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The Plot Against American Democracy That Isn’t Taught in Schools

By Jonathan M. Katz

Jonathan M. Katz

Award-winning journalist Jonathan M. Katz’s new book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire , is an explosive deep dive into the forgotten history of American military imperialism in the early twentieth century. At its center is one of the United States’s most fascinating yet little-known characters — Gen. Smedley Butler, a Marine who fought in nearly every U.S. overseas war in the early twentieth century. In this exclusive excerpt, Katz documents how Butler played a pivotal role in an equally little-known episode, in which a cadre of powerful businessmen tried to overthrow the government of the United States, in an episode that anticipated the events of Jan. 6 , 2021. Read the exclusive excerpt below.

Smedley Butler knew a coup when he smelled one. He had been involved in many himself. He had overthrown governments and protected “friendly” client ones around the world on behalf of some of the same U.S. bankers, lawyers, and businessmen apparently now looking for his help.

For 33 years and four months Butler had been a United States Marine, a veteran of nearly every overseas conflict back to the war against Spain in 1898. Respected by his peers, beloved by his men, he was known as “The Fighting Hell-Devil Marine,” “Old Gimlet Eye,” “The Leatherneck’s Friend,” and the famous “Fighting Quaker” of the Devil Dogs. Bestselling books had been written about him. Hollywood adored him. President Roosevelt’s cousin, the late Theodore himself, was said to have called Butler “the ideal American soldier.” Over the course of his career, he had received the Army and Navy Distinguished Service medals, the French Ordre de l’Étoile Noir, and, in the distinction that would ensure his place in the Marine Corps pantheon, the Medal of Honor — twice.

Butler knew what most Americans did not: that in all those years, he and his Marines had destroyed democracies and helped put into power the Hitlers and Mussolinis of Latin America, dictators like the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo and Nicaragua’s soon-to-be leader Anastasio Somoza — men who would employ violent repression and their U.S.-created militaries to protect American investments and their own power. He had done so on behalf of moneyed interests like City Bank, J. P. Morgan, and the Wall Street financier Grayson M.P. Murphy.

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And now a bond salesman, who worked for Murphy, was pitching Butler on a domestic operation that set off the old veteran’s alarm bells. The bond salesman was Gerald C. MacGuire, a 37-year-old Navy veteran with a head Butler thought looked like a cannonball. MacGuire had been pursuing Butler relentlessly throughout 1933 and 1934, starting with visits to the Butler’s converted farmhouse on Philadelphia’s Main Line. In Newark, where Butler was attending the reunion of a National Guard division, MacGuire showed up at his hotel room and tossed a wad of cash on the bed — $18,000, he said. In early 1934, Butler had received a series of postcards from MacGuire, sent from the hotspots of fascist Europe, including Hitler’s Berlin.

In August 1934, MacGuire called Butler from Philadelphia and asked to meet. Butler suggested an abandoned café at the back of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

First MacGuire recounted all he had seen in Europe. He’d learned that Mussolini and Hitler were able to stay in power because they kept soldiers on their payrolls in various ways. “But that setup would not suit us at all,” the businessman opined.

But in France, MacGuire had “found just exactly the organization we’re going to have.” Called the Croix de Feu, or Fiery Cross, it was like a more militant version of the American Legion: an association of French World War veterans and paramilitaries. On Feb. 6, 1934 — six weeks before MacGuire arrived — the Croix de Feu had taken part in a riot of mainly far-right and fascist groups that had tried to storm the French legislature. The insurrection was stopped by police; at least 15 people, mostly rioters, were killed. But in the aftermath, France’s center-left prime minister had been forced to resign in favor of a conservative.

MacGuire had attended a meeting of the Croix de Feu in Paris. It was the sort of “super-organization” he believed Americans could get behind — especially with a beloved war hero like Butler at the helm.

Then he made his proposal: The Marine would lead half a million veterans in a march on Washington, blending the Croix de Feu’s assault on the French legislature with the March on Rome that had put Mussolini’s Fascisti in power in Italy a decade earlier. They would be financed and armed by some of the most powerful corporations in America — including DuPont, the nation’s biggest manufacturer of explosives and synthetic materials.

The purpose of the action was to stop Roosevelt’s New Deal, the president’s program to end the Great Depression, which one of the millionaire du Pont brothers deemed “nothing more or less than the Socialistic doctrine called by another name.” Butler’s veteran army, MacGuire explained, would pressure the president to appoint a new secretary of state, or “secretary of general affairs,” who would take on the executive powers of government. If Roosevelt went along, he would be allowed to remain as a figurehead, like the king of Italy. Otherwise, he would be forced to resign, placing the new super-secretary in the White House.

Butler recognized this immediately as a coup. He knew the people who were allegedly behind it. He had made a life in the overlapping seams of capital and empire, and he knew that the subversion of democracy by force had turned out to be a required part of the job he had chosen. “I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers,” Butler would write a year later. “In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”

And Butler knew another thing that most Americans didn’t: how much they would suffer if anyone did to their democracy what he had done to so many others across the globe.

“Now, about this super-organization,” MacGuire asked the general. “Would you be interested in heading it?”

“I am interested in it, but I do not know about heading it,” Butler told the bond salesman, as he resolved to report everything he had learned to Congress. “I am very greatly interested in it, because, you know, Jerry, my interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.”

Eight decades after he publicly revealed his conversations about what became known as the Business Plot, Smedley Butler is no longer a household name. A few history buffs — and a not-inconsiderable number of conspiracy-theory enthusiasts — remember him for his whistleblowing of the alleged fascist coup. Another repository of his memory is kept among modern-day Marines, who learn one detail of his life in boot camp — the two Medals of Honor — and to sing his name along with those of his legendary Marine contemporaries, Dan Daly and Lewis “Chesty” Puller, in a running cadence about devotion to the Corps: “It was good for Smedley Butler/And it’s good enough for me.”

I first encountered the other side of Butler’s legacy in Haiti, after I moved there to be the correspondent for the Associated Press. To Haitians, Butler is no hero. He is remembered by scholars there as the most mechan — corrupt or evil — of the Marines. He helped lead the U.S. invasion of that republic in 1915 and played a singular role in setting up an occupation that lasted nearly two decades. Butler also instigated a system of forced labor, the corvée, in which Haitians were required to build hundreds of miles of roads for no pay, and were killed or jailed if they did not comply. Haitians saw it for what it was: a form of slavery, enraging a people whose ancestors had freed themselves from enslavement and French colonialism over a century before.

Such facts do not make a dent in the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Most Americans prefer to think of ourselves as plucky heroes: the rebels who topple the empire, not the storm troopers running its battle stations. U.S. textbooks — and more importantly the novels, video games, monuments, tourist sites, and films where most people encounter versions of American history — are more often about the Civil War or World War II, the struggles most easily framed in moral certitudes of right and wrong, and in which those fighting under the U.S. flag had the strongest claims to being on the side of good.

“Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.

And it is. It was no coincidence that thousands of young men like Smedley Butler were convinced to sign up for America’s first overseas war of empire on the promise of ending Spanish tyranny and imperialism in Cuba. Brought up as a Quaker on Philadelphia’s Main Line, Butler held on to principles of equality and fairness throughout his life, even as he fought to install and defend despotic regimes all over the world. That tension — between the ideal of the United States as a leading champion of democracy on the one hand and a leading destroyer of democracy on the other — remains the often unacknowledged fault line running through American politics today.

For some past leaders, there was never a tension at all. When the U.S. seized its first inhabited overseas colonies in 1898, some proudly wore the label. “I am, as I expected I would be, a pretty good imperialist,” Theodore Roosevelt mused to a British friend while on safari in East Africa in 1910. But as the costs of full-on annexation became clear, and control through influence and subterfuge became the modus operandi of U.S. empire, American leaders reverted seamlessly back to republican rhetoric.

The denial deepened during the Cold War. In 1955, the historian William Appleman Williams wrote, “One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire.” It was essential for the conflict against the Soviet Union — “the Evil Empire,” as Ronald Reagan would call it — to heighten the supposed contrasts: They overthrew governments, we defended legitimate ones; they were expansionist, we went abroad only in defense of freedom.

As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy to tell ourselves, as Americans, that the global dominance of U.S. capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic superpower was just natural — a galaxy of individual choices, freely made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.

But the illusion is fading. The myth of American invulnerability was shattered by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The attempt to recover a sense of dominance resulted in the catastrophic “forever wars” launched in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. The deaths of well over half a million Americans in the coronavirus pandemic, and our seeming inability to halt or contend with the threats of climate change, are further reminders that we can neither accumulate nor consume our way out of a fragile and interconnected world.

As I looked through history to find the origins of the patterns of self-dealing and imperiousness that mark so much of American policy, I kept running into the Quaker Marine with the funny name. Smedley Butler’s military career started in the place where the United States’ overseas empire truly began, and the place that continues to symbolize the most egregious abuses of American power: Guantánamo Bay. His last overseas deployment, in China from 1927 to 1929, gave him a front-row seat to both the start of the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists and the slowly materializing Japanese invasion that would ultimately open World War II.

In the years between, Butler blazed a path for U.S. empire, helping seize the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, and invading and helping plunder Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and more. Butler was also a pioneer of the militarization of police: first spearheading the creation of client police forces across Latin America, then introducing those tactics to U.S. cities during a two-year stint running the Philadelphia police during Prohibition.

Yet Butler would spend the last decade of his life trying to keep the forces of tyranny and violence he had unleashed abroad from consuming the country he loved. He watched the rise of fascism in Europe with alarm. In 1935, Butler published a short book about the collusion between business and the armed forces called War Is a Racket . The warnings in that thin volume would be refined and amplified years later by his fellow general, turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, whose speechwriters would dub it the military-industrial complex.

Late in 1935, Butler would go further, declaring in a series of articles for a radical magazine: “Only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria, and the African attack of Mussolini.”

Butler was not just throwing stones. In that article, he repeatedly called himself a racketeer — a gangster — and enumerated his crimes:

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.…

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China, in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

Butler was telling a messier story than the ones Americans like to hear about ourselves. But we ignore the past at our peril. Americans may not recognize the events Butler referred to in his confession, but America’s imperial history is well remembered in the places we invaded and conquered — where leaders and elites use it and shape it to their own ends. Nowhere is more poised to use its colonial past to its future advantage than China, once a moribund kingdom in which U.S. forces, twice led by Butler, intervened at will in the early 20th century. As they embark on their own imperial project across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Chinese officials use their self-story of “national humiliation” to position themselves as an antidote to American control, finding willing audiences in countries grappling with their own histories of subjugation by the United States.

The dangers are greater at home. Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-20th-century imperial chestnuts — militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood — with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made, by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.

To those who did not know or have ignored America’s imperial history, it could seem that Trump was an alien force (“This is not who we are,” as the liberal saying goes), or that the implosion of his presidency has made it safe to slip back into comfortable amnesias. But the movement Trump built — a movement that stormed the Capitol, tried to overturn an election, and, as I write these words, still dreams of reinstalling him by force — is too firmly rooted in America’s past to be dislodged without substantial effort. It is a product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that were woven into the structure of U.S. global supremacy from the beginning — forces that now threaten to break apart not only the empire but the society that birthed it.

On Nov. 20, 1934, readers of the New York Post were startled by a headline: “Gen. Butler Accuses N.Y. Brokers of Plotting Dictatorship in U.S.; $3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared; Says He Was Asked to Lead 500,000 for Capital ‘Putsch’; U.S. Probing Charge.”

Smedley Butler revealed the Business Plot before a two-man panel of the Special House Committee on Un-American Activities. The executive session was held in the supper room of the New York City Bar Association on West 44th Street. Present were the committee chairman, John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, and vice chairman, Samuel Dickstein of New York.

For 30 minutes, Butler told the story, starting with the first visit of the bond salesman Gerald C. MacGuire to his house in Newtown Square in 1933.

Finally, Butler told the congressmen about his last meeting with MacGuire at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. At that meeting, Butler testified, MacGuire had told him to expect to see a powerful organization forming to back the putsch from behind the scenes. “He says: ‘You watch. In two or three weeks you will see it come out in the paper. There will be big fellows in it. This is to be the background of it. These are to be the villagers in the opera.’” The bond salesman told the Marine this group would advertise itself as a “society to maintain the Constitution.”

“And in about two weeks,” Butler told the congressmen, “the American Liberty League appeared, which was just about what he described it to be.”

The Liberty League was announced on Aug. 23, 1934, on the front page of The New York Times . The article quoted its founders’ claim that it was a “nonpartisan group” whose aim was to “combat radicalism, preserve property rights, uphold and preserve the Constitution.” Its real goal, other observers told the Times , was to oppose the New Deal and the taxes and controls it promised to impose on their fortunes.

