Former United States President Donald Trump will hold a news conference this coming Thursday, Jan. 6, exactly one year after the deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol that he was accused of fomenting; and now he will probably commemorate! After all, it was one of the rare attempts at a coup d'etat in the U.S., even though it was downgraded to a coup de grace. As it was a coup nonetheless, it will be immortalized in its own right.

The U.S. has had many coups, both "d’etat" and "de grace," deadly and nonfatal, real and bogus, in the palace and on the street, but always in an outside country. It had three such experimentations in Turkey – in 1960, 1970 and 1980. With the "post-modern" coup of 1997, and finally, the averted "July 15 coup bid" of 2016, the total comes to five.

Globally, the U.S. has been involved in 72 (in Wikipedia’s cordial but dispassionate wording) "regime changes in foreign countries." Here we read that "the United States government has participated and interfered, both overtly and covertly, in the replacement of foreign governments." Wikipedia classifies them into six periods showing dates and interventions by countries. I’ll only list the names Wikipedia uses for the periods, which are very telling in their own rights, and the number of coups: