A Duty To The Country? To The American People? To History? To Your Own Conscience?

 

Like by Nancy Ohanian

Everyone has to make those decisions for him- or herself. If you've heard me on Nicole Sander's or David Feldman's shows recently, you've probably heard me talking about A French Village, and about how each of us may have to decide where we are on a spectrum that goes from enthusiastic collaboration with fascism to violent resistance to it, just as the characters in the TV series were forced to. History Professor Walter Moss noted that Americans, "never having lived under military occupation by a hostile foreign power... have little appreciation for how complex everyday life could become under such conditions. Although most people would like to think that they would resist the Nazi invaders and not cooperate with them in any way, the reality for occupied peoples-- under the Germans and other occupiers-- was usually much more varied. FV depicts this well. Some collaborated; some cooperated partly; only a small minority engaged in active resistance."

It becomes even more nuanced, of course, when it isn't a foreign occupation but a fascist coup we have to decide how to position ourselves for or against. It hasn't come to that yet... but for many ex-Trump staffers, there is a decision they have to make now... or not make. AP reporter Jill Colvin wrote yesterday that "With just weeks left before the Nov. 3 election, now is the moment of truth for current and former Trump administration officials debating whether they, too, should step forward and join the chorus of Republican voices trying to persuade on-the-fence voters to help deny Trump a second term." After all, according to former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, Trump was routinely asking aides to break the law, using his former agency for explicitly political purposes, and wanting to maim and shoot migrants trying to cross the southern border. Taylor said that "Those who witnessed the president’s unfitness for office up close have a moral obligation to share their assessment with the electorate."

Other prominent “formers” have spoken out independently-- or are considering it.

Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote a scathing book in which he said Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed” on how to run the government. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis broke a self-imposed vow of silence in June with an op-ed slamming Trump’s response to racial justice protests. He and former director of national intelligence Dan Coats also were quoted extensively in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward calling Trump dangerous and unfit for office.

But Mattis and Coats, like former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, have refrained from more explicit condemnations, often citing a “duty of silence” or a long tradition of military officials staying out of politics, according to people who’ve spoken with them.

Efforts to draw them out are ongoing. While former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen appears disinclined to step forward, there are hopes that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson might be persuaded to comment and that Coats might be urged to say more. And Kelly, a retired four-star general, is said to be on the fence and torn about the decision.

“I think that he loves his country and he wants to do what’s best for the country,” said Neumann, who served as Kelly’s deputy chief of staff at DHS and is hopeful he’ll speak out, even as others don’t think it will happen.

Officials like Kelly, with long careers and hefty pensions, would seem to have less to lose by doing so than more junior staffers like Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who last week joined the campaign against Trump and said she’d be voting for Biden.

In a video and interviews, Troye has accused Trump of mishandling the coronavirus and being more concerned about his reelection prospects than saving lives. The White House punched back with an aggressive attack campaign aimed at discrediting her through a barrage of statements, interviews and denunciations from the lectern in the White House briefing room.

“These are not profiles in courage, but these are profiles in cowardice,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of Troye and Taylor, dismissing them as part of a “fringe club of, quote, ‘Never Trumpers’ who are desperate for relevancy.”

Taylor said it was clear the White House was “coming after” those who speak out as a warning to others who are considering doing likewise.

“The White House knows if they show this is a very costly thing to do they will scare people from going forward,” he said.

He added that while more people are still considering coming forward, the White House tactics have worked to some extent-- dissuading one senior official who had been on the cusp of speaking out.

Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, stressed that time is running out.

“There will be a cottage industry when Trump is out of office of people who say, ‘Oh, I fought from the inside, I fought the good fight, I kept so many bad things from happening.’” he said. “It doesn’t matter. There’s only one moment in time where it matters. And that’s now.”





...Anthony Scaramucci, who turned against the president last year after a short stint as White House communications director, has also been in discussions with those on the fence and is using every channel he can find to spread his message, including a new anti-Trump documentary.

“We have to keep the pressure on, and so for me it’s a multimedia approach. It’s radio, it’s podcasts, it’s Twitter, it’s television and it’s movies,” he said. “As a citizen all I’ve tried to do is provide a surgeon general’s warning... This guy is a threat to the institutions of democracy, and I worked for him and I think it’s important to send a signal to other people,” he said, that it’s OK to speak out.