Among the Liberty League’s principal founders was the multimillionaire Irénée du Pont, former president of the explosives and chemical manufacturing giant. Other backers included the head of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, as well as executives of Phillips Petroleum, Sun Oil, General Foods, and the McCann Erickson ad agency. The former Democratic presidential candidates Al Smith and John W. Davis — both of them foes of FDR, the latter counsel to J.P. Morgan & Co. — were among the League’s members as well. Its treasurer was MacGuire’s boss, Grayson Murphy.

Sitting beside Butler in the hearing room was the journalist who wrote the Post article, Paul Comly French. Knowing the committee might find his story hard to swallow — or easy to suppress — Butler had called on the reporter, whom he knew from his time running the Philadelphia police, to conduct his own investigation. French told the congressmen what MacGuire had told him: “We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers, and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

MacGuire, the journalist added, had “continually discussed the need of a man on a white horse, as he called it, a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse. He said that was the only way to save the capitalistic system.”

Butler added one more enticing detail. MacGuire had told him that his group in the plot — presumably a clique headed by Grayson Murphy — was eager to have Butler lead the coup, but that “the Morgan interests” — that is, bankers or businessmen connected to J. P. Morgan & Co. — were against him. “The Morgan interests say you cannot be trusted, that you are too radical and so forth, that you are too much on the side of the little fellow,” he said the bond salesman had explained. They preferred a more authoritarian general: Douglas MacArthur.

All of these were, in essence, merely leads. The committee would have to investigate to make the case in full. What evidence was there to show that anyone beside MacGuire, and likely Murphy, had known about the plot? How far had the planning gone? Was Butler — or whoever would lead the coup — to be the “man on a white horse,” or were they simply to pave the way for the dictator who would “save the capitalistic system”?

But the committee’s investigation would be brief and conducted in an atmosphere of overweening incredulity. As soon as Butler’s allegations became public, the most powerful men in media did everything they could to cast doubt on them and the Marine. The New York Times fronted its story with the denials of the accused: Grayson M.P. Murphy called it “a fantasy.” “Perfect moonshine! Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon!” exclaimed Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner at J.P. Morgan & Co. “He’d better be damn careful,” said the ex-Army general and ex-FDR administration official Hugh S. Johnson, whom Butler said was mooted as a potential “secretary of general affairs.” “Nobody said a word to me about anything of the kind, and if they did, I’d throw them out the window.”

Douglas MacArthur called it “the best laugh story of the year.”

Time magazine lampooned the allegations in a satire headlined “Plot Without Plotters.” The writer imagined Butler on horseback, spurs clinking, as he led a column of half a million men and bankers up Pennsylvania Avenue. In an unsigned editorial, Adolph Ochs’ New York Times likened Butler to an early-20th-century Prussian con man.

There would only be one other witness of note before the committee. MacGuire spent three days testifying before McCormack and Dickstein, contradicting, then likely perjuring himself. He admitted having met the Croix de Feu in Paris, though he claimed it was in passing at a mass at Notre-Dame. The bond salesman also admitted having met many times with Butler — but insisted, implausibly, that it was Butler who told him he was involved with “some vigilante committee somewhere,” and that the bond salesman had tried to talk him out of it.

There was no further inquiry. The committee was disbanded at the end of 1934. McCormack argued, unpersuasively, that it was not necessary to subpoena Grayson Murphy because the committee already had “cold evidence linking him with this movement.”

“We did not want,” the future speaker of the House added, “to give him a chance to pose as an innocent victim.”

The committee’s final report was both complimentary to Butler and exceptionally vague:

In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country There is no question but that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

The committee said it had “verified all the pertinent statements made by General Butler.” But it named no one directly in connection with the alleged coup.

Was there a Business Plot? In the absence of a full investigation, it is difficult to say. It seems MacGuire was convinced he was a front man for one. (He would not live long enough to reveal more: Four months after the hearings, the bond salesman died at the age of 37.)

It seems possible that at least some of the alleged principals’ denials were honest. MacGuire’s claim that all the members of the Liberty League were planning to back a coup against Roosevelt does not make it so. The incredulity with which men like Thomas Lamont and Douglas MacArthur greeted the story could be explained by the possibility that they had not heard of such a plan before Butler blew the whistle.

But it is equally plausible that, had Butler not come forward, or had MacGuire approached someone else, the coup or something like it might have been attempted. Several alleged in connection with the plot were avid fans of fascism. Lamont described himself as “something like a missionary” for Mussolini, as he made J.P. Morgan one of fascist Italy’s main overseas banking partners. The American Legion, an alleged source of manpower for the putsch, featured yearly convention greetings from “a wounded soldier in the Great War … his excellency, Benito Mussolini.” The capo del governo himself was invited to speak at the 1930 convention, until the invitation was rescinded amid protests from organized labor.

Hugh S. Johnson, Time ’s 1933 Man of the Year, had lavishly praised the “shining name” of Mussolini and the fascist stato corporativo as models of anti-labor collectivism while running the New Deal’s short-lived National Recovery Administration. Johnson’s firing by FDR from the NRA in September 1934 was predicted by MacGuire, who told Butler the former Army general had “talked too damn much.” (Johnson would later help launch the Nazi-sympathizing America First Committee, though he soon took pains to distance himself from the hardcore antisemites in the group.)

Nothing lends more plausibility to the idea that a coup to sideline Roosevelt was at least discussed — and that Butler’s name was floated to lead it — than the likely involvement of MacGuire’s boss, the banker Grayson M.P. Murphy. The financier’s biography reads like a shadow version of Butler’s. Born in Philadelphia, he transferred to West Point during the war against Spain. Murphy then joined the Military Intelligence Division, running spy missions in the Philippines in 1902 and Panama in 1903. Then he entered the private sector, helping J.P. Morgan conduct “dollar diplomacy” in the Dominican Republic and Honduras. In 1920, Murphy toured war-ravaged Europe to make “intelligence estimates and establish a private intelligence network” with William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan — who would later lead the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA. This was the résumé of someone who, at the very least, knew his way around the planning of a coup.

Again, all of that is circumstantial evidence; none of it points definitively to a plan to overthrow the U.S. government. But it was enough to warrant further investigation. So why did no one look deeper at the time? Why was the idea that a president could be overthrown by a conspiracy of well-connected businessmen — and a few armed divisions led by a rabble-rousing general — considered so ridiculous that the mere suggestion was met with peals of laughter across America?

It was because, for decades, Americans had been trained to react in just that way: by excusing, covering up, or simply laughing away all evidence that showed how many of those same people had been behind similar schemes all over the world. Butler had led troops on the bankers’ behalf to overthrow presidents in Nicaragua and Honduras, and gone on a spy run to investigate regime change on behalf of the oil companies in Mexico. He had risked his Marines’ lives for Standard Oil in China and worked with Murphy’s customs agents in an invasion that helped lead to a far-right dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. In Haiti, Butler had done what even the Croix de Feu and its French fascist allies could not: shut down a national assembly at gunpoint.

In his own country, in his own time, Smedley Butler drew a line. “My interest, my one hobby, is maintaining a democracy,” he told the bond salesman. Butler clung to an idea of America as a place where the whole of the people chose their leaders, the “little guy” got a fair shot against the powerful, and everyone could live free from tyranny. It was an idea that had never existed in practice for all, and seldom for most. As long as Americans refused to grasp the reality of what their country actually was — of what their soldiers and emissaries did with their money and in their name all over the world — the idea would remain a self-defeating fairy tale. Still, as long as that idea of America survived, there was a chance its promise might be realized.

The real danger, Butler knew, lay in that idea’s negation. If a faction gained power that exemplified the worst of America’s history and instincts — with a leader willing to use his capital and influence to destroy what semblance of democracy existed for his own ends — that faction could overwhelm the nation’s fragile institutions and send one of the most powerful empires the world had ever seen tumbling irretrievably into darkness.

Twenty-one U.S. presidential elections later , on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump stood before an angry crowd on the White House Ellipse. For weeks, Trump had urged supporters to join him in an action against the joint session of Congress slated to recognize his opponent, Joe Biden, as the next president that day. Among the thousands who heeded his call were white supremacists, neo-Nazis, devotees of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory, far-right militias, and elements of his most loyal neo-fascist street gang, the Proud Boys. “It is time for war,” a speaker at a warm-up rally the night before had declared.

On the rally stage, the defeated president spoke with the everyman style and bluntness of a Smedley Butler. He mirrored the Marine’s rhetoric, too, saying his purpose was to “save our democracy.” But that was not really his goal. Trump, and his faction, wanted to destroy the election — to dismantle democracy rather than cede power to a multiethnic, cross-class majority who had chosen someone else. Trump lied to the thousands in winter coats and “Make America Great Again” hats by claiming he still had a legitimate path to victory. His solution: to intimidate his vice president and Congress into ignoring the Constitution and refusing to certify the election, opening the door for a critical mass of loyal state governments to reverse their constituents’ votes and declare him the winner instead. In this, Trump echoed the French fascists of 1934, who claimed their attack on parliament would defend the popular will against “socialist influence” and “give the nation the leaders it deserves.”

Trump then did what the Business Plotters — however many there were — could not. He sent his mob, his version of Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the Croix de Feu, to storm the Capitol. “We fight like hell,” the 45th president instructed them. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

It was not just Trump’s personal embodiment of fascist logic and authoritarian populism that should have prepared Americans for the Jan. 6 attack. Over a century of imperial violence had laid the groundwork for the siege at the heart of U.S. democracy.

Many of the putschists, including a 35-year-old California woman shot to death by police as she tried to break into the lobby leading to the House floor, were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some wore tactical armor and carried “flex cuffs” — nylon restraints the military and police use for mass arrests of insurgents and dissidents. The QAnon rioters were devotees of a supposed “military intelligence” officer who prophesized, among other things, the imminent detention and execution of liberals at Guantánamo. A Washington Post reporter heard some of the rioters chanting for “military tribunals.”

Even many of those opposed to the insurrection struggled to see what was happening: that the boundaries between the center and the periphery were collapsing. “I expected violent assault on democracy as a U.S. Marine in Iraq. I never imagined it as a United States congressman in America,” Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote as he sheltered in the Capitol complex. George W. Bush, the president who ordered Moulton into Baghdad, observed: “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic.” Watching from home, I wished Smedley Butler was around to remind the former president how those “banana republics” came to be.

A few weeks after the siege, I talked to Butler’s 85-year-old granddaughter, Philippa Wehle. I asked her over Skype what her grandfather would have thought of the events of Jan. 6.

Her hazel eyes narrowed as she pondered: “I think he would have been in there. He would have been in the fray somehow.”

For an unsettling moment, I was unsure what she meant. Butler had much in common with both sides of the siege: Like Trump’s mob, he had often doubted the validity of democracy when practiced by nonwhites. (The most prominent Trumpist conspiracy theories about purported fraud in the 2020 election centered on cities with large immigrant and Black populations.) Like many of the putschists, Butler saw himself as a warrior for the “little guy” against a vast constellation of elite interests — even though he, also like most of the Capitol attackers, was relatively well-off. Moreover, the greatest proportion of veterans arrested in connection with the attempted putsch were Marines. An active-duty Marine major — a field artillery officer at Quantico — was caught on video pushing open the doors to the East Rotunda and accused by federal prosecutors of allowing other rioters to stream in.

But I knew too that Butler had taken his stand for democracy and against the Business Plot. I would like to think he would have seen through Trump as well. Butler had rejected the radio host Father Charles Coughlin’s proto-Trumpian brand of red-baiting, antisemetic conspiratorial populism, going so far as to inform FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of an alleged 1936 effort involving the reactionary priest to overthrow the left-leaning government of Mexico. When a reporter for the Marxist magazine New Masses asked Butler “just where he stood politically” in the wake of the Business Plot, he name-checked several of the most left-leaning members of Congress, and said the only group he would give his “blanket approval to” was the American Federation of Labor. Butler added that he would not only “die to preserve democracy” but also, crucially, “fight to broaden it.”

Perhaps it would have come down to timing: at what point in his life the attack on the government might have taken place.

“Do you think he would have been with the people storming the Capitol?” I asked Philippa, tentatively.

This time she answered immediately. “No! Heavens no. He would have been trying to do something about it.” He might have been killed, she added, given that the police were so unprepared. “Which is so disturbing, because of course they should have known. They would have known. They only had to read the papers.”

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The Business Plot: The Little-Known Story Of The Wall Street Scheme To Launch A Fascist Coup In America

As fdr's new deal worried wall street, a cadre of bankers decided to replace him with decorated marine corps general smedley butler as their fascist dictator. here's how they failed..

