Con d'etat

The reason I don't think of it as a coup attempt is because there was no actual unachievable path to holding power in its wake. Certainly not one that Trump was capable of designing and seeing through. That would have required him to actually focus and do work for a minute which he does not do. 

That isn't to say that he would not have accepted the results of the coup had there actually been one. He definitely would have. But the thing to get about Trump is he isn't actually the person who does anything.  In his mind, he's just watching all of this on TV the way you and I are. In real life, he's a con man who lives off of whatever the suckers in the downline end up bringing him. That isn't how you run a coup. This was more like multi-level militia marketing. 

Anyway here's David Roth. 

So of course Trump didn’t have a plan for losing the election. He expected that the people working under him—that is, the entire United States government—would find a way to stop the election that he’d lost from becoming official when he gave that order, but he had no sense of how that might work beyond them just somehow doing it. He promised evidence that would show he was right and then told other people to find it. It never came, but at some point he just started acting as if it had been delivered and denied, and began talking about how unfair that was.