Narratology: Folie à Trois

 

Salvador Dalí, Swans Reflecting Elephants (1937), via Wikipedia.

Well, well, well, gossip genius Michael Wolff seems to be releasing a third volume on the Trump administration, under the title Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, to arrive July 27, and New York magazine has a promo excerpt dealing with the events of 6 January, with which I am totally fascinated.

Not that it tells you the story of an unfolding coup attempt: it doesn't. One of the inherent defects of the genre, whether the author is a patrician-reporter like Bob Woodward or a literary slumdweller like Wolff, is that it's forced to take its sources' self-serving stories at more or less face value. If a coup attempt was really taking place, none of Wolff's sources said so, whether because they didn't know or because they were pretending not to know, understandably, so he effectively couldn't tell the story by the means at his command. 

And it really seems from the excerpts as if none of his sources might have known such a thing; the characters divide neatly into two groups, one consisting just of the truly delusional Trump and Giuliani, in a remarkable kind of folie à deux, who were genuinely hoping that Pence would decertify the election with his imaginary vice presidential powers, and everybody else in and around the White House, who knew this would not happen, but didn't know how to tell the boss. And they nearly all sound as if whoever is talking to Wolff is more or less telling the truth.

Nevertheless there is some room for a coup in the interstices of the things Wolff doesn't say and the people for whom he didn't have sources, or at least reliable sources, starting with Roger Stone, who is reported telling an obvious lie on the morning of the insurrection at the Willard Hotel, where Giuliani was renting a suite as a "war room" from which he was masterminding the legal effort to overturn the election, and Stone had been spending the night with a pack of his Oath Keepers "bodyguards". Giuliani was heading to the Ellipse to offer a speech at the rally with John Eastman, an expert on constitutional law, his old criminal friend Bernie Kerik, and a familiar Trump thug, Boris Epshteyn, who was serving as a kind of liaison between Giuliani's people and Trump's people.:

Coming out of the Willard, Giuliani ran into Roger Stone in the lobby. When Giuliani asked if he was going to the rally, Stone said he hadn’t been invited. He didn’t even know who had organized it, he said.

But in fact he had not merely been invited, but scheduled to speak on the Ellipse that morning, alongside Giuliani and the others and Trump himself. He didn't come, he told Alex Jones on TV, because his Oath Keepers told him it would be too "disorganized and chaotic", or on Instagram that he decided he wasn't "interested"—

While I was supposed to speak at the Ellipse [alongside Donald Trump] and lead a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol, or speak at the Capitol, or at least allegedly was so [sic], I decided that I wasn’t interested in doing any of those things and in fact I left town while demonstrators were still—to my astonishment—inside the Capitol.

—and eventually he claimed he had never left his hotel room at all during the day, which we know is a lie because he was photographed in front of the hotel that morning with some of the at least six of Stone's Oath Keepers who were among the shock troops who stormed the Capitol that afternoon, all of them repeatedly identified in video of Stone obtained by The Times from before the incursion accompanying him or in one case driving him in a golf cart, from a speech he gave on the steps of the Supreme Court on 5 January, where Stone said,

“Let’s be very clear. This is not an election between Republicans and Democrats. This is not a fight between liberals and conservatives. This is nothing less than an epic struggle for the future of this country between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil. And we will win this fight or America will step off into a thousand years of darkness. We dare not fail. I will be with you tomorrow, shoulder-to-shoulder.”

though he was lying about that too, of course, he never did show up.

Trump did something very similar, too, as you may already have remembered, delivering his own speech at the Ellipse the next day, with the curious remark he interpolated (according to Wolff) into the written text:

After this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you.... We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

Mark Meadows, who had left the speech and gone back with Scavino to the White House, learned about it from a panicked Secret Service agent and after Trump got back asked him what he'd meant:

The president seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.

“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol.”

“Well — ”

“How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump said.

Is that a coincidence? Here's another one from way back in September, when Stone and Trump were both on grifting tours in Nevada:

Citing widely debunked claims of fraud around early voting, absentee balloting and voting by mail, [in a call to the Infowars radio program] Stone told [Alex] Jones Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act and arresting the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Zuckerberg, Tim Cook of Apple and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity”.

He also said: “The ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state. They are completely corrupted. No votes should be counted from the state of Nevada if that turns out to be the provable case. Send federal marshals to the Clark county board of elections, Mr President!” (Guardian, 13 September 2020)

And as we just found out last week, the Insurrection Act was something Trump had been very interested in for a while, ever since the disturbances following the murder of George Floyd, which he interpreted as a kind of genuine anti-Trump insurrection burning American cities down—to the point of having a proclamation evoking the Insurrection Act drafted for him to use, just in case he felt the need, at the beginning of June 2020. (Two days later was when Senator Tom Cotton published his notorious New York Times op-ed calling for martial law under the Act to put down the "nihilist criminals" and "cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa".)  And Stone was among those after the election, in December (Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Michael Flynn) calling for martial law to overturn the result—Stone did it on the Alex Jones show once again.

Although, needless to say, there was no more chance of Trump legally remaining president through a declaration of martial law than there was of reversing the election through dozens of worthless lawsuits and an uncooperative vice president; and it's inconceivable (as I kept saying) that he should have gotten away with it in the normal extralegal way real-world coups actually work without the support of the military, which everybody should understand by now he would not have had (hi, General Milley!).

What I'm suggesting is that the coup was really a second folie à deux, shared by Trump and Stone, as the fantasy of Congress and the Supreme Court overturning the election was shared by Trump and Giuliani, with the same ragged band of retainers, shysters like Wood and Powell, renegade soldiers like the Flynn brothers and the gangs like Three Percenters with a heavy ex-military contingent in the membership, phony journalists like Jones and Carlson and Hannity, willing to participate in either adventure as the occasion arose, and associated publicity grifters like Amy and Kylie Kremer supplying the uninformed masses and Q-crazies among whom the insurgents could pass less noticed, hardly any of them with more than the vaguest idea of what the plan might be, and in fact there was no plan—it was just that stupid. 

Which doesn't make it any the less reprehensible—the rioters responding to Stone's and Trump's signals ("I will be with you") could have done enormous harm if they'd made it into the Senate chamber or House before the members escaped, as they very nearly did. And I think Stone and Trump were really hoping it might work, somehow, allowing Trump to pull out his martial law order, just as Giuliani and Trump were really hoping Pence might declare him president that afternoon.

Another thing missing from the published Wolff excerpts is any mention of the idea of an armed insurrection, or of the declaration of martial law, which doesn't mean it's not in the book. I'm especially intrigued by a time gap between 3:30, when Trump was finally deciding to make the video calling the rioters off (he posted the video on Twitter at 4:17), and around 7:00, when he stumbled back to the East Wing, banned from Twitter. Whatever Wolff has to say about those three and a half hours when he made the video and the revolutionaries wandered back to their hotels and RVs is something he decided to hold back. I can't wait to find out what it is.