On Nov. 24, 1934, retired General Smedley Butler sat before a closed session of the Congressional Special Committee on Un-American Activities in New York. Though he was a two-time Medal of Honor winner with a once unimpeachable reputation, Butler knew there were already those outlets, like the New York Times , who would call his story a “Gigantic Hoax.”

He also knew, however, that if he said nothing the Business plot, a coup of the country’s most wealthy designed to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt from office and replace him with a fascist regime, could only continue. Worse still, it might succeed.

“May I preface my remarks by saying, sir,” Butler began , “That I have one interest in all of this, and that is to try to do my best to see that a democracy is maintained in this country.”

Smedley’s testimony was ultimately dismissed. The conspirators were never prosecuted.

Smedley Butler: An Uncommon Marine

Wikimedia Commons Smedley Butler at his 1931 retirement ceremony.

Born to a Quaker family in 1881 Pennsylvania, Smedley Butler would rise from an underaged 16-year-old soldier in Cuba to one of the most well-respected military men in the United States.

Butler rose to Major General in the Marine Corps through his service in the Boxer Rebellion and across Central America before accepting his commission in the First World War.

As the commander of a fort in northern France, Butler oversaw the care of more than two million men and earned a reputation as someone who understood the common man. Following the Armistice in 1918, he had accepted command at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia and waded into politics and criticism of President Hoover. Naturally, the president grew to dislike Butler.

Butler finally retired in 1931 when the president snubbed him by giving the role of Commandant of the Marine Corps to a less senior officer.

Wikimedia Commons Victory parade celebrating the end of World War I. 1919.

It was just as well, by this time, Hoover’s presidency was riddled with problems.

At the end of World War I, more than three million American troops had returned from “the war to end all wars” in various states of disarray. The veterans were without support in an era before the official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder, the Veterans Affairs Bureau, or anything resembling a GI bill.

In 1919, most veterans had received $60 in mustering pay and a train ticket home for their trouble. The American Legion organization was consequently established to serve as a veterans’ union to increase their bargaining power in government and petition for aid.

In 1924, these efforts resulted in the passage of the War Adjusted Compensation Act, which promised World War I veterans bonus pay for their lost wages in the form of a bond that would be collectible after 20 years in 1945.

This had seemed like a reasonable compromise at first. But then, the stock market crashed in 1929.

The Battles Of The Bonus Army

Bettmann/Getty Images; Ryan Stennes One of the shanty towns, or “Hoovervilles,” in Central Park at the height of the Great Depression. 1933.

By 1932, “Hoovervilles” or tent cities for the homeless and downtrodden, were a common sight across the country.

When, however, a camp of around 15,000 veterans who called themselves “The Bonus Army” formed outside of Washington D.C., officials and politicians began to panic.

Backed by some U.S. politicians, the Bonus Army demanded immediate payment of their bond debts to assist their families and boost the economy. In total, this would have required more than two billion dollars, roughly half the Government’s budget for the year.

Library of Congress The Bonus Army protests in 1932 outside the Capitol for the wages they were promised before the Great Depression hit.

While President Herbert Hoover and his military advisors argued about what to do with this crowd, Smedley Butler — a newly private citizen making his living as a public speaker — gave a well-received broadcast from the Bonus Army camp.

“They may be calling you tramps now,” Butler declared, “but in 1917 they didn’t call you bums! … You are the best-behaved group of men in this country today. I consider it an honor to be asked to speak to you.”

Butler added that this gathering was “the greatest demonstration of Americanism that we’ve ever had” and urged the soldiers to remain orderly while preserving the country’s faith in its veterans.

Wikimedia Commons Line outside Chicago soup kitchen run by Al Capone. 1931.

Butler’s remarks made quite a contrast when, a few days later, Gen. Douglas McArthur and a cadre of armed troops broke up the camp.

Veterans and their families were chased from Washington with gas weaponry and bayonets as their tents were trampled and burned. At least two veterans died and many others were injured.

Angered by the Government’s “betrayal” of its troops, Butler publicly backed Franklin Delano Roosevelt for that November’s election to end Hoover’s presidency.

Butler’s principled stance and bombastic entrance into public consciousness caught America’s attention.

Wikimedia Commons Bonus Army members clash with Washington, D.C. police. 1933.

But it also caught the attention of a covert group of wealthy men who were particularly anxious about these tumultuous times.

A New Deal Threatens The Livelihoods Of The Rich

As part of his New Deal Platform, Roosevelt promised “bold persistent experimentation” to craft a country that worked for all Americans.

In mid-1933, this included taking the United States off the gold standard. The decision led Lewis Douglas, Roosevelt’s budget director, to resign in protest. Douglas called the decision “the end of western civilization” and a good number of people agreed with him.

Wikimedia Commons Contemporary political cartoon about Roosevelt consolidating power.

FDR was also relatively unpopular with the wealthy. His plans to employ the unemployed and open opportunity to all, intimidated conservative businessmen.

“Roosevelt was damned as a socialist or Communist out to destroy private enterprise by sapping the gold backing of wealth in order to subsidize the poor,” wrote Jules Archer in his biography, The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR .

By this time, Butler had become accustomed to living as a public speaker and hired particularly to speak with veterans. So, when a mutual friend called to say two members of the American Legion wanted to meet with him, he was not too surprised.

But when, on July 1, 1933, these men — Gerald MacGuire and Bill Doyle — arrived in a chauffeured limousine, Butler grew suspicious about who exactly these “wounded veterans” worked for.

Butler’s First Intro To The Business Plot

Wikimedia Commons Announcement of Executive Order forbidding private gold ownership, part of Roosevelt’s economic policies.

The following information regarding Butler’s meetings with the men behind the Business Plot was obtained in his 1933 testimony on the matter.

According to Butler, over several visits, MacGuire – a World War I soldier-turned-banker — asked him if he would be interested in taking over the leadership of the American Legion at the upcoming convention that September.

Butler pointed out that he hadn’t been invited, but MacGuire said he was on the delegation committee and could have him brought in as a special guest from Hawaii.

After Butler declined, the banker offered some 300 to 400 men to disrupt the convention and demand that the general take the stage.

Butler was startled by this offer, but he decided to play along. He said wasn’t sure what he would say, or how so many struggling veterans were supposed to get to Chicago. MacGuire said his organization, the Committee for Sound Currency, had already written him a speech and produced bank statements for over $110,000, which is just under two million by today’s standards, “for expenses.”

American Legion Digital Archives Excerpt from American Legion guide article to 1933 convention. October 1933.

After Butler read the speech, he asked who had written it and why a speech about soldier’s bonuses focused so much on returning to the Gold Standard.

The banker answered that it had been written by John W. Davis, who was 1924’s Democratic Presidential Candidate, former Ambassador to the U.K., and current legal counsel to J.P. Morgan and Company.

Davis, MacGuire continued, was an associate of his direct employer who was also a soldier, financier Colonel M.P. Murphy. The “why,” MacGuire said, was very simple. They just wanted to make sure that the veterans received their bonuses with real, not “rubber” money.

MacGuire offered Butler checks from Murphy and another man named Robert S. Clark as a down payment to help get the necessary gang together.

Butler knew both of these men from back in the Boxer Rebellion. He also knew that Murphy was a multi-millionaire and had been one of the biggest backers of the American Legion’s founding, fronting $125,000 — so why would one of the Legion’s founders want him to overthrow their leadership?

Robert Clark’s Offer

Wikimedia Commons American Legion Convention, 1922.

Robert S. Clark had served under Butler in China known as the “millionaire lieutenant,” a young heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Now, he was a settled and successful financier.

When in New Jersey for a speaking engagement, MacGuire surprised Butler at his hotel to once again ask about gathering soldiers and giving a speech.

Butler, frustrated, said he didn’t believe that MacGuire actually had the money. The banker pulled $18,000 in thousand-dollar bills from his wallet and threw them onto Butler’s bed. Insulted, Butler said he was tired of dealing with middlemen. He demanded to speak with Robert Clark himself.

MacGuire agreed.

Just before the American Legion Convention in Miami that September, Clark traveled by train to his old commander’s home. The pair caught up, reminisced about the Boxer Rebellion, and then got down to business.

Clark reiterated the same pitch about gathering soldiers and getting back to the Gold Standard. Butler said it didn’t add up. Finally, the former officer came clean.

According to Butler, Clark told him that he had a fortune of $30 million. These were uncertain times, and if he had to spend half of his money to protect the other half, he would do it.

All of his partners would do this too, even if that meant paying the bonuses for every soldier themselves.

Getty Images Gerald MacGuire, his attorney N.L. Marks, and William MacGuire.

Roosevelt was on the verge of destroying everything with his inflation and overspending, Clark claimed. If Butler gave the speech and took control of the Legion, demanded a return to the gold standard, then perhaps they could persuade congress and the president to do so as well.

Butler’s Last Stand

Butler asked how Clark could be so sure that Roosevelt would abandon his own political platform.

Clark said that was simple. Roosevelt was from a rich family. He swam in the same circles as the conspirators. The president would have the backing of some very powerful friends, and so would Butler if he played along.

The retired general said he didn’t like seeing soldiers used as pawns to undermine democracy. Clark told him to stop being so stubborn and offered to pay his mortgage.

Wikimedia Commons Robert S. Clark, heir to the Singer Sewing fortune, horse breeder, and philanthropist — and a conspirator in the plot to overthrow FDR.

Furious, Butler took his guest down the hall to his study. He pointed around the room, indicating all the medals and honors he had been awarded in his career. Clark, seemingly sobered by the sentiment, asked to use the General’s phone.

Once MacGuire answered, Clark told him that Butler would not be joining them in Chicago and they should proceed with Plan B. The only other part Butler heard was “telegrams.”

Reading about the convention after the fact, Butler was horrified to discover that telegrammed pamphlets had fallen from the ceiling during. In them, a message argued for paying bonuses and returning to the gold standard.

They had inspired the Legionnaire’s to officially support gold-backed currency.

In October, MacGuire visited Butler again. The general was about to embark on a nationwide speaking tour on behalf of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. MacGuire bragged about the convention resolution, but Butler replied that the soldiers were no closer to their bonuses.

The banker offered to pay Butler $750 for every speech he mentioned the gold standard in, but Butler refused.

Wikimedia Commons Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, or Colonel M.P. Murphy of the Business Plot, in 1918.

MacGuire asked that he be allowed to come on the tour to recruit men. Again, Butler said no.

The Fascist Plot Revealed

He did not hear from MacGuire again until January. Then, he started receiving postcards from all over Europe.

The messages described a “family vacation” in Italy, the French Riviera, and Berlin. That summer, when Butler’s tour was finished, MacGuire asked to meet him again.

On Aug. 22, 1934, three days after Hitler officially became the Führer of Germany, Butler met MacGuire seated at a secluded table at his hotel restaurant.

Wikimedia Commons Mussolini marches with Blackshirts in Rome. 1922.

MacGuire started talking about getting soldiers together but then started talking obsessively about his travels. Butler kept waiting for him to get to the point but then he picked up on the pattern within the anecdotes.

In France, MacGuire had met with members of the Far-Right paramilitary veterans group, La Croix de Feu or “The Cross of Fire.” In Italy, he had studied the structure of Mussolini’s government and been enamored of the loyalty and power of Il Duce’s Black Shirts.

He’d also met with representatives of the new German government and admired their ambitions.

The time was right to try the same thing in America, MacGuire said. A new Secretary of General Affairs, one who would replace the Secretary of State and leave the President to “dedicate bridges and kiss children.”

For the first time, Butler understood what MacGuire wanted. MacGuire and his group wanted Smedley Butler to become America’s first fascist dictator, propped up by a devoted following of veterans.

Butler's Claims Published In A Newspaper

The Times-Picayune , 1934. Butler’s claims made it to the front page of the Springfield Union , and various other papers.

Some members of his organization, MacGuire said, had wanted Douglas MacArthur to lead the revolution. But, he’d known since the break-up of the Bonus Army that MacArthur would never be as esteemed as Smedley Butler would be to the veterans.

MacGuire estimated that in all, they’d only need an army of about 500,000.

The general asked how they intended to pull all this off or even pay for it. MacGuire explained that the group would be announcing its presence publicly in the next few weeks. He wasn’t sure which name they’d settled on yet, but between the collaborators, they might have as much as $300 million to commit to “protecting the constitution.”

That is more than $5 billion in 2019 currency.

Whether Butler agreed or not, MacGuire said, once they got in touch with the right members of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign wars and acquired weaponry, it was only a matter to time until their plot was successful. Once again, he asked Butler to think about it.

Wikimedia Commons French Fascists march in Paris. 1934.

