“We now have a better sense of how dangerous what we might call the ‘paperwork coup’ was. The theory under which Trump and his cronies attempted to steal the election was not especially elaborate or persuasive, but it didn’t need to be. It was coherent, and if a few things had happened differently—most especially, if Vice President Mike Pence had gone along with it—the result would have been chaos at the least and possibly a second Trump term and widespread conflict at worst. The violence on January 6 broke a long string of peaceful transfers of power in the United States. If the paperwork coup had worked, though, peace might have prevailed—but the transfer of power might not have happened,” the Atlantic‘s David A. Graham writes.
