Dyer: Trump lacks courage to be true revolutionary

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Turning yourself from a democratically elected president into a dictator is a tricky operation, and most people who try it fail. To try it without first gaining the support of the armed forces is lunacy. Yet, from time to time, an elected president tries to do exactly that.

The latest president to try it is South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol. His declaration of martial law on Dec. 3 was withdrawn after three hours: thousands of civilians went to the National Assembly building and helped the lawmakers to get inside and vote to cancel President Yoon’s decree.

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The police tried to arrest him on Saturday, but thousands of Yoon’s supporters formed a human chain around the presidential residence to stop them. So, the police chose to withdraw.

This was not a blunder or a failure of nerve by the court’s investigators. It was a sensible decision not to give Yoon the spectacle of 3,000 armed police clashing with his own civilian backers and hundreds of armed presidential guards. It will take a little longer to get Yoon into handcuffs, but at the end of it he will no longer be president.

The martyrdom of another president who tried and failed to carry out a self-coup is just beginning. Last month, Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and 36 former associates were indicted by Brazil’s federal police for plotting to assassinate the victor in the 2022 election, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and put Bolsonaro back in office.

What makes these two events relevant to the present is both Bolsonaro and Yoon modeled their behaviour on that of Donald Trump. Yoon’s supporters in the confrontation outside the presidential residence last week were even waving American flags, to emulate Trump’s supporters in their attack on the U.S. Congress on  Jan. 6, 2021.

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Like Trump again, both men justified their illegal actions with the false claim the previous election had been rigged against them. But there was one big difference: unlike Trump, they didn’t chicken out at the last moment. Wicked and stupid, but brave.

In any coup attempt, there is a point at which mere talk crosses the line into irrevocable action, and it is a bright red line. To bring people with you in sufficient numbers, you have to cross that line and risk everything. Yoon and Bolsonaro crossed it, and failed anyway. Trump never crossed it.

The key moment was on Jan. 6 four years ago when Trump, having promised to join the potential rioters and insurrectionists in front of the Capitol building, let himself be driven back to the White House after a brief token attempt to seize the steering wheel from the Secret Service driver. He watched the potential coup fizzle out on television.

Four years later, having won reelection, Trump is heading back to the White House. If even half of his promises are kept, there will be plenty of conflicts and crises between his administration on one side, and federal law, the U.S. Constitution and the strongly held values of around half the population on the other.

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Trump’s control of the Supreme Court will let him ride out some of the protests, but it is likely there will be grave confrontations between Trump and a large section of the American people. It is therefore some consolation that he lacks the courage and determination of a genuine revolutionary.

He talks a great fight, but when it came to the crisis point in 2021 he went tamely back to the White House. The rational explanation was he could not count on the U.S. military to accept a Trump coup (which is probably still the case), but the real reason was  he didn’t have the guts to stage a coup.

That’s no guarantee next time won’t be different, but 78-year-old leopards don’t usually change their spots.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.

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