This time, Butler couldn’t stop thinking about it. Mussolini had proved strangely popular in the American media over the last decade. The press was similarly hopeful about Hitler.

In July, Fortune Magazine had run an editorial which asked “whether Fascism is achieving in a few years of decades such a conquest of the spirit of man as Christianity achieved only in ten centuries.”

The article went on, “the good journalist must recognize in Fascism certain ancient virtues of the race, whether or not they happen to be momentarily fashionable in his own country. Among these are Discipline, Duty, Courage, Glory, Sacrifice.”

Butler decided to call a friend at the VFW and warn him about what he’d been hearing. As it turned out, there were other, similar rumors floating around.

Without proof, the conspiracy was not necessarily anything more than just a rumor.

The Conspirators Make Their Move

Wikimedia Commons FDR (second from left) with accused conspirators John W. Davis (second from right) and Al Smith (right). 1924.

When the American Liberty League (ALL), a group of conservatives who opposed FDR and his New Deal, became public, any notion that it was merely a rumor was abolished.

Among its members were Colonel M.P. Murphy, Robert S. Clark, and John W. Davis — every one of the conspirators MacGuire had mentioned.

There were other connections too. The members’ list of the American Liberty League was a who’s who of business and politics including members of both political parties opposed to the New Deal. Its stated purpose was to “protect the constitution.”

Butler realized something else, then, about himself.

Part of why he’d been the perfect candidate was that he was known for his temper and speaking out. If he went public with his accusations, people might think it was a publicity stunt. He needed more than his own word to inform the government.

So, he reached out to a journalist from the Philadelphia Record , Paul French, who agreed to help him collect evidence.

Wikimedia Commons Paul French of the Philadelphia Record , to whom Smedley Butler broke the story of the Business Plot.

French determined that ALL member Irenee Dupont, who would later do business with the Nazis well into World War II, owned a controlling stake in Remington-Colt which possibly provided the group with access to artillery.

Other members of ALL included Al Smith, former governor of New York and 1932 democratic presidential hopeful and turned rival of President Roosevelt; as well as other men whose connections ran back to the Klu Klux Klan and Pro-Nazi groups within the United States.

As the New York Post put it, “The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League are in turn spawning Fascism.”

Collecting The Evidence And Exposing The Truth

To build more evidence, Butler introduced French to MacGuire as a like-minded friend. Soon, MacGuire opened up to the reporter as well, in some cases being even more candid with French than he had been with the general.

Getty Images Gerald P. MacGuire was subpoenaed by the Congressional Committee On Un-American Activities. Here he is in court.

According to French’s account, MacGuire was convinced that “We need a Fascist government in this country…to save the Nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built — in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader.”

As French recalled, MacGuire continually discussed “a dictator who would come galloping in on his white horse… either through the threat of armed force or the delegation of power and the use of a group of organized veterans, to save the capitalistic system.”

And it was at around the time that French and Butler were building a case against MacGuire and his purported co-conspirators that the general was subpoenaed to discuss rumors of a fascist plot before Special Committee on Un-American Activities.

After Butler and French had testified, Gerald MacGuire was allowed to speak in his own defense.

The New York Times , 1934. The New York Times headline on Butler’s hearing.

For his part, MacGuire claimed Butler and French had made it all up. He had traveled to Europe for pleasure and had certainly never tried to buy Butler’s compliance in a coup.

Despite this, when letters which contained MacGuire discussing Croix de Feu training movements and plans were produced, he had no explanation for why he so closely described a far-right paramilitary veterans group.

Similarly, he had no explanation for $20,000 that went missing from his accounts during the same time frame that Butler claimed he’d been offered 18 $1,000 bills.

In the end, only MacGuire spoke to the committee. Robert S. Clark lived in France and could not be forced to appear in the United States. But no explanations were provided for the absence of Colonel Murphy, John W. Davis, or any of the other suspected conspirators.

They were never asked to testify at all.

Accusations Of A Government Cover-Up

When the court report was published, it concluded that a plot to overthrow the Roosevelt Administration and install a Fascist government in its place did indeed exist. How far it had gotten was never determined, however, and the investigations into the plot never officially looked into that anyway.

The names of the accused and the American Liberty League, itself, were redacted.

Amidst accusations from The New York Times that his story was “credulity unlimited,” Butler broke his silence once again. In a speech broadcast for radio and recorded for a newsreel, Butler repeated his accusations and openly asked why the named individuals were never called to testify.

Then, on March 25, 1935, Gerald MacGuire suddenly died of “pneumonia” at 37. His family publicly blamed the stress of Butler’s accusations for ending his life.

Regardless of the reasons, with MacGuire gone, the case went cold.

Newspapers.com Iowa Dispatch coverage of MacGuire’s sudden death in March 1935.

Butler went on to publish his book War is a Racket later that same year. As an anti-War classic, throughout the text, Butler laments his military roles in places like Nicaragua, Mexico, and China.

“I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Butler spent the rest of his life trying to draw attention to the ties between big business and the American military. A strident isolationist is his last years, Butler died of pancreatic cancer in June 1940. He was 58.

Alternate Explanations For The Business Plot?

In the decades since, doubters have asked why, if the scheme was real, didn’t President Roosevelt aggressively pursue it?

Would it have been wise for the president to allow a group of openly treasonous fascist sympathizers to continue to operate in Washington? On the other hand, if there was such a group, what could Roosevelt have done about it anyway?

Perhaps the best explanation on the matter to come from Roosevelt came in 1936 when he reaccepted the nomination of the Democratic Party.

Speaking just after he defeated American Liberty League-backed rivals, Roosevelt declared :

“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service, new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result of the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

Those accused represented the single most powerful subset of American society: the rich.

Within a decade, the alliances between business and government proved vital in World War II. After defeating the American Liberty League in 1936, the organization faded away, apparently peacefully by 1940.

But if MacGuire was more cautious or someone else was asked to ride the “white horse,” could the whole 20th century have been different? Could the United States have entered World War II as a fascist dictatorship?

The frightening reality here is that perhaps the only thing that prevented this was a retired Marine playing Paul Revere.

Next, read up on the death of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini . Then, see what life was like inside fascist Italy .

PO Box 24091 Brooklyn, NY 11202-4091

clock This article was published more than 3 years ago

Wealthy bankers and businessmen plotted to overthrow FDR. A retired general foiled it.

The consternation had been growing in the months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election and his inauguration, but his elimination of the gold standard in April 1933 infuriated some of the country’s wealthiest men.

Titans of banking and business worried that if U.S. currency wasn’t backed by gold, inflation could skyrocket and make their millions worthless. Why, they could end up as poor as most everyone else was during the Great Depression .

So, according to the sworn congressional testimony of a retired general, they decided to overthrow the government and install a dictator who was more business friendly. After all, they reasoned, that had been working well in Italy.

How close this fascist cabal got, and who exactly was in on it, are still subjects of historical debate. But as the dust settles after the pro-Trump attack on the U.S. Capitol , and as it becomes clearer how close lawmakers came to catastrophe, the similarities to the Business Plot are hard to ignore.

Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control

“The nation has never been at a potential brink as it was then up until, I think, now,” said Sally Denton, author of the book “ The Plots against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right .”

Smedley D. Butler was a highly decorated Marine Corps general who had received the Medal of Honor twice. He was beloved by his men before his retirement, and more so afterward when he spoke in support of the Bonus Army ’s fight for early bonus payments for World War I service.

“He was wildly popular and was an outspoken critic of fascism and Mussolini at a time when there was really an impulse toward that throughout the world, including in the United States,” Denton said.

Given his opposition to fascism, Butler might not have seemed like a good fit for the job of coup leader, but his support from veterans was more important to the Wall Street plotters. At the time, there were many more veterans than active-duty service members; if someone could summon them as a force of 500,000 to march on Washington, the government could fall without a shot being fired.

The scariest moment of a presidential transition: Six gunshots fired at FDR

In the summer of 1933, a bond broker and American Legion member named Gerald MacGuire approached Butler and tried to convince him that it would be in the Bonus Army veterans’ interests to demand their payments in gold. He then offered to send Butler and a group of veterans on a lavish speaking trip, all expenses paid, in support of the gold standard.

Butler was suspicious about where the money was coming from but strung MacGuire along over several months to glean more information. Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt being overwhelmed and in bad health. Once Butler’s army rolled in, a “Secretary of General Affairs” would be installed to handle the real governance, while Roosevelt would be reduced to cutting ribbons and such. And they would take care of Butler, too.

Additionally, they “offered college educations for his children and his mortgage paid off,” Denton said. “A lot of people would have taken it.”

But Butler wanted to know who these businessmen offering him money and power were. According to the BBC radio show “ Document ,” MacGuire told him they would announce themselves shortly.

A few weeks later, news of a new conservative lobbying group called the American Liberty League broke. Its members included J.P. Morgan Jr., Irénée du Pont and the CEOs of General Motors, Birds Eye and General Foods, among others. Together they held near $40 billion in assets, Denton said — about $778 billion today.

Had Butler been a different sort of person and gone along with the plot, Denton thinks it would have been successful. Instead, in the fall of 1934, he went to J. Edgar Hoover, head of what would become the FBI. Congressional hearings were launched to investigate possible fascist sympathizers.

Details of the plot soon leaked to the press, who mocked Butler and declared it all a “ gigantic hoax .” If Butler wasn’t making it all up, journalists declared, then surely MacGuire was just a prankster fooling him.

The committee never released a report, but it told Congress it “had received evidence that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”

Butler — who later published a book, “War Is a Racket,” in which he lamented that all the military conflicts he had ever been involved in were fought to benefit “millionaires and billionaires” — was somewhat vindicated. But he claimed that he had named names, and those names had been removed from his testimony that was released to the public. “Like most committees, it has slaughtered the little and allowed the big to escape. The big shots weren’t even called to testify,” he said in a radio interview.

The committee maintained the names were kept under wraps until they could be investigated and verified. But no further investigation was ever conducted.

According to journalist John Buchanan , speaking to the BBC in 2007, that was probably because Roosevelt struck a deal with the backers of the plot: They could avoid treason charges — and possible execution — if they backed off their opposition to the New Deal. Denton thinks the press may have ignored the report at the urging of the government, which didn’t want the public to know how precarious things might have been.

Remembering when bankers tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator

Image source: History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Though we know today that his policies eventually ended the Great Depression, FDR’s election was seen as disastrous by some.
A group of wealthy bankers decided to take things into their own hands; they plotted a coup against FDR, hoping to install a fascist dictator in its stead.
Ultimately, the coup was brought to light by General Smedley Butler and squashed before it could get off the ground.

When we look back at history, we have the benefit of knowing how things turned out. Not true for those who were living through history’s tensest moments. At key inflection points in history and in response to crises, most of the actors had no idea what would happen or what the right thing to do was. Sometimes, this uncertainty drove people to bold and ill-advised actions.

Take the Great Depression. Something had to be done, but nobody knew what for certain. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected on a campaign that promised to abandon the gold standard and provide government jobs for the unemployed, many in the grips of the crisis thought that this was certainly the wrong way to go.

“This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty,” wrote Republican Senator Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia to a colleague. “The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of democracy but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.”

General Smedley Butler. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The allure of fascism

Fascism had reared its head in Europe, and the world had yet to make up its mind what it thought about it. That would come later, in World War II. Many thought that the best way to pull America out of the Great Depression was to install a dictator. Even the New York Herald Tribune ran a headline called “ For Dictatorship If Necessary .” Although the newspaper’s article was in support of FDR, a group of wealthy financiers believed that America should indeed have a dictator, just not in the form of FDR, a suspected communist. So, they began to plot a coup d’état that would later come to be known as the Business Plot, or the Wall Street Putsch.

The conspirators included Gerald MacGuire, a bond salesman; Bill Doyle, commander of the Massachusetts American Legion; investment banker Prescott Bush , the father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush; and others.

The Business Plot nearly involved another individual as well: Retired Major General Smedley Butler , who was at that time the most decorated soldier in U.S. history. After his military career, however, Butler became a vociferous critic of war and its place in American capitalism. Later, he would write the famous War is a Racket and an article in the socialist magazine Common Sense stating, “I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Butler was also an influential figure in the so-called Bonus Army, a group of 43,000 marchers — among them many World War I veterans — who were camped at Washington to demand the early payment of the veteran’s bonus promised to them for their service. Although his politics leaned more to the left than the Business Plot conspirators would like, Butler was extremely well-respected among veterans and the military, who, like everybody else, were fed up. What’s more, MacGuire believed that Butler could be more easily manipulated than other generals. And the conspirators needed a general.