And a lot is going to fall on Biden's shoulders, shoulder's I'm afraid not up to the task. In his NY Times OpEd yesterday, How To Debate Someone Who Lies, psychiatrist Richard Friedman offered Biden some advice: "Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up, you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the original lie.) Instead, Mr. Biden should use more powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive-- and also tell the audience that the president is a dishonest narrator. The first weapon may be the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns confronted a 'white power' march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read 'wife power' and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would have served the interests of the racists."

I doubt Biden would dare, but he should only refer to Trump as "Donald," which drives him up the wall and would cause a complete crackup tomorrow night.

Trump Biden Debate by Nancy Ohanian

Last night I was talking with Mike Siegel, the progressive working to replace Trump ally Michael McCaul in a gerrymandered central Texas district. Defeating Trumpist enablers like McCaul is what's going to make all the difference in 2021. Mike told me his team is "this close to defeating one of the wealthiest and most reactionary members of Congress because we are running a people-powered, populist campaign that speaks to the needs of the people in this moment of overlapping crises. We are fighting for universal health care during a pandemic, a Green New Deal in response to massive unemployment and climate disasters, a renewed Voting Rights Act to battle massive voter suppression, and other programs to guarantee equality, dignity and justice for all. This poll will help us raise additional resources and win new sources of support, all in support of a transformational movement to flip a seat and usher in a new era of representation that is close to the ground and responsive to the people."

YES!!! We're in! Please contribute to Mike's campaign here. But how does Mike know he's close to beating McCaul? Once you leave Austin, it's a pretty red district. He shared a polling memo with me and said it was ok to run it on DWT. These are the key findings-- and from a relatively conservative sample of voters:

The TX-10 rematch between Mike Siegel and Michael McCaul is very close as we head into the final 5 weeks of the 2020 election. There has been notable movement in the race since our previous poll conducted at the beginning of August. Siegel has gained 4 points during these past 7 weeks, and now trails McCaul 45 to 43 percent (with Libertarian Roy Eriksen receiving 6 percent). The 2-point gap also reflects a narrowing of the 2018 result when McCaul won by 4 points, and Siegel is well-positioned to continue making gains as voters engage and the statewide environment further improves for Joe Biden.

The movement in the Congressional race is consistent with movement taking place at the top of the ticket in this rapidly changing district. In fact, TX-10 is a reflection of what is happening around the country as voters of color and college educated voters are forming a powerful Democratic coalition that is transforming districts that have been held for years by Republicans and are now becoming Democratic. While Obama lost the district by 21 points to Romney in 2012, Clinton cut that margin to 9 points against Trump in 2016, and O’Rourke tied against Cruz in 2018. In our latest poll, Biden is tied with Trump and has gained 4 points since August.

The following findings are based on a survey of 400 registered voters who are likely to cast ballots in the November election. The survey was conducted September 21-September 24, 2020 with live dialers to both landlines and cell phones, and is subject to a margin of error of +/- 4.9 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence interval.

Key Findings:

• The political environment has improved for Democrats over the past 7 weeks, and the Presidential and House races are shifting toward Biden and Siegel. Biden gained 4 points in his race with Trump, and Siegel gained 4 points in his race with McCaul. Biden is now tied with Trump in the district, and Siegel is down by 2 points against McCaul (45 to 43 percent).
• Siegel’s coalition reflects the power of the political and demographic changes in the district. TX-10 has a very diverse electorate that is comprised of white (69 percent), Hispanic (13 percent), African American (11 percent), and AAPI voters (3 percent). Siegel is winning by large margins among voters of color, as well as with white college educated voters.

• College educated: Siegel 48 / McCaul 42
• College educated women: Siegel 57 / McCaul 35
• Voters of color: Siegel 60 / McCaul 26
• Independents: Siegel 46 / McCaul 36

• Siegel demonstrates his durability by maintaining positive favorability amid McCaul launching television and digital ads attacking him. Siegel has a +6 favorability rating (32 percent favorable / 26 percent unfavorable), which is particularly notable given the advertising on broadcast television that McCaul has run against him prior to Siegel launching his own television campaign. Siegel entered this race with high name ID for a challenger, which has helped him sustain his strength against McCaul’s efforts.
• The bottom line: this is a very close race, and real movement is taking place in a state undergoing profound political change. The survey shows that healthcare remains a very powerful issue, just as it had been in 2018 when two Texas districts flipped to Democrats and several others – such the Siegel-McCaul race – were decided by only a few points. McCaul is particularly vulnerable on his votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and voters express strong opposition to his healthcare positions that continue in the middle of this pandemic. Once again, Siegel is in a neck-and-neck race with McCaul-- and this time with a stronger wind at his back-- and TX-10 is a serious pick-up opportunity for Democrats.

