This week's anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt by former President Donald Trump's loyalists to overthrow an election is a grim reminder of the razor's edge on which American democracy sits. The multifaceted schemes to nullify President Joe Biden's victory brought us dangerously close to a coup d'etat. As three retired Army generals warned in a recent op-ed, "We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time."

As well they should be, as should the rest of us. What was supposed to be the celebration of our enduring democracy — the constitutionally mandated tabulation of electoral votes — became its desecration. The insurrection will stand out either as a historic blinking red light about the fragility of America's democratic norms or the beginning of their end.

As a House committee investigates the circumstances of the Jan. 6 putsch attempt, Olympic-level stonewalling is underway by those who know what they did, and who hope to prevent their countrymen from finding it out. Trump has asked the Supreme Court to block the committee from obtaining public records that document what he did that day. The records were paid for by the taxpayers and are owned by the American people. Trump, however, is unenthusiastic about letting us know what they say.

Trump's lawsuit is frivolous and has already been rejected by two federal courts. But his hope is that the justices whom he appointed will stoop to turning the Supreme Court into a kind of Trump Protection Tribunal. Last week, a group of former top lawyers from Republican administrations filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that Trump's Hail Mary-style move to hide the evidence be rejected a third time.

Trump isn't the only one frantic about keeping the committee from learning the truth about Jan. 6. Twice-indicted Trump strategist Steve Bannon has refused to obey a committee subpoena. Former chief of staff Mark Meadows produced damning documents, and then reversed himself, refusing to answer questions about them, thereby earning himself a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

Last week Rudy Giuliani protege Bernard Kerik delivered a trove of documents but produced a list of documents he was withholding as "attorney work product." Kerik is not an attorney. He did, on the other hand, spend time in jail for fraud, ethics violations and criminal false statements. He is withholding a document heartwarmingly entitled "Draft Letter from POTUS to Seize Evidence in the Interest of National Security in the 2020 Election." It is dated Dec. 17, 2020, the day before Trump met in the Oval Office with disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to discuss seizing election equipment in states whose election results Trump sought to overturn. Kerik, a convicted felon, was hired by Giuliani, who is under federal criminal investigation, on behalf of Trump, double-impeached and under investigation in at least two jurisdictions. Flynn is a convicted felon.

A regular Brady Bunch.

As the committee begins holding public hearings to present the evidence it has amassed about the insurrection's decidedly un-immaculate conception, Americans are forced to confront the unpleasant similarities between how the German National Socialist Party took power in the early 1930s and how Trump's Republican Party tried between November 2020 and January 2021 to keep it. Comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump are frowned upon, and with very good reason.

But let's be honest.

The willingness to use violence to advance political objectives, the circumvention of democratic procedures and the systematic trashing of democratic institutions that exist to guard against totalitarianism that characterized the Nazis' seizure of power can no longer be said to be foreign to the American experience. Last year's machinations to stop the counting of votes or to "find" phony ones, the fraudulent claims of election fraud and the attempts to bulldoze local officials into overriding voters, culminating in the storming of the Capitol, bear a terrible resemblance to the Nazi Party's putsch. To think it, to say it, to write it, seems inconceivable. What it does not seem, however, is off-base.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

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