The members of the Business Plot set up several meetings with Butler where they not-so-gradually informed him of their plan. The conspirators would provide the financial backing and recruit an army of 500,000 soldiers, which Butler was to lead. The pretext for the coup would be that FDR’s health was failing. FDR would remain in a ceremonial position, in which, as MacGuire allegedly described , “The President will go around and christen babies and dedicate bridges and kiss children.” The real power of the government would be held in the hands of a Secretary of General Affairs, who would be in effect a dictator: “somebody to take over the details of the office — take them off the President’s shoulders. … A sort of a super secretary.”

Quashing the Business Plot

However, Butler was not so willing a compatriot as they had originally suspected. After meeting with the men several times and learning of the extent of their plan, Butler went to Congress to expose them as traitors. When news broke, nobody really believed that such a coup attempt could even be considered, let alone planned or put into action. In fact, the New York Times ‘s initial reporting on the subject was full of quotes like “Perfect moonshine!”, “A fantasy!”, and “It’s a joke — a publicity stunt.” A second article from the New York Times ‘s on the topic was titled “ Credulity Unlimited .”

Initially, Congress’s reaction was similar, but with Butler’s testimony; the testimony of reporter Paul French, who was present at one of Butler’s meetings with MacGuire; and MacGuire’s own unconvincing testimony, they began to take it more seriously and investigated the subject .

Ultimately, the Congressional investigation found that Butler was telling the truth: the seeds of a coup had indeed been planted. But Congress’s perspective was that the plot had little chance of getting off the ground at all — rather, it had been, in the words of Mayor La Guardia of New York, “a cocktail putsch.”

Nobody was prosecuted in the plot. In fact, some later went on to serve in office, such as Prescott Bush. Would the coup have been carried out had Butler merely turned down MacGuire’s offer, rather than report them to Congress? It’s impossible to say. But the Wall Street Putsch does show that dire times can drive people to make otherwise inconceivable — “moonshine” — plans.

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The Business Plot – Did American Billionaires Really Plan a Fascist Coup?

“a coalition of america’s wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the roosevelt administration.”.

DONALD TRUMP ADDED a touch of levity to the U.S. Presidential election last November , albeit unintentionally.

As the major news networks declared an Obama victory the night of Nov. 6, the notorious billionaire and one-time White House wannabe took to Twitter to register his outrage over the result.

“We should have a revolution in this country!” Trump tweeted.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty!” he added moments later.

While the outbursts were roundly mocked in the days following the vote, Trump isn’t the only American one-percenter to have advocated the overthrow of a democratically-elected president. In the early 1930s, a coalition of America’s wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the Roosevelt Administration and replace it with a fascist dictatorship.

Known as the Business Plot , the plan was supposedly dreamed up by a prominent tycoons and Wall Street big shots who controlled many of the country’s major corporations like Chase Bank , Maxwell House , General Motors , Goodyear , Standard Oil , Dupont and Heinz , as well as other noted Americans, including Prescott Bush , grandfather of former U.S. president George W. Bush. [ 1 ] [ 2 ]

The conspirators were fuming over the 1932 election victory of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. Once in office, FDR pledged a raft of measures to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression, which were known collectively as the New Deal . America’s 32nd president was also an advocate for the abandonment of the gold standard , something that horrified many elites. Critics condemned the White House for placing the country on what they saw as a slippery slope to outright Bolshevism .

In 1933, the conspirators planned to recruit half a million military veterans from the First World War through various American Legion branches. They even pledged $3 million to buy weapons for their army so the troops could capture and hold the American capital. Once the seat of power was theirs, the plotters would install an ultra-nationalist, business-friendly regime modelled after Mussolini’s Italy. (Many conspirators were also admirers of Hitler even before the Nazis came to power, largely because of his ardent anti-communism).[ 3 ]

The cabal planned to offer command of their rebel army to a celebrated U.S. Marine general by the name of Smedley Butler . The 52-year-old veteran of the war in France had also fought counter-insurgencies in Latin America and the Philippines and was perhaps the most respected military leader in the country at the time.

Just a year earlier, that very same Smedley Butler had publicly voiced support for a march on Washington by Great War veterans who were demanding the government make good on its promises to provide benefits. On the orders of then-president Herbert Hoover, this so-called Bonus Army was eventually broken up by another well-known military leader of the day, General Douglas MacArthur . The Business Plotters felt that Butler’s patriotism along with his popularity among veterans would make him an ideal leader for their putsch.

Little did the conspirators realize, Butler had long-since become a critic of corporate greed, seeing it as an engine that drove many of America’s foreign wars. In fact, in 1935, he committed his thoughts on the matter to a famous book entitled War is a Racket .

In 1933, American Legion leaders involved in the plot approached Butler, offering him command of the rebel army. The decorated war hero immediately alerted Washington of the conspiracy, which admittedly hadn’t progressed much beyond the discussion phase. Nevertheless, a Congressional committee was struck in 1934 to look into the matter.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee , which would go onto become the House Committee on Un-American Activities , examined the allegations, declaring that there was some evidence of a scheme by Wall Street elites, anti-communists and fascist sympathizers. Even though the findings were declared by Congress to be “alarmingly true,” no charges were ever laid against anyone involved.

“The [committee] received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient,” Congress declared. [ 4 ]

Many blasted the committee’s findings as pure make-believe. The New York Times declared it a “giant hoax,” while historians since have argued that there is little proof that any plot ever posed a threat.

To listen to a full BBC podcast on the Business Plot, click here .

9 thoughts on “ The Business Plot – Did American Billionaires Really Plan a Fascist Coup? ”

About a decade ago Micheal Moore asked for help from the UN in one of his books to help free the US from an unelected president. And from a democratic point of view, he had more of a pint there than Trump. 😉

Believe Clinton did away with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and now we do not have any safeguards and the Organized Criminals have indeed overthrown our Constitution in their continued effort to form their NWO 🙁 Boo Hiss

Have you ever read the Constitution? There is not a single word defining our system as a capitalist system, but, it definitely accepts the slavery system. HUAC was an extension of the Slavery

“a democratically-elected president” ! Yeah Right ! One that got 200% of the vote in numerous voting precincts throughout the U.S. Yeah, democratically-elected by imaginary and dead people.

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Are we ever going to accept the fact that slavery was wrong, and had to end?

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The Rosenberg Diary – Secret Nazi Journal Reveals Inner Workings of Third Reich

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America’s Second-Worst Scenario

So far, cumulative acts of civic virtue have saved the republic. But the constitutional order is still in danger.

A crack opens in the ground in front of a voting station.

Updated at 7:18 p.m. ET on January 17, 2021.

T he next time an insurgent mob arrives to sack the Capitol, if one happens to try between now and Inauguration Day, mere strength of numbers will not overwhelm the defenses. In the 10 days since the January 6 assault on Congress, the Secret Service has overseen the establishment of an instant “green zone ,” fortified by eight-foot steel barriers and patrolled by some 20,000 National Guardsmen. Those are real bullets in the magazines of their Army-issued M-4 assault rifles, not at all the standard gear for maintaining civic order.

A healthy democracy does not need a division-size force to safeguard the incoming president in its capital. Generals and admirals in a thriving republic do not have to enjoin the troops against “violence, sedition and insurrection” or reaffirm that “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” A nation secure in the peaceful transfer of power does not require 10 former defense secretaries to remind their successor that he is “bound by oath, law and precedent to facilitate the entry into office of the incoming administration.”

This is a moment of historic fragility in America. We are a long way yet from a second civil war, but there is no precedent for our fractured consensus about who holds legitimate power.

A joint intelligence bulletin distributed in government channels this week reported that armed domestic extremists—an unholy alliance of militia forces, white nationalists, “boogaloo” warriors , and QAnon delusionists, among others—“may exploit the aftermath of the Capitol breach by conducting attacks to destabilize and force a climactic conflict in the United States.”

Read: The boogaloo bois prepare for civil war

But even this is not the principal threat we face. Nobody is going to take control of the U.S. government by force. The extremists are capable of bloodshed, but they cannot stop Joe Biden from taking office. Their resurgence is, however, a symptom of genuine danger to our constitutional order.

Here is the nub of our predicament. Donald Trump attempted democracide, and he had help. The victim survived but suffered grievous wounds. American democracy now faces a long convalescence in an environment of ongoing attacks. Trump has not exhausted his malignant powers, and co-conspirators remain at large.

I do not mean to be taken figuratively. The president of the United States lost an election and really did try with all his might to keep the winner from replacing him. He did his level best to overthrow our system of government, and tens of millions of Americans marched behind him. But a coup d’état in America had seemed so unlikely a thing, and it was so buffoonishly attempted, that the political establishment had trouble taking it seriously. That was a big mistake.

Zeynep Tufekci: ‘This must be your first’

It is still too soon to assess this moment in historic perspective, but we seem to be living through something like a next-to-worst-case scenario. Trump failed in the end—if we have reached the end—to maintain an illegal grip on power. But his attempted coup made too much headway for comfort, and his supporters are far from finished with their assault on majority rule.

Even so, there is good news to be found in the manner of Trump’s defeat. The system held. Enough officials did the right thing, when it counted, to fend off the overthrow of our government. And in this we can see a path forward.

I n late September , six weeks before Election Day, The Atlantic published my cover story, “The Election That Could Break America.” In it, I made two categorical predictions. One was that Trump would not concede under any circumstance. He would insist, against all evidence, that he had prevailed. The other was a corollary:

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

And so it was. Even under maximum pressure, after the Capitol insurrection, his bow to reality (“I will not be going to the Inauguration”) was wrapped in rejection: The transfer of power, his refusal implied, would not be legitimate.

From the November 2020 issue: The election that could break America

Many politicians and pundits initially saw Trump’s refusal to concede as pathetic, delusional, and mostly harmless. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official asked The Washington Post in early November, two days after the election was called for Biden. “No one seriously thinks the results will change.”

The official guidance from Biden’s camp was to keep calm and carry on. The election was over; Democrats would not dignify Trump’s attempt to contrive a debate. They took for granted, or anyway said they did, that the results would be certified and formalized by the usual constitutional means.

Trump, meanwhile, claimed over and over, in ornate fabrications, that a great victory had been stolen from him. “It did not happen,” Trump said three days before Christmas. “He did not win. We won by a landslide … Democrats perpetrated this monstrous fraud.”

Some of the nightmares I feared did not come to pass. No right-wing mobs descended on Democratic neighborhoods to interfere with voting on Election Day. No ballots were seized, and not many were delayed, by the Postal Service. Then–Attorney General William Barr not only refused to lend the Justice Department’s backing to Trump’s fabricated claims but declared publicly that he saw no evidence of fraud that could have changed the result.

Read: It was supposed to be so much worse

In the first few days after November 3, I began to relax my guard. Fox News had called Arizona for Biden on Election Night, well ahead of its competitors—a clear sign that the network’s symbiotic relationship with Trump had its limits. When Trump came out to speak in the early-morning hours of November 4, he looked disconsolate. “We were getting ready to win this election,” he said , before bucking himself up. “Frankly, we did win this election.” His voice carried no conviction. Maybe, I thought, he will content himself with making excuses for his loss.

But many surprises were still in store. When Fox named Biden the president-elect on November 7, the announcement felt like a milestone. On this one crucial subject—the outcome of the election—MAGA viewers would have to live in the same world as everyone else.

That impression proved wildly premature. Even as Fox’s prime-time lineup—Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham—picked up the fraud story line, Trump supporters fled the network in favor of Newsmax and One America News Network and QAnon forums, where Trump was forever the victor robbed of his win. The far-right information ecosystem turned out to be even more divorced from reality than it had already appeared.

Read: MAGA-land’s favorite newspaper

Trump’s legal campaign was more incompetent than expected—but at the same time more effective in its impact outside the courtroom. Judges dismissed Trump’s illogical lawsuits in 63 out of 64 cases. (The one exception was of no consequence.) But the manufacture of ersatz evidence by Trump’s legal team—hundreds of pages of affidavits, doctored video clips, and wild speculation about international conspiracies—built momentum among even mainstream Republican voters for the belief that something had gone badly wrong with the election.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, was shifting its posture. GOP politicians had begun by saying only that Trump was entitled to his day in court. As Trump’s wild lies began to echo around right-wing disinformation centers, the party’s leaders began to repeat them. Eighteen Republican state attorneys general joined a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the votes cast in four blue states . Nearly two-thirds of Republicans in Congress joined the suit as well.

The elected Republicans had to know they were lying. But Trump voters, astonished that he had lost, were exposed to a stream of intricate stories about dead people casting ballots, a Venezuelan plot to control voting machines, late-night deliveries of suitcases stuffed with fake Biden ballots. The manufactured evidence got nowhere in court, but it dominated the right-wing discourse.