As Rich Benjamin reminded Intercept readers yesterday "In order to win this presidential contest, liberals need to accept that Trump supporters do not care if he were to scrap millions of mail-in votes or to welcome, and even solicit, Russian interference for his cause. Not only do some Trump supporters understand that he is an autocrat who will cheat the rules to stay in power, that’s precisely what they like about him. The left should understand that many Trump supporters inherently believe that they would fare better under an autocratic system of white supremacy than under a multiracial democracy... Questioning all that fervent, widespread Trump support would force them to question how their neighbor, their cousin, their uncle, their co-worker, their favorite vendor is complicit to a regime that prioritizes their well-being and social privilege as white people, second only to Trump’s greed. To acknowledge your aunt’s or your own complicity in Trump’s nationalist autocracy might make you feel accountable for what this country is. And that accountability to the problem damns you to an accountability to the solution... Wealth redistribution to the top, privatization, extreme incoming inequality, and ruling kleptocracy: Such are the hallmarks of this regime’s totalitarian capitalism, one that exploits catastrophe to further undercut a fair economy, a robust middle class, and truly representative democracy."

Mark Your Calendar: The Interregnum Ends On December 8th-- We Should Know If America Is Still A Democracy Or Not On That Day

 

I hope you read yesterday's essay by Liam O'Mara, professor of the history of ideas and Riverside County congressional candidate about the intersection fascism and Trumpism. A few hours later, Politico Magazine published a similar essay by author (On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History) Matthew MacWilliams, Trump Is an Authoritarian. So Are Millions of Americans. He talks about a topic I think of constantly: how so many of our fellow citizens are "predisposed to authoritarianism... [T]he single factor that predicted whether a Republican primary voter supported Trump over his rivals," he wrote, "was an inclination to authoritarianism." His research shows that something like 18% of Americans are "highly disposed to authoritarianism... When activated by fear, authoritarian-leaning Americans are predisposed to trade civil liberties for strongman solutions to secure law and order; and they are ready to strip civil liberties from those defined as the 'other'-- a far cry from the image of America as a country built on a shared commitment to liberty and democratic governance."

American authoritarians, compared to non-authoritarians, are more likely to agree that our country should be governed by a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections. They are more likely to support limiting the freedom of the press and agree that the media is the enemy of the people rather than a valuable independent institution. They are also more likely to think the President should have the power to limit the voice and vote of opposition parties, while believing that those who disagree with them are a threat to our country-- a concerning trend as we head to the polls this year.

American authoritarians fear diversity. They are more likely to agree that increasing racial, religious, and ethnic diversity is a clear and present threat to national security. They are more fearful of people of other races, and agree with the statement that “sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.”

...[This] explains, in part, how President Trump can remain popular with his base despite any number of policies that would have been considered unconstitutional, anti-American and perhaps even criminal in the past by members of both parties. He has sent paramilitary forces from the Department of Homeland Security to quell nonviolent protests, looked the other way when a foreign power meddles in American elections, celebrated the wounding of a journalist by police as “a beautiful sight,” and spent an election year casting doubt on the very basis of our democracy, the electoral system, rather than working to protect it-- all without eroding his main base of support.

...Our nation’s egalitarian, democratic aspirations have always competed for supremacy with a darker tradition rooted in authority, obedience and the hegemonic enforcement of majoritarian interests and norms. But it has never confronted a challenge like this. Trumpism is McCarthyism on steroids, and its full expression menaces the stability of our democracy. A country where authoritarian ideals are ascendant, and remain ascendant, is no longer a democracy. It is on the road to fascism, or what some now call euphemistically illiberal democracy.

BUT... MacWilliams wanted to be clear about something-- the need to follow the money. He wrote that "our fellow Americans, including our authoritarian neighbors, are not the enemy. The enemies of democracy are self-interested men and women who exploit fear to secure and expand their power. Fear activates the reservoir of intolerance that resides across ideological and partisan divides. And it dupes some of us into demanding uniformity over diversity, denigrating our neighbors, and turning our back on the very motto inscribed on the Great Seal of our Republican in 1782: e pluribus unum... In November, we have a choice: freedom or fear. If we choose freedom, our work is not done. Once stirred and embraced as deeply as it has been over the last four years, authoritarianism will not simply dissipate with the results of an election. We need to take action personally, institutionally and socially to rebuild the guardrails of democracy that protect our Republic from careening off the road into the gutter."

