avatarBill Myers

Summarize

Photo by Author, November 2023

Constitution

HOW Trump Incited the Jan 6 Overthrow Attempt

Even I missed it the first time I read his speech

Someone claimed in an MSN comment that Trump encouraged a peaceful demonstration on Jan 6 during his speech. I reread the speech and realized that I had missed an extremely subtle strategy. I doubt that 1 in 10,000 readers would have seen it, and even fewer listeners.

Introduction

People frequently cite this phrase as evidence that Trump was not promoting the violent overthrow of the constitution.

  • “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

It was embedded about 22% into the speech to provide plausible deniability. As I continued reading, I noticed a strange pattern of 44 numbers — too regular to be real. By the end of a speech full of emotional agitations, peacefulness was completely forgotten & worthless. May as well have never been included based on its impact.

Technique to Incite

Trump made a statement intended to anger the crowd. One or two, they would just shout and go home. Same with normal anger. His statements raised the anger to the insanity level! Then he needed a trigger to set them off.

Mike Pence was the trigger. Trump told him to overthrow the constitution — 7 times. He instructed Pence to ignore his duties as spelled out in the constitution and stop the electoral vote count.

Then Trump set up the mob. He gave them numbers that would make any normal person furious. If provable, they would even make a normal democrat furious with the voting system. For example, in one state

  • “… you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.”

Such a huge number of phantom voters would make anybody furious.

Problem is that it is an unaudited claim with no real source. It also is a round number, which wouldn’t be a problem if it had a valid source that was not rounded. Finally, he implied that all 205,000 went democrat. If it was a valid number, they would have split some.

A similar claim would pile more anger on top of the first one since the claims were seconds apart. There were 44 such flagrant numbers + 2 ridiculous percentages. Every number was round making the whole batch unbelievable. Those accumulated bogus claims put the crowd into a frenzy.

Each number increased the anger level until a huge anger was imprinted in the brain.

Anything could set off that imprinted anger. Pence’s failure to overthrow the constitution set off the attack on the building to overthrow the constitution on Jan 6.

With 1 request to be peaceful and 46 incitements to anger after that, which do you think will carry over to the next day. There is no way it could have not been intentional.

Conclusion

Trump used an incredibly subtle method to incite the Jan 6 insurrection. It is unlikely that the participants even knew that they were attempting to overthrow the constitution.

The real hero of Jan 6 was Pence - just doing his job.

References

  • Unedited speech text
  • Brainwashed definition # 2: persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship Jan 7, 2021
  • Article II: Executive Section 1: Process to elect the president

Witness in Colorado trial outlines how Trump plans language to be magnet for extremists (msn.com)

  • Another example of “plausible deniability

Other Articles in the Same Category

Politics
Trump
Insurrection
Jan 6
Brainwashing
Recommended from ReadMedium