues in the National Guard units, which we’ve also seen in the South Dakota governor sending the National Guard under the funding of a private donor to do border enforcement. And in Ron DeSanctis’s call for a “non-National Guard state militia” for Florida. And we see those sovereignty struggles mirrored in groups on the extreme right that don’t recognize the federal government or any authority higher than the local sheriff. We’re at a crisis point that just boggles understanding.

SREENIVASAN: I want to play a clip from a film that talks about how a coup is still possible. Let’s take a look.

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: January 6th is now a fact of our history. If it was possible to have a failed coup on January 6th, it’s possible to have a successful coup. It sounds very simple but it’s a huge change.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Democracy, if it’s anything at all, it is losers’ consent. People who lose leave and they try again next time. Trump still hasn’t really conceded the 2020 election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What the 2020 election revealed was that the rules that govern this are very loose and rely on norms of self-restraint and forbearance. Once you discover how to steal an election, it’s hard to unlearn the lesson. And so, that’s why I think looking forward, this is one of the greatest risks facing our democracy.

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SREENIVASAN: We have had hearings. We’ve had investigations. We’ve had a number, dozens of arrests of people who were involved. Yet, absent from that, are any of the elected officials who gave support to this, helped plan it, what do you think that says if there is such a carveout, so to speak? Professor Belew, I’ll start with you.

BELEW: I think this is where we see the sort of two goals of the process of accountability really articulated, because we have to pay attention both to the individuals who committed violence on January 6th and to the sort of planning mechanisms, accountability questions, especially among our elected officials. My hope is that that is what the January 6th Commission will be able to begin to deliver, perhaps a lawsuit by the attorney general can begin to deliver some of that information. But what we have to ask is when we have that information, what kind of dent can we make in the false narrative that has now been so thoroughly circulated in the bodied politic? And I think this goes back to a bigger question about the long history of white supremacy in the United States. We are by far not the only nation that struggles with white supremacy, racial violence, racial injustice and incomplete articulations of democracy. There are many other countries who have faced these issues. But we are very unusual in how little we have done to have a real national conversation about that shared history. And you can see this appearing across the political spectrum. I mean, I think even the slogan, make America great again, is at its bottom, an argument about history. Who America is, what America is, when we were great, can greatness be achieved again, these are historical arguments that require us to have an idea of the shared legacies that we bring into the present moment and these deep histories of anti-democracy, illiberalism, conflicts about sovereignty and power, all of those conversations have to happen for all of this to get resolved, because the public opinion needle can’t move until we confront some of these problems. This is what I think fuels the division and polarization that is the real issue here.

MOYERS: I’m not a pessimist. I’m not giving up on democracy. I deal, we all deal with bad news. The anecdote, I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the story is told that in the middle of the Waterloo Campaign, Napoleon said to his valet, if the news from the front is good, do not wake me. If the news from the front is not good, wake me immediately. He wanted to hear the bad news. I want to hear the bad news. That’s why I do the journalism. I do not because I love dwelling in the bad news, but I believe an informed people who know the difference between a lie and the truth are the people who are going to save us, and that includes Republicans and that includes Democrats. This includes independents. We need a mass mobilization to save the constitution. If I can put it that way. That’s why this fight, that Professor Belew has so eloquently written and talked about is important to recapture the discussion and debate of history so that we look and see ourselves for what we’ve done wrong. At the same time, we look and see the brave men and women who fought to change it and we can imitate them in many, many ways. That goes for lawyers, it goes journalists, it goes for everyday people down where what their main contribution and to stand or rely (INAUDIBLE) and vote. That’s what we need in this country. It’s to instill, to invigorate, to challenge, with the whole idea of what the democracy is, it’s about us. It’s about you and me. If we can do that and save the elements that are threatening in it, we’re going to be OK.

SREENIVASAN: The film, “Preserving Democracy,” airs on PBS stations on January 6th. Professor Kathleen Belew and Bill Moyers, thank you both.

BELEW: Thank you.

MOYERS: Glad to be here.