Yesterday's must, must, must read essay was a pre-release of The Atlantic's November cover story, The Election That Could Break America, by Barton Gellman. The teaser: "If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?"

Gellman wrote that "The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery... [S]tudents of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights."

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”

...The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.

“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.





Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

Maybe you hesitate. Is it a fact that if Trump loses, he will reject defeat, come what may? Do we know that? Technically, you feel obliged to point out, the proposition is framed in the future conditional, and prophecy is no man’s gift, and so forth. With all due respect, that is pettifoggery. We know this man. We cannot afford to pretend.

Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously-- to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.

Pathology may exert the strongest influence on Trump’s choices during the Interregnum. Well-supported arguments, some of them in this magazine, have made the case that Trump fits the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy and narcissism. Either disorder, by its medical definition, would render him all but incapable of accepting defeat.

Conventional commentary has trouble facing this issue squarely. Journalists and opinion makers feel obliged to add disclaimers when asking “what if” Trump loses and refuses to concede. “The scenarios all seem far-fetched,” Politico wrote, quoting a source who compared them to science fiction. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, writing in The Atlantic in February, could not bring herself to treat the risk as real: “That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about.”

But Trump’s supporters aren’t the only people who think extra­constitutional thoughts aloud. Trump has been asked directly, during both this campaign and the last, whether he will respect the election results. He left his options brazenly open. “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. Okay?” he told moderator Chris Wallace in the third presidential debate of 2016. Wallace took another crack at him in an interview for Fox News this past July. “I have to see,” Trump said. “Look, you-- I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

How will he decide when the time comes? Trump has answered that, actually. At a rally in Delaware, Ohio, in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, he began his performance with a signal of breaking news. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a major announcement today. I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election.” He paused, then made three sharp thrusts of his forefinger to punctuate the next words: “If … I … win!” Only then did he stretch his lips in a simulacrum of a smile.

...All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede-- his mere denial of defeat-- will have cascading effects.

...We have no precedent or procedure to end this election if Biden seems to carry the Electoral College but Trump refuses to concede. We will have to invent one.

Trump is, by some measures, a weak authoritarian. He has the mouth but not the muscle to work his will with assurance. Trump denounced Special Counsel Robert Mueller but couldn’t fire him. He accused his foes of treason but couldn’t jail them. He has bent the bureaucracy and flouted the law but not broken free altogether of their restraints.

A proper despot would not risk the inconvenience of losing an election. He would fix his victory in advance, avoiding the need to overturn an incorrect outcome. Trump cannot do that.

But he’s not powerless to skew the proceedings-- first on Election Day and then during the Interregnum. He could disrupt the vote count where it’s going badly, and if that does not work, try to bypass it altogether. On Election Day, Trump and his allies can begin by suppressing the Biden vote.

There is no truth to be found in dancing around this point, either: Trump does not want Black people to vote. (He said as much in 2017-- on Martin Luther King Day, no less-- to a voting-­rights group co-founded by King, according to a recording leaked to Politico.) He does not want young people or poor people to vote. He believes, with reason, that he is less likely to win reelection if turnout is high at the polls. This is not a “both sides” phenomenon. In present-day politics, we have one party that consistently seeks advantage in depriving the other party’s adherents of the right to vote.

Just under a year ago, Justin Clark gave a closed-door talk in Wisconsin to a select audience of Republican lawyers. He thought he was speaking privately, but someone had brought a recording device. He had a lot to say about Election Day operations, or “EDO.”

At the time, Clark was a senior lieutenant with Trump’s re­election campaign; in July, he was promoted to deputy campaign manager. “Wisconsin’s the state that is going to tip this one way or the other … So it makes EDO really, really, really important,” he said. He put the mission bluntly: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes … [Democrats’] voters are all in one part of the state, so let’s start playing offense a little bit. And that’s what you’re going to see in 2020. That’s what’s going to be markedly different. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.” (Clark later claimed that his remarks had been misconstrued, but his explanation made no sense in context.)

Of all the favorable signs for Trump’s Election Day operations, Clark explained, “first and foremost is the consent decree’s gone.” He was referring to a court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The expiration of that order was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” Clark said.