Zeynep Tufekci: Most House Republicans did what the rioters wanted

Trump and his party brainwashed tens of millions of people with a proposition that could only lead to violence. What choice is there but rebellion against a pretender to the throne? Sedition, for Trump’s true believers, became the patriotic choice.

To the extent that Trump’s legal flailing had any strategy, it was to raise so much doubt about the vote in any given state that a court would rule the state had “ failed to make a choice .” That finding, according to federal law, would open the door to the direct appointment of presidential electors.

This maneuver was at the heart of the only true threat of a successful coup. Every scenario in which Trump might steal the election required Republican legislatures in at least three states to throw away the results and appoint presidential electors for Trump. That would not have been the end of the fight, because Congress and perhaps the Supreme Court would still have had to bless the disputed electors. But Trump had no chance at all unless the legislators went along.

Kimberly Wehle: Four ways to prevent a future insurrection

In order to embolden the legislators, Trump worked desperately to delegitimize state election results. His legal team tried to find a judge who would strike down the vote, and it mounted parallel efforts to prevent state officials from certifying the election as valid.

That was where Aaron Van Langevelde came in.

T he man in rimless glasses and a paisley tie clutched a pen as if in self-defense. Van Langevelde, a boyish-looking 40-year-old, held a part-time position in a quiet cul-de-sac of Michigan’s election bureaucracy. By great misfortune he had attracted the attention of Donald Trump, who was three weeks into a desperate struggle to erase his defeat at the ballot box. Trump wanted him, lawlessly, to block the certification of Michigan’s presidential vote.

The monstrous pressure that descended upon Van Langevelde is not easy to convey. He was one of two Republicans on the four-person board of state canvassers. Trump needed them both to sabotage the certification, and one had already signed on. State and national party leaders were broadcasting lies about fraud. The president and a parade of prominent Republicans had sent the message that Van Langevelde must follow along. He ducked their calls. He went off the grid. Observers in Lansing expected him to resign.

He did not. On the afternoon of November 23, Van Langevelde showed up, pen in hand, for a public hearing. All 83 county authorities reported valid election results. Van Langevelde leaned forward to toggle on his mike, pulling down his face mask to speak. “The board’s duty today is very clear,” he said calmly. “We have a duty to certify this election based on the returns.”

From the July/August 2020 issue: History will judge the complicit

Why did Van Langevelde hold the line when so many fellow Republicans bent to Trump’s authoritarian will? Whatever the inspiration—he has granted no interviews and did not respond to messages I left on his cellphone—Van Langevelde’s deciding vote had repercussions beyond Michigan. In Washington, D.C., just a few hours later, Emily Murphy, the head of the General Services Administration, finally “ ascertained ” that Joe Biden was “the apparent successful candidate,” unblocking presidential-transition resources that she had withheld for weeks. “Certifications of election results,” she wrote, had helped persuade her.

Through such cumulative acts of civic virtue, the levees of American democracy held. The republic survived a sustained attempt on its life because judges and civil servants and just enough politicians did what they had to do.

If Trump had suborned just that one man, Van Langevelde, the Michigan certification would have failed and the Republican legislature would have had an excuse to meddle. Van Langevelde was not a prominent party member—his day job was deputy counsel to the state House Republican Caucus—but he was thought to be a reliable one. All he really had to do was abstain, and the board would have been unable to certify the results.

“I’ve had a pretty good chance to look at the law the last few days, as you can imagine,” Van Langevelde said dryly in the hearing that day. “I’ve found nothing that gives us the authority to review complaints of fraud.”

Adam Serwer: If you didn’t vote for Trump, your vote is fraudulent

The same drama played out still more publicly in Georgia, where Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another Republican, defended the state’s election integrity against a ferocious assault by Trump. The president mocked him publicly and threatened him in a telephone call while demanding that Raffensperger “recalculate” the election outcome. Unaccountably, Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp—notorious for no-holds-barred voter suppression when he held Raffensperger’s job—backed up his secretary of state, even when Trump threatened to support an opponent in Kemp’s reelection race next year.

“If Brian Kemp had agreed to be completely lawless, he could have called in the state legislature and they could have tried to appoint a different slate of electors,” Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at UC Irvine, told me. “He could have refused to sign the certificate of the electors. I’ve never thought of Kemp as a voting-rights hero … but he was a hero here, stood up to tremendous pressure given the hold that Trump has over the Republican Party right now.”

So why did they do it? Why did Kemp and Raffensperger and Van Langevelde accept Biden’s victory—while nearly two-thirds of the U.S. House Republican caucus voted to overthrow the election? Why did Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, sign the “certificate of ascertainment” of Biden’s win in his state—while more than a dozen Arizona lawmakers joined legal efforts to throw away results in other states? * Why did state legislators in Pennsylvania not attempt to appoint Trump electors—while signing a letter asking Congress to reject the Biden electors?

“I think it did depend on the personalities,” Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian, told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line and you get a different set of outcomes … If enough people do that, if enough dominoes fall, the whole thing falls apart.”

Read: Republicans meet their monster

Edward Foley, an Ohio State law professor, likewise told me that old-fashioned “personal virtue” saved the republic. Of Van Langevelde, he said: “There was intense pressure on him, and he looked like a pretty young guy. He really held firm, and the only thing to account for that is character.”

I see a more optimistic explanation, less contingent on the happenstance of personality. During Trump’s attempted coup, political actors did the right thing at the moments when the power of decision was directly in their hands. The Republicans who stayed true to the law, who chose to follow their duty, were the ones who had actual power to move events. Putting your name on a brief or a letter is a kind of performance—“a cheap act of virtue signaling, or vice signaling, depending on your perspective,” as Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor, put it to me. Voting can be symbolic, too, when a resolution has no chance of passage. But when it came to concrete, meaningful steps—when state officials could actually have reversed an outcome by decertifying a vote or appointing Trump electors—there were enough Republicans who would not cross that line.

Even Vice President Mike Pence, at the moment of final decision, declined Trump’s demand that he claim the unilateral power—nowhere granted him by law—to strike down state election results. This prompted shouts of “Hang Pence!” from the insurgents who poured into the Capitol that afternoon. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chose that same moment—the formal acceptance of the Electoral College vote—to make his first definitive break with the president. Heedless opportunists such as Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, along with the majority of Republicans in the House, could vote to overthrow the election knowing that they had no chance to prevail. McConnell and Pence had meaningful power to sabotage the results, and they stayed their hand.

Read: Mike Pence has nowhere to go

“There was more dedication to democracy, more commitment to democratic institutions, than I had expected,” Kathryn Olmsted, a historian of conspiracy politics at UC Davis, told me. “Because it wasn’t just a game of pretend anymore.”

Baldly stealing the election for Trump could have been costly to men like Raffensperger and Kemp. The backlash in the general public would have been immense. A plurality of their voters, after all, had cast ballots for Biden. Even so, Persily said, “I also want to praise their integrity. I think they realized they had a higher obligation here to the democracy. We shouldn’t pretend that they didn’t pay a significant price. Their political futures in Georgia are really in doubt as a result of this.”

“They weren’t ready to give up on the American experiment,” Hasen said.

T his hypothesis has limits. Conscience restrained the powerful this time, but power also corrupts. If the election had been closer, or if a judge had given legal cover, or if one of the legislatures—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia—had gone first, the temptations and pressures on others would have been harder to resist. More than once, but for circumstance, Trump’s efforts might have found traction and momentum might have broken his way.

The shock of the Capitol mayhem, which left five people dead, has momentarily changed the balance of power in Washington. Trump has begun to pay a price for inciting insurrection. Ten Republicans joined with the Democrats to impeach him for a second time. Trump lost two things very dear to him: the PGA golf championship he planned to host next year at his club in New Jersey, and his almighty Twitter account. He was locked out of his accounts, as well, on Facebook and YouTube.

Read: Trump’s tweets were never just tweets

Three banks, two real-estate brokers, and a law firm have withdrawn from any further business with Trump. He has lost valuable contracts to operate two New York City ice rinks and the carousel in Central Park.

Cruz and Hawley have lost key backers after leading the election denialists in the Senate. Numerous businesses and political-action committees have suspended contributions to any Republican who voted to overturn the Electoral College.

In Georgia this week, two Republican state senators lost their committee chairmanships after joining in Trump’s attempt to overturn the state’s election results. Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, an ally of Raffensperger, stripped them of their seniority.

These are useful starting points. Our democracy can begin to heal itself if it rewards and honors people who did the right thing and punishes those who wrought the worst damage upon it. Republicans who want to make amends for election denial can speak the truth now and speak it loudly. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy put a down payment on that on Wednesday afternoon, merely by admitting that Biden won. He has a long way to go.

History is not finished with Trump, Cruz, or Hawley. If we value our democracy, they will face justice now. The reckoning has only begun.

* An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Arizona's attorney general had joined an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to discard the election results in four states.

How to Plan and Execute a Coup

The attempted coups in the United States in January 2021 and Brazil in January 2023 share a key element: In both cases, insurgents have skillfully moved across various social media platforms to create and spread narratives and mobilize their followers. A playbook for staging a coup is emerging, and governments and platforms have been slow to respond. More cooperation and transparency are required. While the European Union has at least created an appropriate legal framework, implementation will be challenging.

Brazil on January 8, 2023; the United States on January 6, 2021: two cases of insurgencies that attained the heart of national power. In both countries, the supporter basis shared important characteristics. They adhered to a mutually sympathetic ideological affiliation, created a narrative about a stolen election and the need for an armed insurrection or coup, and, of course, engaged in actual violent mobilization. Much of the real action – and the real points of commonality – was online. And that matters.

In Brazil, plotters tried to hide their tracks, but a team of researchers has assembled a coherent story. They spotted evidence of coordinated planning on Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Gettr, and YouTube between January 1 and January 10, 2023. There is evidence that Bolsonaristas and Bolsanaro allies employed a hybrid social media strategy – hybrid in the sense that it was partly offline but also involved major social media platforms alongside less moderated alt tech platforms like Gettr, Parler, or Truth Social.

Analyses on the run-up to the storm on Capitol Hill two years before reveal parallels. ProPublica & The Washington Post studied about 650,000 Facebook posts leading up to the events on January 6, 2021. Brookings traced the impact of podcasts which were used to fan the flames. Together with a report by the Election Integrity Partnership that studied how the narrative of the “stolen election” turned into the # stopthestealmovement, these analyses provide a clear picture of patterns traced by following digital footprints across platforms.

Insurgents in both countries evidently used the same online playbook on how to plan a coup online and execute it in the offline world: A small core group of X plans and organizes the various phases using encrypted messenger services; they then amplify their narrative and galvanize and radicalize users via major social media platforms; next, they mobilize their followers offline; and finally, they hide whatever tracks they left online. This use of social media is a game-changer when it comes to mobilizing insurrections because the platforms are built on algorithms designed for virality, engagement, and access to millions of users.

Avoiding Content Moderators Was Easier Than It Should Have Been

Plotters have exhibited considerable knowledge of how social media “ecosystems” work. They have managed to catapult fringe content from smaller, less moderated alt tech platforms to major social media platforms, all the while avoiding its removal. By leveraging the specific features of each platform, they have successfully ensured that different groups of users see and engage with specific content. This requires plotters to be able to navigate individual content moderation policies across a wide range of platforms. They also need to know the platforms’ real red lines on flagging and removing content to exploit their inconsistency.

YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook were comparatively good at flagging content relating to election denialism in Brazil. These were platforms that had adopted stricter policies after the run on Capitol Hill in 2021 and were resolved to clamp down on misinformation related to the narrative of a stolen election. Yet, Bolsonaristas benefited from the fact that content moderators lacked local knowledge. Given Brazil’s past as military regime from 1964 to1988, it was negligent of platforms to fail to act on viral posts that called for a military coup.

The failure of US social media platforms to attune to local political contexts abroad is not new. It was highlighted in Autumn 2020 by two Facebook whistleblowers, Sophie Zhang and Frances Haugen but still has not been fixed. In 2021, only nine percent of users of the major social media platforms used English. Yet the platforms concentrate an estimated 87 percent of their content moderation resources on efforts to counter English-language misinformation.

Insurgents Use Multiple Platforms to Mobilize Online

In both countries, insurgents built their social media success on mastery of not just one platform. Coordinating efforts on various types and exploiting the lack of coherence between them was key. What stands out in both Brazil and the United States is how skillfully insurgents navigated between platforms for the stages of planning, amplifying, and finally mobilizing. The plotters used strategies to leverage the various functions of internet platforms to maximum effect to bring fringe topics such as the call for a military coup to the mainstream and mobilize potential insurgencts.

