Trump Didn’t Attempt a Coup. He Threw a Temper Tantrum that Never Had a Chance

Since Election Day, President Trump has done everything in his power to discredit the election results and secure a second term for himself. Yet his efforts have failed completely, absolutely and spectacularly.

Judges, election overseers, state officials and news organizations — Republican as well as Democratic, conservative as well as liberal — showed fealty to the Constitution and the rule of law over a willful president. Despite Trump’s rout, however, many Trump-haters are still freaking out about a possible “coup.” Like the “raskall many” in Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” who can’t quite believe St. George has finally slain the dragon that has menaced them, they remain afraid their nemesis will magically roar back to life.

Trump, of course, will continue to deny his defeat — even tweeting “Fraud!” as he boards his helicopter to Mar-a-Lago. But his thorough discomfiture should dispel everyone’s anxiety. Trump has been stripped of the presidency, and whatever challenges lie ahead, that’s a historic achievement.

In short: The system worked.

That phrase comes from the Nixon Era, of course — and the parallels with Nixon’s demise are instructive. After all, even more than Trump’s erratic and destructive White House sojourn, Watergate represented the historic zenith of presidential lawlessness. Nonetheless, over two years, Congress, the justice system, the news media and civil society came together to send Nixon packing and shore up democracy. Watergate even became a textbook civics lesson, a model of how our well-wrought system and democratic mores could ensure not even an “imperial president” was above the law.

What’s sometimes forgotten, though, is how precarious American democracy seemed then — exactly as it has during the past four years. Today’s understandable but misplaced fears that Trump “won’t leave” the White House on Jan. 20 have a perfect precedent in identical anxieties about Nixon at the peak of Watergate. As the vise tightened in July and August 1974, Nixon appeared to many ready and willing to defy even an impeachment conviction.