>The explicit goal was to disrupt congressional proceedings as part of a plan to overturn election results.

And then what? Once the mob was cleared out, they would have resumed. There's a chasm between disrupting proceedings and actually taking over a country. The latter also almost always involved having control of the military by the way.

They were a few feet away from having the entirety of this nations legislative branch at their mercy (which they made clear they didn’t have much of) and the Vice President. People downplaying this aren’t just doing a dangerous thing, they clearly have ulterior motives.

If Donald Trump wasn't a pathetic coward, then the US was somewhere between 1 and 15 minutes away from a civil war on January 6.

It might've been a short civil war, but if Trump had gone out and marched with the protesters like they thought he would and told them to stay in the Capitol building, you would've immediately created a situation where government business is suspended and the commander in chief is at direct odds with the military's constitutional obligations.

There was, and has been, a soft coup ongoing since that day, since the president at the time refused to issue any direction to the military and situation only started to be resolved when Pence took defacto command of the executive without invoking the 25th amendment. That process has been ongoing since then.

The plan is to continue creating escalating chaos, and grasp whatever advantage is available in the aftermath while people who care about things like laws and constitutions throw their hands on the air and declare their shock and dismay. This is how autocrats work. Actually responding effectively and shutting this shit down is how you keep a constitutional government from sliding directly into an autocracy. Hemming and hawing about did he or didn't he mean to be smart enough to circumvent the constitution, while the situation continues to escalate, is how you end up in, say, Pinochet's Chile.

Remember Trump is already commander in chief, so has power 'by default.' He just needs to create a situation where that status quo remains, either by creating a situation whereby the right people are willing to disregard the election results /or/ the constitution directly.

Actually, to continue, this is hacker news! So let's use an appropriate software analogy. Think of it as fuzzing the interface of constitutional democracy. You can throw chaos at it until you find an exploit.

It certainly looks much different from what we would historically label coup attempt. Usually a coup has to at least be theoretically possible. It also would seem to require some level coordination. I have yet to see evidence of that. I really do believe that some of the protestors might have been there to peacefully protest, not overthrow the American government. Ymmv