It was an attempted coup, let's not try and normalize this. If the congressmen had not been able to evacuate in time they would have been taken hostage or killed.
A coup is an organised attempt to depose one regime and install another in its place. No such thing was evident in Wednesday's events.
The participants had a vague nation that by, obstructing the senate's ratification of the electoral college, they could buy time for their big beautiful president to play whatever last ace he had up his sleeve. This does not represent an attempt to depose the current regime, or to install a new regime in its place. Perhaps they would have supported such an attempt, if it occurred; but it did not. Many of the participants in last summer's demonstrations would probably have supported a revolution, had it occurred; but it did not, and it would be frivolous to claim that it was a failed revolution on such a basis.
This was not a coup. The reason that some claim it was a coup, the
only reason, is that they have spent the last twelve months
expecting a coup, had
convinced themselves that such an event was inevitable, so when some sort of civil unrest occurred, it
must have been the coup they had predicted. The alternative would be conceding that the elaborate story they had built for themselves, a story so-far fetched as to cast geriatric segregationist Joseph Biden as the saviour of American democracy, was hysterical nonsense, and nobody is quite prepared to let go of that just yet.