Make no mistake: Trump is trying to pull off a Latin American-style ‘self-coup’ | Opinion

What happened Wednesday in Washington, D.C. — President Trump encouraging his mob of minions to take to the streets to overturn the results of an election he lost, before telling them to go home — is a classic example of a Latin American auto-golpe, or self-coup.

I have seen many auto-golpes in Latin America while writing about the region in recent decades, most recently in Bolivia, in 2019. And while I’m pretty confident that U.S. democratic institutions will prevail and President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Jan. 20, Wednesday’s chaos set a horrific precedent.

Trump’s call on his followers to overturn the 2020 election results and the images of these mobs taking over the U.S. Congress will weaken the world’s respect for America’s democracy for decades to come.

Also, it will cripple Trump supporters’ moral authority to preach democracy in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba or China.

In 2019, Bolivia’s then-populist president, Evo Morales, was running for a fourth term in office. He had already changed the constitution, which originally allowed him to serve only two consecutive terms.

When Morales failed to win a first-round victory in the Oct. 20, 2019, election, and international election observers concluded that he had to go to a runoff, Morales called on his supporters to take to the streets. He knew that he would most probably lose a second-round vote, because the leading opposition candidates would unite against him.

So Morales fraudulently proclaimed himself the winner of the first round and called on his followers to take to the streets. Morales’ mobs surrounded the presidential palace and congress, until the opposition reacted likewise, and international organizations such as the 34-country Organization of American States demanded a second-round election.

In the end, the Bolivian police and the army decided not to back Morales’ claims — or asked him to leave, depending on whose side you believe. He resigned. Ironically, his party now is back in power, although Morales himself is not part of the Bolivian government.

Like Morales and other Latin American demagogues, Trump is a populist narcissist who had already created a cult of personality around himself, is a pathological liar and has played the “victim” card to exhaustion — blaming the media, the opposition, Wall Street, Big Tech, you name it — for his electoral defeat in November. And now, he is pulling the ultimate trick from the elected Latin American dictator’s manual — the “self-coup.”

Many Trump supporters say that the president has the right to contest electoral results. He sure does, and he has done so ad nauseam. However, Trump and his supporters have not been able to show any evidence of massive fraud that could put Biden’s win in doubt.

Even the Supreme Court, despite its conservative majority that includes three Trump-appointed justices, and almost 60 different courts in the country have rejected Trump’s lawsuits to overturn the election results. Even ultra-submissive former attorney general William Barr and top Republican state officials have concluded that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims of meaningful vote fraud.

So why is Trump doing this? He obviously knows that Congress will proclaim Biden as the next president, because there are enough Democrats and Republicans who believe in democracy and the U.S. Constitution. He is doing this because he wants to leave office as a victim rather than as a loser — even if that means undermining America’s institutions.

And why are Republican legislators such as Ted Cruz, of Texas, backing Trump’s self-coup, and others such as Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio remaining silent? Because they are cowards who want to run for president in 2024 and are afraid that an angry tweet from Trump could cost them the support of his rabid voters.

But what will be Cruz’s moral authority from now on to demand democracy in Venezuela or Cuba when he’s supporting a coup in his own country? And can Rubio ever do that same with a straight face? Not unless he breaks his shameless silence and supports the rule of law in the United States. Wednesday, he coyly tweeted, “This is 3rd-world-style anti-American anarchy.” But it’s not just anarchy — it’s a coup attempt on the part of a president whom Rubio has slavishly supported. And he should say so.

Trump has been a disgrace to America, and to the world. Until now, coup attempts were a Latin American and African phenomenon. Now, thanks to Trump, they are part of America’s reality.

This story was originally published January 6, 2021 at 5:48 PM with the headline "Make no mistake: Trump is trying to pull off a Latin American-style ‘self-coup’ | Opinion."