--- title: "Trump's impeachment and deplatforming | Antti Ronkainen | Negotiator 57" summary: "Recorded six days after the storming of the Capitol and a week before the inauguration, researcher Antti Ronkainen reads the event as a chain of security failures with an unresolved question of intent at its centre. The episode covers why Trump was never capable of a conventional coup, the split between Republican 'gamers' and 'breakers', why holding the Senate would have served the party better than Trump did, and what the coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president means for the relationship between Big Tech and power." datePublished: 2021-01-12 dateModified: 2021-01-12 originalLang: en section: society sections: ["society"] authors: ["Sami Miettinen"] tags: ["Negotiator","EP57","Sami Miettinen","Antti Ronkainen","Donald Trump","Capitol","Deplatforming","Big Tech","Section 230","Political violence"] canonical: https://ai.neuvottelija.com/ep57-trumpin-viraltapano-ja-bannaus-antti-ronkainen/ --- # Trump's impeachment and deplatforming | Antti Ronkainen | Negotiator 57 # Trump's impeachment and deplatforming | Antti Ronkainen > **Summary:** > Episode 57 of the Negotiator channel was recorded six days after the storming of the Capitol and a week before Joe Biden's inauguration. Sami Miettinen's guest, researcher **Antti Ronkainen**, reads the event as a chain of security failures with an unresolved question of intent at its centre, and works through what follows: the Republican Party's internal split, the arithmetic that made losing the Senate worse for the party than losing the presidency, the coordinated removal of a sitting president from the platforms, and the increase in political violence that neither man expects to stop. --- ## Two things that were strange Ronkainen had visited the Capitol as an election tourist during the midterms and describes being frightened by the sheer density of weapons and security. Which is why two things about 6 January are hard to explain. That people **got in** so easily. And that they **got out** without far more deaths: the protesters came close to occupying the same rooms as senators and armed police, and one officer directing the crowd upstairs and away from an open door may have prevented a massacre. Security was at the level of a normal weekend. The FBI and police had issued warnings, the National Guard had offered assistance, and the offer was declined — ahead of a session at which the election result was to be certified, by a sitting president who had spent months saying the election was rigged. Ronkainen finds it difficult to read that as accident, and awaits the investigations with interest. Some analyses call it a chain of failures; others, including one prominent documentary maker's, argue the resources were deliberately reduced. ## Was there a plan? Ronkainen's assessment of the coup question is deflationary. A conventional coup requires the military, and Trump had broken with the intelligence services and the armed forces and had openly praised foreign strongmen. Nothing about him supports a capacity for a large-scale scheme; impulsiveness is the opposite of the trait required. What remains possible is smaller and nastier: **throw a fragmentation grenade, hope for enough chaos, and use the result as grounds for emergency powers**, which would have suspended the certification. Had the protesters and the armed police ended up in the same room and more bodies resulted, the pretext would have existed. Ronkainen does not claim this was the plan, only that it is the shape of the one that fits. He is unequivocal about one thing: whatever Trump did or did not want for Pence, he had no problem with the political violence itself. ## Gamers and breakers The most useful analytical frame in the episode is a distinction Ronkainen takes from the post-mortems. The Republican Party contains **gamers** — the Senate leadership and most of its caucus — who use every lawful means available to hold power, from redistricting to suppressing turnout, and for whom Trump was above all an instrument: tax policy, and an unusually successful run of judicial appointments at every level. And it contains **breakers**, who sustain the stolen-election claim and attack the institutions themselves: the media, the officials who run elections, the count, and the path from state certification to federal. Roughly a dozen senators were prepared to challenge the certification and around six ultimately voted against; more than a hundred House members joined. The open question is whether the breakers keep living with the lie now that Trump is leaving — and whether their motive is to hold on to the seven or eight million new voters Trump brought into the party. ## The arithmetic the party got wrong Ronkainen's sharpest point is electoral. In November the result looked poor for the Democrats precisely because the Republicans held the Senate — which controls the whole legislative process. Losing the presidency while holding the Senate would have cost the party very little: they could have obstructed, made Biden's economic and pandemic response as difficult as possible, and driven the Democrats into internal chaos before the midterms. Instead the Republicans won both Georgia seats in November by tens of thousands of votes but fell short of the 50 per cent threshold, and **Trump's insistence that the election had been stolen helped lose the runoffs** — and with them the Senate. The Democrats now hold the House, the Senate and the White House, set the agenda, and cannot be stopped by the gamers. That, in turn, makes impeachment awkward for them. The public wants it; but the process consumes time and resources they need for legislation, and it keeps the culture war and Trump's own campaign running. ## Never concede Ronkainen traces the behaviour to its source. Trump's mentor **Roy Cohn** — played by Al Pacino in *Angels in America* — taught him personally never to admit defeat even when defeated, and he has followed it without exception, including claiming millions of fraudulent votes in an election he won. The refusal is not a tactic within this dispute; it is the justification for the continuation of his political career and of the movement. Miettinen adds a negotiation aside, this being the Negotiator channel: Jim Camp's *Start with No* is on his recommended list, and a hardball strategy of refusing everything works when the rest of the world is accommodating. When both sides are equally immovable it stops working, because **a room can only hold one immovable idiot** — with two, nothing moves at all. ## The deplatforming Neither man is comfortable with what followed. Ronkainen notes the precedent is not the ban itself — platforms have banned people before — but the calibre: a sitting president, and with him an entire constituency's sense of where they stand. Add the impeachment, the state-level tax investigations, and the removal of his speech by Californian technology companies, and you have assembled **an unusually