His audience of lawyers knew what he meant. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, “We’re going to have sheriffs and we’re going to have law enforcement and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys” to keep close watch on the polls. For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.”

Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents. An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.

Nonetheless, Republicans and their allies have litigated scores of cases in the name of preventing fraud in this year’s election. State by state, they have sought-- with some success-- to purge voter rolls, tighten rules on provisional votes, uphold voter-­identification requirements, ban the use of ballot drop boxes, reduce eligibility to vote by mail, discard mail-in ballots with technical flaws, and outlaw the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. The intent and effect is to throw away votes in large numbers.

These legal maneuvers are drawn from an old Republican playbook. What’s different during this cycle, aside from the ferocity of the efforts, is the focus on voting by mail. The president has mounted a relentless assault on postal balloting at the exact moment when the coronavirus pandemic is driving tens of millions of voters to embrace it.

This year’s presidential election will see voting by mail on a scale unlike any before—some states are anticipating a tenfold increase in postal balloting. A 50-state survey by the Washington Post found that 198 million eligible voters, or at least 84 percent, will have the option to vote by mail.

Trump has denounced mail-in voting often and urgently, airing fantastical nightmares. One day he tweeted, “mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud and abuse. it will also lead to the end of our great republican party. we can never let this tragedy befall our nation.” Another day he pointed to an imaginary-- and easily debunked-- scenario of forgery from abroad: “rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. it will be the scandal of our times!”

Me The People by Nancy Ohanian

By late summer Trump was declaiming against mail-in voting an average of nearly four times a day-- a pace he had reserved in the past for existential dangers such as impeachment and the Mueller investigation: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.”

Summer also brought reports that the U.S. Postal Service, the government’s most popular agency, was besieged from within by Louis DeJoy, Trump’s new postmaster general and a major Republican donor. Service cuts, upper-management restructuring, and chaotic operational changes were producing long delays. At one sorting facility, the Los Angeles Times reported, “workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.”

In the name of efficiency, the Postal Service began de­commissioning 10 percent of its mail-sorting machines. Then came word that the service would no longer treat ballots as first-class mail unless some states nearly tripled the postage they paid, from 20 to 55 cents an envelope. DeJoy denied any intent to slow down voting by mail, and the Postal Service withdrew the plan under fire from critics.

If there were doubts about where Trump stood on these changes, he resolved them at an August 12 news conference. Democrats were negotiating for a $25 billion increase in postal funding and an additional $3.6 billion in election assistance to states. “They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”

What are we to make of all this?

In part, Trump’s hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general. Democrats, he said on Fox & Friends at the end of March, want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Some Republicans see Trump’s vendetta as self-defeating. “It to me appears entirely irrational,” Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, told me. “The Trump campaign and RNC and by fiat their state party organizations are engaging in suppressing their own voter turnout,” including Republican seniors who have voted by mail for years.

But Trump’s crusade against voting by mail is a strategically sound expression of his plan for the Interregnum. The president is not actually trying to prevent mail-in balloting altogether, which he has no means to do. He is discrediting the practice and starving it of resources, signaling his supporters to vote in person, and preparing the ground for post–Election Night plans to contest the results. It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.

Voting by mail does not favor either party “during normal times,” according to a team of researchers at Stanford, but that phrase does a lot of work. Their findings, which were published in June, did not take into account a president whose words alone could produce a partisan skew. Trump’s systematic predictions of fraud appear to have had a powerful effect on Republican voting intentions. In Georgia, for example, a Monmouth University poll in late July found that 60 percent of Democrats but only 28 percent of Republicans were likely to vote by mail. In the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, hundreds of thousands more Democrats than Republicans have requested mail-in ballots.

Trump, in other words, has created a proxy to distinguish friend from foe. Republican lawyers around the country will find this useful when litigating the count. Playing by the numbers, they can treat ballots cast by mail as hostile, just as they do ballots cast in person by urban and college-town voters. Those are the ballots they will contest.

The battle space of the Interregnum, if trends hold true, will be shaped by a phenomenon known as the “blue shift.”

Edward Foley, an Ohio State professor of constitutional law and a specialist in election law, pioneered research on the blue shift. He found a previously un­remarked-upon pattern in the overtime count—the canvass after Election Night that tallies late-reporting precincts, un­processed absentee votes, and provisional ballots cast by voters whose eligibility needed to be confirmed. For most of American history, the overtime count produced no predictably partisan effect. In any given election year, some states shifted red in the canvass after Election Day and some shifted blue, but the shifts were seldom large enough to matter.

