Quote:
Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis
I'm no coup expert or anything, but how often do they happen in wealthy countries? Gotta be pretty rare.
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What does "wealthy" mean here? Argentina has had a few, Greece had one in '67. South Korea in '79. Portugal overthrew a dictator that way in '74. In Turkey the military has been throwing out governments multiple times in 20th century. Egypt is I not wealthy, but not exactly small or poor either, they had a military coup in 2013.
I would argue that a military ousting Trump and his cronies would be at this point by far the best option US has left.
The reason why many military coups have in fact been welcomed by general populations is pretty simple: they are almost always very quick, well organized events with few to no casualties. The other option is very often an outright civil war, which can to be some of the worst wars in history in terms of civilian deaths, length, brutality and instability created.
It's also not particularly rare for a military coup to lead to a democracy.
Portugal is a an obvious example, and
here's Turkish ones. It's fairly common that the military is ultimately not that interested in leading a country politically. In the case of a country like the US where joining the military very explicitly is not a way to have power over your own country, it probably doesn't attract people with dictatorial fantasies. Additionally with the way the US military is organized, there is no single strongman that would be likely to rise to lead the whole thing.
What they would be likely to do is throw a bunch of people they think are a problem into jail from every side, ban some people from running for office, and then let the then filtered rest sort themselves out in an election, where they can once again play "running the country" as long as they don't step on any Pentagon toes too much.
(Of course, logistically the US military is not terribly well setup for a coup. Bases are far from major population centers, they have relatively few boots to place on the ground compared to the size of the country, much of the force is air and naval, much of the military ia spread over the world... The existence of national guards organized by state and commanded by two layers of political leadership makes things even more complicated. This is of course intentional design to protect the country against a coup.
Plus far-right would probably recognize that as their moment to rise up, and they have all those federal agencies with lots of men and lots of Trump bootlickes in charge. And all those police forces with military gear.)