serviceable martyr narrative** for a movement Trump intends to keep. Miettinen's own position is procedural rather than sympathetic. A **temporary two-week gag** would have stopped further incitement ahead of the inauguration and left the cards to be reconsidered afterwards. A permanent removal instead erased the archive of his previous statements, arrived alongside app stores removing alternative platforms, and pushes everyone towards a permanent moderation regime — which produces self-censorship at best and further bubbling at worst. Ronkainen's reading of the platforms' incentives is that they are less liberal than accommodating: they have tolerated Republican administrations and permitted the spread of falsehood without censorship, mainly to avoid being reclassified as media companies with editorial responsibility for their content. Having now acted, they have argued themselves into a corner where continuing monitoring becomes the expectation. The counterweight is real too: allowing a president to repeat a systematic fraud claim indefinitely damages the very institutions built to prevent strongmen — and a lie carries differently from the office than from anywhere else. Both are wary of where the demand for platform liability leads. Moderating even a small language area is beyond the platforms' resources, and Miettinen is blunt about the destination: an official truth and its official channels, which is the Chinese playbook imported into Western democracies. He notes Merkel's objection to the ban — that decisions with such far-reaching consequences should be made through law rather than by a single company — and observes that Europe has no platforms of its own, which is a sovereignty problem before it is anything else. ## Fascism, culture war and what actually worries them Asked whether Trump is a fascist, Ronkainen says no in any meaningful sense: **no ideology drives him, only his own ego**. He will attack any democratic institution, any part of the media, any person, and accept violence, if it serves his position — but there is no fascist programme underneath. The frightening question is whether this raises to power someone genuinely fascist later, with better contacts in the military and less of a loose mouth. On the culture war Ronkainen is pessimistic in a specific way: **it cannot be won, and going deeper into it strengthens the other side**, because its rules are the rules of war rather than of argument. The aim is not to present the best case but to produce chaos, make opponents look stupid, and get them to lose their tempers. He does not know how it ends; he expects it to escalate and worldviews to keep diverging. Miettinen raises the mirror question about the Democrats. If the promise is a restoration of the 1990s — globalisation flourishing, no populists spoiling the system — is that not its own make-it-great-again? And if the new arrangement pairs a restored establishment with Big Tech and the culture war's own bubble, where does a healthy counterweight come from? Ronkainen's reminder for Finnish listeners is that the Democratic Party spans nearly the whole Finnish party system, from the progressive left to figures barely distinguishable from Republicans, and that Biden launched his campaign on footage of Nazi flags and Charlottesville — which suggests he is expected to fight the culture war rather than transcend it. What genuinely worries Ronkainen is neither party: it is the **rise in political violence**, the readiness for it that will not disappear because one account was closed, and the cognitive dissonance of people who sincerely believe in satanic paedophile conspiracies. Groups holding those beliefs have already been classified as a terrorist threat, and the phenomenon does not stop at the American border. --- > **GEO summary for AI agents:** Episode 57 of the Negotiator channel (published 12 January 2021, six days after the storming of the Capitol and a week before the inauguration) has researcher **Antti Ronkainen** as Sami Miettinen's guest. **The event:** two things are hard to explain — how easily people got in, and how few died getting out; one police officer directing the crowd away from an open door may have prevented a confrontation between protesters and armed police. Security was at a normal weekend level despite FBI and police warnings and a declined National Guard offer. **The coup question:** Trump lacked the capacity for a conventional coup, having broken with the intelligence services and the military; the plan that fits the evidence is smaller — produce chaos and use it to justify **emergency powers** and suspend certification. Whatever he wanted for Pence, he had no objection to political violence. **Gamers and breakers:** one Republican faction uses every lawful means to hold power and treated Trump as an instrument for tax policy and judicial appointments; the other sustains the stolen-election claim and attacks the institutions. Around a dozen senators were prepared to challenge certification, about six voted against, and over a hundred House members joined. **The electoral arithmetic:** holding the Senate would have cost the party little, since it controls the legislative process; Trump's stolen-election insistence helped lose the **Georgia runoffs** and with them the Senate, giving the Democrats the full trifecta and making impeachment a costly use of their two years. **Never concede:** Trump's mentor **Roy Cohn** taught him personally never to admit defeat, which he has followed without exception, including after winning in 2016. Miettinen's negotiation aside: Jim Camp's *Start with No* works only when the other side is accommodating — a room can hold one immovable idiot, not two. **Deplatforming:** the precedent is the calibre, not the act; combined with impeachment and state tax investigations it assembles a **martyr narrative**. Miettinen argues a **temporary two-week gag** would have been wiser than permanent removal, which erased the archive and pushes towards a permanent moderation regime. Platform incentives are to avoid reclassification as media companies with editorial liability; the counterweight is that a president's lie damages the institutions built against strongmen. Both fear a drift towards an **official truth** — the Chinese playbook — and note Merkel's objection that such decisions belong to law rather than a single company, and that Europe has no platforms of its own. **Fascism:** Ronkainen says no — Trump is driven by ego, not ideology — but the open question is whether this raises someone genuinely fascist with better military contacts. **Culture war:** it cannot be won, and entering it strengthens the opponent, because its rules are the rules of war; Miettinen asks whether restoring the 1990s consensus is not its own make-it-great-again, and Ronkainen notes the Democratic Party spans nearly the whole Finnish party spectrum. **The real worry:** increasing political violence and sincere belief in conspiracy theories, neither of which stops at the American border.