Two things began to change about 20 years ago. The overtime count got bigger, and it trended more and more blue. In an updated paper this year, Foley and his co-author, Charles Stewart III of MIT, said they could not fully explain why the shift favors Democrats. (Some factors: Urban returns take longer to count, and most provisional ballots are cast by young, low-income, or mobile voters, who lean blue.) During overtime in 2012, Barack Obama strengthened his winning margins in swing states like Florida (with a net increase of 27,281 votes), Michigan (60,695), Ohio (65,459), and Pennsylvania (26,146). Obama would have won the presidency anyway, but shifts of that magnitude could have changed the outcomes of many a closer contest. Hillary Clinton picked up tens of thousands of overtime votes in 2016, but not enough to save her.

The blue shift has yet to decide a presidential election, but it upended the Arizona Senate race in 2018. Republican Martha McSally seemed to have victory in her grasp with a lead of 15,403 votes the day after Election Day. Canvassing in the days that followed swept the Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, into the Senate with “a gigantic overtime gain of 71,303 votes,” Foley wrote.

It was Florida, however, that seized Trump’s attention that year. On Election Night, Republicans were leading in tight contests for governor and U.S. senator. As the blue shift took effect, Ron DeSantis watched his lead shrink by 18,416 votes in the governor’s race. Rick Scott’s Senate margin fell by 20,231. By early morning on November 12, six days after Election Day, Trump had seen enough. “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted, baselessly. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-- ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Trump was panicked enough by the blue shift in somebody else’s election to fabricate allegations of fraud. In this election, when his own name is on the ballot, the blue shift could be the largest ever observed. Mail-in votes require more time to count even in a normal year, and this year there will be tens of millions more of them than in any election before. Many states forbid the processing of early-arriving mail ballots before Election Day; some allow late-arriving ballots to be counted.

Trump’s instinct as a spectator in 2018-- to stop the count-- looks more like strategy this year. “There are results that come in Election Night,” a legal adviser to Trump’s national campaign, who would not agree to be quoted by name, told me. “There’s an expectation in the country that there will be winners and losers called. If the Election Night results get changed because of the ballots counted after Election Day, you have the basic ingredients for a shitstorm.”

There is no “if” about it, I said. The count is bound to change. “Yeah,” the adviser agreed, and canvassing will produce more votes for Biden than for Trump. Democrats will insist on dragging out the canvass for as long as it takes to count every vote. The resulting conflict, the adviser said, will be on their heads.

“They are asking for it,” he said. “They’re trying to maximize their electoral turnout, and they think there are no downsides to that.” He added, “There will be a count on Election Night, that count will shift over time, and the results when the final count is given will be challenged as being inaccurate, fraudulent-- pick your word.”

The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. Josh Mendelsohn, the CEO of the Democratic data-modeling firm Hawkfish, calls this scenario “the red mirage.” The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said.

Election lawyers speak of a “margin of litigation” in close races. The tighter the count in early reports, and the more votes remaining to count, the greater the incentive to fight in court. If there were such a thing as an Election Administrator’s Prayer, as some of them say only half in jest, it would go, “Lord, let there be a landslide.”

Could a landslide spare us conflict in the Interregnum? In theory, yes. But the odds are not promising.

It is hard to imagine a Trump lead so immense on Election Night that it places him out of Biden’s reach. Unless the swing states manage to count most of their mail-in ballots that night, which will be all but impossible for some of them, the expectation of a blue shift will keep Biden fighting on. A really big Biden lead on Election Night, on the other hand, could leave Trump without plausible hope of catching up. If this happens, we may see it first in Florida. But this scenario is awfully optimistic for Biden, considering the GOP advantage among in-person voters, and in any case Trump will not concede defeat. This early in the Interregnum, he will have practical options to keep the contest alive.

Both parties are bracing for a torrent of emergency motions in state and federal courts. They have already been skirmishing from courthouse to courthouse all year in more than 40 states, and Election Day will begin a culminating phase of legal combat.

