Donald Trump was incredibly close to pulling off the overthrow of the US government in 2020, only needing a few more radical loyalists for his plan to come into life, an essay in The Bulwark, an American, anti-Trump, conservative website said Monday.

American attorney and columnist Philip Rotner said in his essay, "Five Rudys from the Abyss," Trump was "five Rudys short" from overthrowing the US government, meaning former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The 2020 attempted coup "came much closer to succeeding than many would admit and was just a dress rehearsal for 2024," he wrote, stressing that the danger to US democracy was "real." "We should all be very worried," he emphasized.

According to Rotner, had "Giuliani-like sycophants" replaced just five officials, Trump's coup plan would have been met with success.

The columnist and regular The Bulwark contributor proposed substituting Giuliani "or any other Trump cultist," such as Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan for five federal officials who held positions during the 2020 election. Think of what might have happened," he said.

Had Giuliani been in the place of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, Michigan State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde, secretary of state of Pennsylvania Kathy Boockvar, Attorney General Bill Barr, or then-Vice President Mike Pence, the 2020 election results would have been drastically different, with Trump fraudulently winning in those states or jurisdictions.

It is worth noting that all the aforementioned figures had in one way or another fought off Trump or GOP pressure and certified Joe Biden's win in their states or jurisdiction.

Rotner argued that Trump's failure to corrupt the federal government is what saved the US, as well as his ignoring of the state governments. "As a result, even states with Republican-dominated legislatures and party officials, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin, weren’t wholly owned Trump subsidiaries," he wrote, explaining that although they supported Trump, they allowed the elections results in their states to be certified.

Despite Trump's failures, Rotner saw, he "came frighteningly close to overturning the election or, at the least, throwing the nation into the mother of all constitutional crises."

He did not attribute Trump's failure to overturn the election to "our brilliantly engineered system of constitutional government," but rather to the former president not having the right people in the right positions to pull it off.