Friday
We’re slowly but surely getting a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s coup attempt, and it appears to have come much closer to succeeding than we realized. In the end, we were saved by the most unlikely person imaginable: Donald Trump’s sycophant-in-chief, Vice President Mike Pence.
Literature is filled with stories of unlikely heroes. The hobbit who saved Middle Earth is the first who comes to mind, but Mike Pence is no Frodo. I think of him more as one of A.E. Housman’s hirelings in his delicious little poem, “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.”
Before applying it, here is my simplified understanding of the coup attempt:
–Trump wanted to create enough doubt about the election that Mike Pence would refuse to certify the election but instead send it back to the states, where anything could happen;
–to create doubt, Trump pressured Attorney General Barr and various governors, secretaries of state, and election boards in critical states to claim voter fraud;
–those in the White House who resisted him after the election were fired and replaced by flunkies ready to carry out his will;
–during all this time, Pence was put under intense pressure, not only by Trump but by lawyer John Eastman and others, who redefined his duties by reinterpreting the Constitution;
–to further pressure Pence and Republican members of Congress, Trump inspired a mob to descend upon the Capitol. The mob was financed by, among others, various rightwing billionaires;
–while Trump may or may not have anticipated that the mob would storm the Capitol, once they did so, he refused to call them off for four hours;
–if Pence had refused to certify the election, Trump’s circle anticipated there would be massive protests from Biden supporters. Various fascist and white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys would then get involved, seeking to stir up trouble, at which point Trump could declare martial law and, voila, stay on as president. It was because the Armed Forces feared such a scenario that they stayed away from the Capitol when it was being attacked.
As a result, for only the second time in American history (the first being 1860) we did not have a peaceful transition of power. Democracy was in danger of “falling” as America’s “foundations fled.”
And who stood true to the Constitution? Who, despite immense pressure, performed the duties he was constitutionally required to do? The man who had groveled before the Trump for four and a half years.
In Housman’s poem, the unlikely heroes are mercenaries who, against all odds, insist on fulfilling their contractual obligations:
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
Pence, when he convened Congress and called for the certification vote following mob violence, did indeed hold the sky suspended. And while he did not, like the mercenaries, die in the process, he is politically dead, loathed by both sides. No one, outside of Housman, gives either mercenaries or sycophants credit when they do something noble. Why should either hirelings or Mike Pence be applauded for just doing their job?
But given all the incentives for them to have acted otherwise, we should hold them up and honor them.