Mail-in ballots will have plenty of flaws for the Trump lawyers to seize upon. Voting by mail is more complicated than voting in person, and technical errors are common­place at each step. If voters supply a new address, or if they write a different version of their name (for example, by shortening Benjamin to Ben), or if their signature has changed over the years, or if they print their name on the signature line, or if they fail to seal the ballot inside an inner security envelope, their votes may not count. With in-person voting, a poll worker in the precinct can resolve small errors like these, for instance by directing a voter to the correct signature line, but people voting by mail may have no opportunity to address them.





During the primaries this spring, Republican lawyers did dry runs for the November vote at county election offices around the country. An internal memo prepared by an attorney named J. Matthew Wolfe for the Pennsylvania Republican Party in June reported on one such exercise. Wolfe, along with another Republican lawyer and a member of the Trump campaign, watched closely but did not intervene as election commissioners in Philadelphia canvassed mail-in and provisional votes. Wolfe cataloged imperfections, taking note of objections that his party could have raised.

There were missing signatures and partial signatures and signatures placed in the wrong spot. There were names on the inner security envelopes, which are supposed to be unmarked, and ballots without security envelopes at all. Some envelopes arrived “without a postmark or with an illegible postmark,” Wolfe wrote. (Watch for postmarks to become the hanging chads of 2020.) Some voters wrote their birthdate where a signature date belonged, and others put down “an impossible date, like a date after the primary election.”

Some of the commissioners’ decisions “were clear violations of the direction in and language of the election code,” Wolfe wrote. He recommended that “someone connected with the party review each application and each mail ballot envelope” in November. That is exactly the plan.

Legal teams on both sides are planning for simultaneous litigation, on the scale of Florida during the 2000 election, in multiple battleground states. “My money would be on Texas, Georgia, and Florida” to be trouble spots, Myrna Pérez, the director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center, told me.

There are endless happenstances in any election for lawyers to exploit. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, not far from Wolfe’s Philadelphia experiment, the county Republican committee gathered surveillance-style photographs of purportedly suspicious goings-on at a ballot drop box during the primary. In one sequence, a county employee is described as placing “unsecured ballots” in the trunk of a car. In another, a security guard is said to be “disconnecting the generator which supplies power to the security cameras.” The photos could mean anything-- ­it’s impossible to tell, out of context-- but they are exactly the kind of ersatz evidence that is sure to go viral in the early days of the Interregnum.

The electoral combat will not confine itself to the courtroom. Local election adjudicators can expect to be named and doxed and pilloried as agents of George Soros or antifa. Aggressive crowds of self-proclaimed ballot guardians will be spoiling to reenact the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, when demonstrators paid by the Bush campaign staged a violent protest that physically prevented canvassers from completing a recount in Miami-Dade County.

Things like this have already happened, albeit on a smaller scale than we can expect in November. With Trump we must also ask: What might a ruthless incumbent do that has never been tried before?

Suppose that caravans of Trump supporters, adorned in Second Amendment accessories, converge on big-city polling places on Election Day. They have come, they say, to investigate reports on social media of voter fraud. Counter­protesters arrive, fistfights break out, shots are fired, and voters flee or cannot reach the polls.

Then suppose the president declares an emergency. Federal personnel in battle dress, staged nearby in advance, move in to restore law and order and secure the balloting. Amid ongoing clashes, they stay to monitor the canvass. They close the streets that lead to the polls. They take custody of uncounted ballots in order to preserve evidence of fraud.

“The president can’t cancel the election, but what if he says, ‘We’re in an emergency, and we’re shutting down this area for a period of time because of the violence taking place’?” says Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. If you are in Trump’s camp and heedless of boundaries, he said, “what I would expect is you’re not going to do one or two of these things-- you’ll do as many as you can.”

There are variations of the nightmare. The venues of intervention could be post offices. The predicate could be a putative intelligence report on forged ballots sent from China.

This is speculation, of course. But none of these scenarios is far removed from things the president has already done or threatened to do. Trump dispatched the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and sent Department of Homeland Security forces to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle during summertime protests for racial justice, on the slender pretext of protecting federal buildings. He said he might invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and “deploy the United States military” to “Democrat-run cities” in order to protect “life and property.” The federal government has little basis to intercede during elections, which are largely governed by state law and administered by about 10,500 local jurisdictions, but no one familiar with Attorney General Bill Barr’s view of presidential power should doubt that he can find authority for Trump.

