Sheesh! From the comments, people still don't understand what you were trying to say. A real coup would have had a lot more guns, with backing from some of the military.
From my perspective, the organizers of this "insurrection" were trying to disrupt the legal proceedings to formally declare Biden as president. If all the i's are not dotted and t's not crossed, then Mr. Biden is not the president regardless of the election results--according to some definitions of the byzantine rules of American succession. With 30,000 yahoos running around Washington, martial law could have been declared, leaving Mr. Trump in charge for a few months more--and until he deemed things settled down enough. This was a deliberately planned constitutional crisis.
What stopped the plan was the evacuation of the legislators before the yahoos could find them. Mob psychology would have induced the mob to do some really terrible things. That would have brought on martial law.
When the dust settled, the legislators went back to vote on the EC results. I wonder if the R's had not come to vote for/against the EC (for safety reasons, of course), would there have been some "quorum" requirements make that vote legal?
