On January 7th, the day after the riots, I called it an “attempted coup.” Before the coup even happened, I said this: “[Trump’s plan] is something much cleverer: a sophisticated, coordinated, multi-layered attack on the few institutions American Democracy has left, from votes to ballots to electors to courts to the people themselves.” On the anniversary of the attempted coup, I wrote: “Jan 6th is best understood as a culmination, the climax of a pattern, and “the coup attempt — the final one — had been carefully plotted and was the pretext for a conspiracy to end democracy.”