Watch Out For A Coup-- The Table Is Set

Hitler wasn't legitimately elected either-- by Nancy Ohanian

Trump is screeching from the rooftops that the November election will be "the greatest election disaster in history," when everyone knows that the greatest election disaster was the one engineered by Vladimir Putin in 2016. "This will be catastrophic for our nation," Trump insisted. "You’ll see it. I’m always right about things like this. I guess I must be, or I wouldn’t be sitting here." He's never right about anything other than about cheating, but this is part of his plan to rig the November outcome-- or to at least create enough chaos and turmoil to make a plausible case for a coup.

Writing yesterday at Politico, David Siders noted that Trump's latest coup threat (prominently pinned to the top of his Twitter account so no one will miss it among all the other gaslighting that account is) "is rapidly coming to the forefront of the presidential campaign, foreshadowing a final stretch roiled not only by the coronavirus and the economy, but by clashes over the nation’s most fundamental democratic norms. Though Trump has no authority to move the election-- an idea he floated Thursday-- Democrats are already bracing for Republican challenges to absentee ballots and at vote counting on Election Day. They have good cause to be prepared: the president has repeatedly raised the prospect of a 'rigged election' and recently declined to say if he’ll accept the results. Trump’s rhetoric points increasingly to the possibility that he will dispute the outcome in a year marked by primary election administration meltdowns-- a prospect that is heightened by his absolute control of state and national party machinery and an attorney general who has amplified Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting fraud."

One veteran of the Clinton administration who has ties to the Trump administration, said, “I think we’re dealing with a person who doesn’t know there are boundaries.”

And this is only the beginning. The issue of the legitimacy of the election promises to become even more prominent once voters begin receiving mail ballots-- in some states as early as September. And it will likely factor in the presidential debates this fall.

New Yorker columnist Susan Glasser was taking Trump's threat very seriously: Trump Is The Election Crisis He Is Warning Us About. She wrote that "On Thursday morning, minutes after the worst U.S. economic data in seventy years were released and barely two hours before an American hero who risked his life for the right to vote was laid to rest, the President of the United States proposed delaying this fall’s election. Amid the coronavirus pandemic and widespread remote voting, Donald Trump said that it would be the most 'INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.' Why shouldn’t the U.S. 'Delay the Election,' he asked, 'until people can properly, securely and safely vote???'"

Maybe he can ask his press secretary or whatever Kayleigh McEnany is. On Friday she told the media that postponing the elections because of COVID "undermines the democratic processes & freedoms" that underpin prosperity. But, apparently, that only applies to China's authoritarian leader oppressing Hong Kong, not to her boss, our authoritarian dips hit oppressing Americans.

Glasser warns that Trump's threat is "not merely one of Trump’s transitory diversions" but that Trump's "attack on the legitimacy of the upcoming election has been intensifying for months, as his poll standing has sunk... [W]e cannot just ignore it when the President threatens to cancel an election. This is the kind of statement that should haunt your dreams. It is wannabe-dictator talk."

The fact that putting off an election is outside the power of the Presidency, that the Constitution clearly prescribes a transition of power on January 20th, 2021, and that it would take an act of Congress to do anything about changing the time, place, and manner of the election is certainly relevant. But there are many ways to cancel elections, and not all of them involve literally failing to hold the balloting. Denying access to the polls, questioning the legitimacy of the results, throwing up legal challenges, forcing voters to stand in long lines: these have all happened, in our lifetimes, in the United States-- we don’t have to look to foreign tyrannies for examples of how to influence elections. So was it really reassuring when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to put the matter to rest by calling the November election date “set in stone”? When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “We should go forward with our election... No way should we ever not hold an election on the day that we have it?”

The President did not back off his words. He did not delete his tweet; instead, he pinned it to the top of his feed for part of the day. After hours of criticism, including from a founder of the Federalist Society, who said that it was ground for his impeachment and removal, Trump’s unconvincing effort at spin was to suggest that it was all a brilliant ploy to get “the very dishonest LameStream Media to finally start talking about the Risks to our Democracy from dangerous Universal Mail-in Voting.” But, in fact, the risk to American democracy is Trump himself.

Later, at a news conference, Trump yammered and stammered his way through questions about whether he really favored a delay. “Do I want to see a day changed? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked election,” he said. He again suggested that the election could be “fraudulent,” “fake,” and “rigged.” It was not a denial. He never disavowed what he had said earlier. On Thursday, Trump careened over a cliff, and the question is, whom is he going to take with him?

A new poll by YouGov for Yahoo News shows that just 7% of voters think Trump will drop out before November but that 52% of voters-- including 51% of white voters, 36% of Republicans, 36 of independent voters and 49% of rural voters-- say Trump will not accept the results of the election if he loses "closely." Also noteworthy is that a majority of Trump voters say they won't accept a narrow loss either if mail-in ballots contribute to Biden’s victory. Mission accomplished.