Bolsonaristas amplified their narrative, claiming their cause was righteous because of election fraud and the need to take action. To drive home their message, they used a QAnon style decoding of events to support their mission. Offline events were organized as well, such as the massive trucker strike that lasted a couple of days, or Bolsonaristas camping in front of military barracks. In combination, these off- and online events created a drumbeat for the riots in Brasilia on January 8, 2023.

The strategy used in Brazil in particular implies a high level of understanding of platform dynamics and their algorithms. The first stage involves using partially encrypted private messenger apps (like WhatsApp and Telegram) for the tactical planning of the coup. The use of these apps is widespread, complex content can be shared with large groups, and there is no content moderation. According to Statista, the penetration of WhatsApp is 99 percent in Brazil. Telegram is installed on 60 percent of smartphones.

The second stage is designed to amplify the dominant narrative – in both cases, the call for a military coup. This was achieved by cross-posting and deploying formats that encouraged online engagement. Influencers and bots then amplified the call for a military intervention, boosting specific posts for maximum exposure. Next, platform algorithms did what they were designed to do: recommend content based on engagement and virality. These strategies were highly efficient and successful in turning a narrative into a movement.

Regulators and Platforms Are Missing the Problem Under Their Noses

Governments and platforms are speculating about another coup attempt and its chances of success as if this were an abstract puzzle. They need to recognize that there is a playbook available to plan a coup based on digitally maximizing on- and offline capabilities to amplify a cause and push for mobilization, and that it has been employed twice already. Insurgents are learning the lessons. We are not. There are no general content moderation policies that all platforms adhere to diligently. The failure is not due to a lack of data on the insurgents: Even though the plotters deleted their digital footprints after their failed attempt in Brazil, those traces have been reconstructed.

Nevertheless, the platforms continue obfuscating. While most of them adapted their content moderation policies after the January 6 events in Washington, they are not sufficiently transparent regarding the effectiveness of their interventions. This was shown by a scorecard developed by the New America’s Open Technology Institute. Without access to platform data, there is no possibility of testing for impact. The only way to improve content moderation is to bring together local human expertise and machine learning to create content moderation models capable of flagging highly problematic local content.

Platforms also have a blind spot when it comes to acknowledging the long-term impact of these insurgencies. They avoid responsibility by treating the coup attempts almost as if they were closed files. Yet, multidirectional platform strategies across platforms can continue to have a devastating impact on the quality of public debate, as we have seen in both the United States and Brazil. The two plots may not have delivered a successful coup, but they certainly contributed to catapulting fringe topics to the front and strengthening anti-democratic sentiment.

Regulators and Industry Must Link-up Platforms and Countries

Content moderation teams need to work with regional experts who can provide more nuanced insights in different contexts. The idea here is to design hybrid (human and machine learning) content moderation models to flag harmful content in multiple languages. This requires a change from current resource allocation and priorities to invest into developing new practices.

While Brazil is not drafting new legislation to govern social media, its response has been swift when it comes to detaining and arresting protesters, issuing judicial orders for the removal of extremist content in relation to the far-right invasion, and pursuing those suspected of undermining Brazil’s democracy. In the United States, persecution of insurgents is still underway. The January 6 Commission report has been released, but there has been no successful attempt at passing legislation which would require social media companies to disclose more data about content moderation. The hard truth is that in the United States, decisions on content moderation and containing the spread of harmful content are left to social media platforms, and their track record in applying content moderation policies vigorously has been tempered severely by their fear of right-wing backlash .

Enter the European Union’s new Digital Services Act (DSA) , which came into force on November 16, 2022 and will be applicable law across the EU from February 24, 2024. It provides a framework that can be used to watch out for multidirectional platform strategies and includes provisions to allow vetted researchers access to platform data. However, this extends only to very large platforms with a reach of about 45 million users in the EU. Smaller alt tech platforms are exempted; and if there is one takeaway from the digital coups’ playbook, it is the absolute need to monitor various types of platforms regardless of their primary use and size.

To identify and monitor patterns, the EU will need to establish clear authorities and roles in coordination with national authorities. According to the DSA, the EU can rely on the assistance of NGOs, civil society, and vetted researchers to identify evolving online risks and study how algorithms work. It will need to make a point of ensuring that content moderation practices are updated to incorporate local human expertise for improved efficacy. Additional efforts are needed during election cycles: At that time, platforms need to be in contact with dedicated national authorities and researchers to share more nuanced insights into flagged narratives. This should include providing information on the timeline for adapting content moderation procedures as well as on the rate of error regarding flagged narratives.

According to the letter of the law, the EU will dispose of most of the tools needed to regulate and work with platforms to improve accountability and minimize the risk of violent insurgencies. The new Digital Services Act does reflect the realization that platforms are inadequate at self-governance. Yet, Europe’s democratic resilience will depend on how efficiently it will be implemented and enforced.

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Dieses DGAP-Memo wurde am 31. Januar 2023 veröffentlicht.

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Retired general warns the U.S. military could back a coup after the 2024 election

Mary Louise Kelly

Noah Caldwell

Ashish Valentine

Retired two-star U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton co-authored a recent op-ed about the fear that a coup could succeed after the 2024 elections. Brent Stirton/Getty Images hide caption

Retired two-star U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton co-authored a recent op-ed about the fear that a coup could succeed after the 2024 elections.

As the anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol approaches, three retired U.S. generals have warned that another insurrection could occur after the 2024 presidential election and that the military could support it.

The generals – Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba and Steven Anderson – made their case in a recent Washington Post op-ed . "In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time," they wrote.

Paul Eaton, a retired U.S. Army major general and a senior adviser to VoteVets, spoke with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly earlier this week.

Below are the highlights of the conversation.

Edited for brevity and clarity.

How could a coup play out in 2024?

The real question is does everybody understand who the duly elected president is? If that is not a clear-cut understanding, that can infect the rank and file or at any level in the U.S. military.

Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., read the final certification of Electoral College votes cast in November's presidential election, hours after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol. Pool/Getty Images hide caption

And we saw it when 124 retired generals and admirals signed a letter contesting the 2020 election. We're concerned about that. And we're interested in seeing mitigating measures applied to make sure that our military is better prepared for a contested election, should that happen in 2024.

How worried is he on a scale of 1 to 10?

I see it as low probability, high impact. I hesitate to put a number on it, but it's an eventuality that we need to prepare for. In the military, we do a lot of war-gaming to ferret out what might happen. You may have heard of the Transition Integrity Project that occurred about six months before the last election. We played four scenarios. And what we did not play is a U.S. military compromised — not to the degree that the United States is compromised today, as far as 39% of the Republican Party refusing to accept President Biden as president — but a compromise nonetheless. So, we advocate that that particular scenario needs to be addressed in a future war game held well in advance of 2024.

A pro-Trump mob breaks into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress held a joint session to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

A pro-Trump mob breaks into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress held a joint session to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump.

Can the current Pentagon leadership handle it?

I'm a huge fan of Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin, a huge fan of the team that he has put together and the uniformed military under [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark] Milley. They're just superb. And I am confident that the best men and women in the U.S. and in our military will be outstanding. I just don't want the doubt that has compromised or infected the greater population of the United States to infect our military.

What should the military do?

I had a conversation with somebody about my age, and we were talking about civics lessons, liberal arts education and the development of the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution. And I believe that bears a reteach to make sure that each and every 18-year-old American truly understands the Constitution of the United States, how we got there, how we developed it and what our forefathers wanted us to understand years down the road. That's an important bit of education that I think that we need to readdress.

I believe that we need to war-game the possibility of a problem and what we are going to do. The fact that we were caught completely unprepared — militarily, and from a policing function — on Jan. 6 is incomprehensible to me. Civilian control of the military is sacrosanct in the U.S. and that is a position that we need to reinforce.

A protester screams "Freedom" inside the Senate chamber after the U.S. Capitol was breached by a mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Retired U.S. Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton suggests better civics lessons could help prevent another insurrection. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

Are civics lessons 'weak tea' to stave off an insurrection?

A component of that — unsaid — is that we all know each other very well. And if there is any doubt in the loyalty and the willingness to follow the Oath of the United States, the support and defend part of the U.S. Constitution, then those folks need to be identified and addressed in some capacity. When you talk to a squad leader, a staff sergeant, a nine-man rifle squad, he knows his men and women very, very well.

Editor's note: The headline on this article has been changed to accurately reflect General Eaton's point that some in the military could support a coup – not that they would lead it.

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Olivia Troye, former advisor to Former Vice President Mike Pence, and Molly Jong Fast, Vanity Fair Correspondent and MSNBC political analyst, join Ali Velshi to discuss the dangerous far-right strategy to overhaul the federal government and give Donald Trump unchecked power over the executive branch.”Imagine an entire federal government that serves as a campaign arm to Donald Trump,” Jong-Fast says.

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What to Do About Coups

A deserted military tank from the July 2016 failed coup in Ankara, Turkey.

Article by Elliott Abrams

January 11, 2024 11:11 am (EST)

Nothing may seem more obvious to supporters of democracy than the need to oppose, punish, and deter coups. But defining a coup, let alone reacting sensibly to one, is difficult for many democratic governments. The dictionary definition of a coup is reasonably clear. Merriam Webster’s definition is “a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” Similarly, Cambridge says a coup is “a sudden illegal, often violent, taking of government power, especially by part of an army.” In practice, however, these definitions are trickier.

What Is U.S. Law?

For nearly four decades, U.S. law has required that the U.S. government react to coups by immediately cutting off many forms of foreign assistance. In 1985, a provision of law was adopted saying assistance to the government of El Salvador would be stopped if there were a coup, and in the following year Congress expanded that provision to “any country.” While initially the law referred to “military coups,” the provision was broadened to include any form of “coups d’état” in 2010 and broadened again in 2012 to add any “actions in which the military plays a decisive role.” Today, Section 7008 of the State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs (SFOPS) appropriations legislation reads as follows:

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Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy

Prohibition.--None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available pursuant to titles III through VI of this Act shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’etat or decree or, after the date of enactment of this Act, a coup d’etat or decree in which the military plays a decisive role….

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Under the statute, assistance would be resumed if and when the secretary of state “certifies and reports to the appropriate congressional committees that subsequent to the termination of assistance a democratically elected government has taken office.”

Applying U.S. Law: Calling a Coup a Coup Has Been a Problem

These laws may seem straightforward but putting them into practice has been difficult. There are occasions when the U.S. government acted with dispatch when coups occurred and cut off aid. The Congressional Research Service [PDF] reported in 2023 that “during the past decade, the provision was temporarily in effect for the following countries: Fiji (2006 coup; lifted after 2014 elections), Madagascar (2009 coup; lifted after 2014 elections), Guinea-Bissau (2012 coup; lifted after 2014 elections), Mali (2012 coup; lifted after 2013 elections), and Thailand (2014 coup, lifted after 2019 elections).” But it also noted that the “coup provision” was not applied in these cases: Honduras in 2009, Niger in 2010, Egypt in 2013, Burkina Faso in 2014, Zimbabwe in 2017, Algeria in 2019, and Chad in 2021.

The old legal saying that “hard cases make bad law” seems to apply to the “hard case” of the 2013 coup in Egypt, where, after a period of public unrest, the military overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammed Morsi. Egypt was suspended from the African Union, which has an anti-coup regulation. The European Union (EU) and France immediately labeled the action a coup. But the United States, which unlike the EU and France actually has a law on the books requiring suspension of aid when there is a coup, nevertheless did not join them. As one news story put it at the time, “U.S. Ducks Decision on Egypt Coup.”

That story quotes State Department Press Secretary Jen Psaki explaining that “the law does not require us to make a formal determination...as to whether a coup took place, and it is not in our national interest to make such a determination.” She also said , when questioned about why the Obama administration was not using the term “coup,” that “each circumstance is different. You can’t compare what’s happening in Egypt with what’s happened in every other country.” She added that, in huge demonstrations against the Morsi government that preceded the coup, “there were millions of people who have expressed legitimate grievances. A democratic process is not just about casting your ballots…There are other factors including how somebody behaves or how they govern.”

This implicit criticism of the Morsi government was almost a defense of the coup, truly a “hard case” pushing the U.S. government into a position difficult to defend. The United Kingdom also refused to label the coup a coup, and British Prime Minister David Cameron explained why : the United Kingdom “never supports” intervention by the military, he said, “but what we need to happen now in Egypt is for democracy to flourish and for a genuine democratic transition to take place.”

