The insurrection and its aftermath remain salient to contemporary American Politics. Existing scholarship has shown the insurrection was fueled by an effort to return Donald Trump to power while also protesting the decline of the non-Hispanic white population. Scholars also discuss the impact of continuous division across partisan and ideological lines. We are interested in exploring if these divisions are visible across attitudes of non-Hispanic white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American/Pacific Islander respondents in a nationally representative survey. We explore the following research question. Does the impact of partisanship, ideology, and attitudes toward Trump’s responsibility affect the attitudes of respondents from various racial and ethnic groups? We use the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to complete our analyses. We contribute to the existing literature by examining whether partisanship, ideology, and attitudes toward Trump lead to potential differences across race and ethnicity. We find that respondents across all racial and ethnic groups share similar evaluations of the insurrection, the president’s role, and the rioters, particularly when they hold identical partisan and ideological views and identify the president as the cause of the insurrection.

The storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021 was a presidential attempt at a self-coup. To make the case, this article reviews elements of the Capitol assault and the events leading up to it, in light of the key conceptual components of a self-coup, and how those compare to attributes of other kinds of attacks on governments. The Trump self-coup will then be compared and contrasted empirically to other self-coups perpetrated by leaders. It is found that what separates successful self-coups from those that fail is whether the military backs the undertaking. Thus, a section is included on US military behaviour in response to Trump's attempts to gain military adherence for his political actions.