On 6 January 2001 then president Donald Trump clearly attempted to overthrow our Democracy.  The effort was inept, but still criminal.  In hindsight, after   all 10 living former Department of Defense secretaries published in the  Sunday, 3January2021, issue of the Washington Post a public letter , declaring that the U.S. presidential election was over, Trump should have realized that without the Department of Defense, there was no hope for a successful coup. The letter – signed by Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter – amounts to a remarkable show of force against Trump’s subversion efforts just days before Congress is set to count Electoral College votes . Watch William Cohen explain on CNN their motivation for this extraordinary action. Okay, that was one Republican effort to destroy our Democracy, although I would argue that the culprit was Donald Trump, not the entire party.