Brian Klaas, a professor at University College London and Washington Post columnist would never make such an incendiary suggestion if he did not have an unimpeachable source and credible evidence backing up his claim:
An unnamed friend who happens to live in the capital.
Okay, it was more conjecturizing really.
Awful news to wake up to of Myanmar's coup. A friend who lives in Yangon texted me saying that the generals were likely emboldened by Trump's playbook, as they used false claims of widespread election fraud as a pretext to seize power.
"Were likely emboldened."
As a nearby resident of the United States capital, and having attended Trump's speech on January 6, I can attest to the fact that I didn't not see Myanmar generals there watching attentively and taking notes.
I mean, everyone was wearing those MAGA hats, so they could have been there.
I'm not sure why you would need more proof than that.
(This wouldn't be the first time, by the way, as Myanmar's government committed mass atrocities against the Rohingya minority...
Oh, and there's that, too. There's these past mass atrocities, AND trump making some remarks most of which were not anything new.
Call it 50-50.
...and then denounced the press while calling reports of those atrocities "fake news").
Interesting example. The news the government denounced as fake, really was fake.
I'm pretty sure Klaas had not intended to support Trump here.
He thought better of his original take and followed up three hours later with this:
To clarify: Trump is obviously not to blame for the coup.
When you have to point out that something is obvious, it's not.
But as I found in my PhD research studying coups after contested elections, there *is* a diffusion effect for pretexts used when militaries seize power. In both tweets above, I'm talking about the justifications used.
Pulling out the big guns: "I have degrees!!"
He felt pretty strongly about making clear the "obvious" in that he made a similar stand-alone tweet (outside of the original thread) to hammer the point home yet again.
For the record, no, Trump is obviously not to blame for the coup. My doctoral research focused on coups, including field research in SE Asia. Civil-military relations in a coup-prone country aren't dictated by US presidents. But could their pretext have been affected? Sure.
And just like that, in trying to dig himself out, he just digs deeper.
"But could their pretext have been affected? Sure."
Hey, it could have, right? "Sure," says the professor with a doctorate in unsupported conjecture.
Still, I can't help but wonder. Could Professor Klaas, with all his admitted research into coups and knowledge of Southeast Asia have aided and abetted the Myanmar coup himself and is now merely trying to deflect attention?
"Sure."
