has Biden done a good job as president?

[Rev. Rye]

Just for the record, there’s a thing called a self-coup or an auto-coup: a leader who’s been democratically elected decides to seize power from the other branches of government and officially become a dictator. Some of the more well-known examples include the Coup of 18 Brumaire (wherein Napoleon seized power) and the Enabling Act which allowed mere Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler to become the Führer we know and hate today.

The term is fairly recent, but not “We Need a New Word To Describe What Trump Just Tried to Do” recent. It seems to have arisen in the wake of Juan Maria Bordaberry’s Coup d’etat in Uruguay in 1973, mostly in its Spanish form “autogolpe.” It’s not been terribly common in layman’s parlance, but that’s mainly because it’s not as common as it used to be. And Wikipedia’s had an article about the concept since 2004.

And on the off chance that you recognize the concept, even if the gallows was so rickety and shittily-designed that it’d collapse before you could get the noose around the victim’s neck, the mere act of building a gallows (especially during a riot where people were demanding that Mike Pence be hanged) is still a sign of intent. You might think there should be no points for trying and failing to do something, but in the real world, that’s not how the justice system sees crime.