In plainer English, Cameron was arguing that once a coup happens, it is spilled milk and governments have to be realistic. The question at that point is how to work with the country (and the coup leaders) and try to get things back on the democratic track. Psaki took a different and much worse line: Morsi had been a bad and increasingly unpopular ruler of Egypt, so a coup was perhaps inevitable and anyway Morsi was no model democrat. Fair enough, but U.S. law was clear: it speaks of a “duly elected government,” and surely Morsi’s was that.

This is one significant flaw in the U.S. law: it is not so rare that a leader is “duly elected” but then subverts the democratic system to stay in power. Morsi was accused of doing it, as was Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Father Aristide in Haiti, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to take but three examples. Why should overthrowing a would-be dictator, or an elected president who destroys democracy and makes another free election impossible, be treated exactly like a military coup that ousts a truly democratic government?

What is increasingly clear is that the “coup provision” in U.S. law, instead of strengthening U.S. opposition to coups, has often led the U.S. government to duck even calling a coup by its proper name. The most recent case is the coup in Niger on July 26, 2023. It is a classic case: a democratically elected civilian president was removed and detained by the military. The EU, France, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) immediately labeled this a coup. But the United States has refused to do so, leading to a Washington Post editorial in August entitled “U.S. Should Call Niger’s Coup What It Is: A Coup.” Why has the United States refused? The Post theorizes that “administration officials [are] hoping that diplomacy might still persuade the soldiers to return to their barracks….” But as the weeks go by, this hope is increasingly unrealistic.

So why not label the coup a coup now—better late than never? Perhaps because the Biden administration wishes to continue some important counterterrorism programs in Niger even under its new military junta. The solution seems obvious: call the coup by its proper name but say that U.S. national security requires continuing the relationship with the Nigerien military.

“National Security” Waivers

The “national security waiver” is a common procedure in the human rights context. For example, U.S. law states that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights…unless the President certifies in writing to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate that extraordinary circumstances exist warranting provision of such assistance.” In accordance with this provision of law, the Biden administration has withheld portions of U.S. military assistance to Egypt on human rights grounds but delivered other portions.

Another similar provision of law prohibits “any training, equipment, or other assistance for a unit of a foreign security force if the Secretary of Defense has credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights,” but adds that the provision “shall not apply if the Secretary of Defense, after consultation with the Secretary of State, determines that…the equipment or other assistance is necessary to assist in disaster relief operations or other humanitarian or national security emergencies.”

In 2023, Congress for the first time added a national security waiver to the provisions of law requiring a cut-off of assistance when a coup overthrows a “duly elected head of government.” The new provision states that the secretary of state “may waive the restriction in this section…if the Secretary certifies and reports to the Committees on Appropriations that such waiver is in the national security interest of the United States….”

Thus, the national security waiver is available today in the United States, as it was not after the coup in Egypt in 2013. The Biden administration is able to take the Washington Post ’s advice in the case of Niger and in future coup cases. Be honest about what has happened but say that the United States has national security interests that—at that moment and in that case—override its preference for democratically elected governments and against military coups.

Are Anti-Coup Laws Good Policy?

Has the forty-year U.S. experiment with anti-coup laws advanced the cause of democracy? Has the law been honored more in the breach than in the observance? Has the United States now found a happy equilibrium or a poor balance?

It is impossible to say how many coups, if any, were avoided by the prospect of a cut-off in U.S. assistance. Given the uncertainty of whether the United States would call a coup a coup and actually cut off aid, it seems unlikely that there were many. The law surely serves notice from Congress to the executive branch that it takes coups against elected governments seriously and does not expect them to be overlooked or downplayed when the State Department makes decisions about foreign aid. But Congress, which must appropriate foreign aid, always has the ultimate say and can cut off aid to any recipient government whenever it wants. The great advantage of the anti-coup provision is speed, because it can be invoked immediately, while new legislation cutting off aid may take a year to pass. For a new military junta, the prospect of a cut-off next week surely means more than one a year or more away.

But the addition of a national interest waiver to the “coup cut-off provision” after thirty-eight years suggests that Congress has finally acknowledged what history shows: the cut-off provision is a strait jacket for the State Department. Its attempts to escape the law’s provisions may do more harm to democracy than the good the existence of the law accomplishes. At least the waiver provision now allows the State Department to be honest about the fact of a coup, and then decide how to weigh security interests against the desire to protect democracy.

Has a happy medium been reached? Perhaps, but the waiver provision now risks creating two classes of countries: those significant enough to warrant a waiver and those so unimportant to the United States that the waiver is not invoked. And similarly, it may create two classes of coups: those deemed acceptable because the United States did not like the previous (elected) government, and those that overthrew a president the United States supported.

Or perhaps the executive branch’s future waiver decisions will be based on hard realpolitik : where a coup is reversible it will suspend aid, but where it seems the new military government is there to stay aid will be continued, accompanied by a wagging of fingers and more press guidance about the importance of democracy.

Coups occur irregularly but they are an apparently incurable disease, so the new law with its waiver provision will be tested in time. One can think of an addition to the new law—containing now the mandatory cut-off but also the waiver provision—that requires (a) that the State Department report to Congress (in secret testimony if need be) within one week of an apparent coup; (b) that it make a determination: coup or no coup; and (c) that State defend the policy it is following, explaining how it is weighing the value of U.S. support for democracy against what it sees as U.S. national security interests. The current law no doubt expresses opposition to coups, but it has not led to candor in the execution of U.S. foreign policy. That is an ingredient worth adding, and a part of democratic government as well.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.

John Bolton admits he's helped plan coups in other countries while speaking to CNN's Jake Tapper on live TV: 'It takes a lot of work'

John Bolton told CNN that he's helped plan coups in other countries.
"As somebody who has helped plan coup d'état, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work," Bolton said.
Bolton was making the case that Trump was too incompetent to have been involved in a carefully coordinated coup.

John Bolton, who served in an array of key government roles across multiple Republican administrations, casually told CNN's Jake Tapper that he's helped plan coups in other countries.

The admission came on Tuesday as Bolton and Tapper discussed former President Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to overturn the results of a US presidential election. Bolton, who served as national security advisor in the Trump administration from 2018 to 2019, told Tapper that "nothing Donald Trump did after the election in connection with the lie about election fraud — none of it is defensible."

But Bolton rejected the notion that Trump's actions were part of a "carefully planned coup d'état aimed at the Constitution." Bolton portrayed the former president as too incompetent to be involved in such a plan.

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COMMENTS

Business Plot
The Business Plot, also called the Wall Street Putsch and The White House Putsch, was a political conspiracy in 1933, ... Given a successful coup, Butler said that the plan was for him to have held near-absolute power in the newly created position of "Secretary of General Affairs", ...
The Business Plot Against FDR and America You Never Heard About
In an excerpt from Gangsters of Capitalism, Jonathan M. Katz details how the authors of the Depression-era "Business Plot" aimed to take power away from FDR and stop his "socialist" New Deal. By ...
The Business Plot: When A Group Of U.S. Bankers Staged A Fascist Coup
The Business Plot: The Little-Known Story Of The Wall Street Scheme To Launch A Fascist Coup In America. As FDR's New Deal worried Wall Street, a cadre of bankers decided to replace him with decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler as their fascist dictator. Here's how they failed. On Nov. 24, 1934, retired General Smedley Butler sat ...
FDR coup: The business plot to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt by
Eventually, MacGuire laid it all out: He was working for a group of mega-rich businessmen with access to $300 million to bankroll a coup. They would plant stories in the press about Roosevelt ...
When The Bankers Plotted To Overthrow FDR : NPR
Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president. The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers. "They ...
Remembering when bankers tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist
A group of wealthy bankers decided to take things into their own hands; they plotted a coup against FDR, hoping to install a fascist dictator in its stead. Ultimately, the coup was brought to ...
Timeline of the coup: How Trump tried to weaponize the Justice ...
The coup attempt reached a horrifying crescendo on January 6, 2021, when Trump held a massive rally near the White House and incited thousands of supporters to attack the Capitol while lawmakers ...
US Allies Say Trump Attempted Coup With Help From ...
Some among America's military allies believe Trump deliberately attempted a coup and may have had help from federal law-enforcement officials. President Donald Trump at the White House on November ...
5 Lessons From the Coup Attempt
David A. Graham: This is a coup. (2) The republic stands undefended against internal enemies. If you do not regularly enter the Capitol, you might think it is guarded like a prison for ...
Historian Says Trump Should Have Been at Capitol Riot to Pull Off Coup
An expert on fascism said Trump would have needed to be at the Capitol to pull off a coup. Ruth Ben-Ghiat said that explained why he wanted to march with supporters last year on January 6. She ...
The Business Plot
In the early 1930s, a coalition of America's wealthiest industrial magnates allegedly hatched a scheme to topple the Roosevelt Administration and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. Known as the Business Plot, the plan was supposedly dreamed up by a prominent tycoons and Wall Street big shots who controlled many of the country's major ...
How Close Did the U.S. Come to a Successful Coup?
Trump failed in the end—if we have reached the end—to maintain an illegal grip on power. But his attempted coup made too much headway for comfort, and his supporters are far from finished with ...
How to Plan and Execute a Coup
The attempted coups in the United States in January 2021 and Brazil in January 2023 share a key element: In both cases, insurgents have skillfully moved across various social media platforms to create and spread narratives and mobilize their followers. A playbook for staging a coup is emerging, and governments and platforms have been slow to respond.
Retired general warns the military could back a coup after the 2024
Brent Stirton/Getty Images. As the anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol approaches, three retired U.S. generals have warned that another insurrection could occur after the 2024 ...
What's in Senate Plan to Stop 2024 Trump Election Sabotage, Coup
A group of senators has unveiled a long-awaited bipartisan plan to prevent a future Trump-style coup attempt in 2024. The , led by GOP Sen. Susan Collins and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, that ...
'Blueprint for a soft coup': Inside the far-right plan that ...
Donald Trump is narrowing his running mate choices and the business world ties of some top candidates are helping them rise on his list — while aiding Trump's search for new deep-pocketed donors ...
Write your business plan
Common items to include are credit histories, resumes, product pictures, letters of reference, licenses, permits, patents, legal documents, and other contracts. Example traditional business plans. Before you write your business plan, read the following example business plans written by fictional business owners.
Coup d'état
A coup d'état (/ ˌ k uː d eɪ ˈ t ɑː / ⓘ; French: [ku deta]; lit. ' stroke of state '), or simply a coup, is typically an illegal and overt attempt by a military organization or other government elites to unseat an incumbent leadership. A self-coup is when a leader, having come to power through legal means, tries to stay in power through illegal means.. By one estimate, there were 457 ...
What To Do in a Coup: 10 Practical Observations for Impacted ...
8. Engage with local embassies. They can provide information and help assess the possibility of sanctions with operational impacts such as border closures, restrictions on importation of critical ...
What to Do About Coups
The dictionary definition of a coup is reasonably clear. Merriam Webster's definition is "a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of ...
How Business Leaders Can Stop a Coup
A coup is not just deplorable, undemocratic and illegal, it is bad for business. A coup means a faction has taken control of a government by force and upends democracy. This typically means that ...
EU drafts plan to exempt long-haul flights from new emissions rules
The European Commission has drafted plans to exempt long-haul flights from rules on monitoring their non-CO2 emissions, after international carriers lobbied for an opt-out, documents seen by ...
Trump tax breaks are set to expire after 2025. Here's what advisors are
Trillions in tax breaks enacted by former President Donald Trump are scheduled to expire after 2025. Here's how to prepare, according to financial advisors.
Business Coups in the US and Britain
Interestingly, Britain's Business Coup involved Prince Phillip's uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who was also one of Britain's most important war heroes and military commanders. The British Plot ...
Equipment rental company Ashtead has no immediate plan for US listing
British equipment rental company Ashtead Group has no immediate plans to move its listing to the United States, it said on Tuesday, when it also forecast slower revenue growth for fiscal 2025 ...
Elon Musk's multi-billion paycheck just got approved by ...
Tesla shareholders on Thursday confirmed they want Elon Musk to get a massive record pay package for running Tesla for the last six years. The question now is, how much will he get going forward?
John Bolton admits he's helped plan coups in other countries while
John Bolton told CNN that he's helped plan coups in other countries. "As somebody who has helped plan coup d'état, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work," Bolton said. Bolton was ...
Abortion United Evangelicals and Republicans. Now That Alliance Is
The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination of Protestant Christians in the United States, voted at an annual gathering last week to oppose the use of in vitro fertilization.
In CEO meeting, Trump promised more tax cuts
Former President Donald Trump told some of America's most powerful business leaders this week that he plans to once against slash corporate taxes, four people familiar with the matter told CNN.
Trump, Biden aide woo corporate America executives
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Jeff Zients, U.S. President Joe Biden's White House chief of staff, on Thursday met with top American business leaders in Washington as they ...