Prohibited Acts by Nancy Ohanian

With every day that passes after November 3, the president and his allies can hammer home the message that the legitimate tabulation is over and the Democrats are refusing to honor the results. Trump has been flogging this horse already for months. In July he tweeted, “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”

Does it matter what Trump says? It is tempting to liken a vote count to the score at a sporting event. The losing coach can belly­ache all he likes, but when the umpire makes the call, the game is over. An important thing to know about the Interregnum is that there is no umpire-- no singular authority who can decide the contest and lay it to rest. There is a series of lesser officiants, each confined in jurisdiction and tangled in opaque rules.

Trump’s strategy for this phase of the Interregnum will be a play for time as much as a concerted attempt to squelch the count and disqualify Biden votes. The courts may eventually weigh in. But by then, the forum of decision may already have moved elsewhere.

The Interregnum allots 35 days for the count and its attendant lawsuits to be resolved. On the 36th day, December 8, an important deadline arrives.

At this stage, the actual tabulation of the vote becomes less salient to the outcome. That sounds as though it can’t be right, but it is: The combatants, especially Trump, will now shift their attention to the appointment of presidential electors.

December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.

We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

To a modern democratic sensibility, discarding the popular vote for partisan gain looks uncomfortably like a coup, whatever license may be found for it in law. Would Republicans find that position disturbing enough to resist? Would they cede the election before resorting to such a ploy? Trump’s base would exact a high price for that betrayal, and by this point party officials would be invested in a narrative of fraud.

The Trump-campaign legal adviser I spoke with told me the push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will. Once committed to the position that the overtime count has been rigged, the adviser said, state lawmakers will want to judge for themselves what the voters intended.

“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser said. Democrats, he added, have exposed themselves to this stratagem by creating the conditions for a lengthy overtime.

“If you have this notion,” the adviser said, “that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days-- in some states a week, 10 days-- then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”

When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign about plans to circumvent the vote and appoint loyal electors, and about other strategies discussed in the article, the deputy national press secretary did not directly address the questions. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.”

In Pennsylvania, three Republican leaders told me they had already discussed the direct appointment of electors among themselves, and one said he had discussed it with Trump’s national campaign.

“I’ve mentioned it to them, and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman, told me. “I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” He added that everyone’s preference is to get a swift and accurate count. “If the process, though, is flawed, and has significant flaws, our public may lose faith and confidence” in the election’s integrity.

Jake Corman, the state’s Senate majority leader, preferred to change the subject, emphasizing that he hoped a clean vote count would produce a final tally on Election Night. “The longer it goes on, the more opinions and the more theories and the more conspiracies [are] created,” he told me. If controversy persists as the safe-harbor date nears, he allowed, the legislature will have no choice but to appoint electors. “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law.”

Republicans control both legislative chambers in the six most closely contested battleground states. Of those, Arizona and Florida have Republican governors, too. In Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the governors are Democrats.

Foley, the Ohio State election scholar, has mapped the ripple effects if Republican legislators were to appoint Trump electors in defiance of the vote in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Democratic governors would respond by certifying the official count, a routine exercise of their authority, and they would argue that legislators could not lawfully choose different electors after the vote had taken place. Their “certificates of ascertainment,” dispatched to the National Archives, would say that their states had appointed electors committed to Biden. Each competing set of electors would have the imprimatur of one branch of state government.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who oversees elections, is a Democrat. She could assert her own power to certify the voting results and forward a slate of Biden electors. Even in Florida, which has unified Republican rule, electors pledged to Biden could meet and certify their own votes in hope of triggering a “controversy or contest” that would leave their state’s outcome to Congress. Much the same thing almost happened during the Florida recount battle of 2000. Republican Governor Jeb Bush certified electors for his brother, George W. Bush, on November 26 of that year, while litigation of the recount was still under way. Gore’s chief lawyer, Ronald Klain, responded by booking a room in the old Florida capitol building for Democratic electors to cast rival ballots for Gore. Only Gore’s concession, five days before the Electoral College vote, mooted that plan.

In any of these scenarios, the Electoral College would convene on December 14 without a consensus on who had legitimate claims to cast the deciding votes.

Rival slates of electors could hold mirror-image meetings in Harris­burg, Lansing, Tallahassee, or Phoenix, casting the same electoral votes on opposite sides. Each slate would transmit its ballots, as the Constitution provides, “to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.” The next move would belong to Vice President Mike Pence.

This would be a genuine constitutional crisis, the first but not the last of the Interregnum. “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen,” Norm Ornstein says.

Two men are claiming the presidency. The next occasion to settle the matter is more than three weeks away.

January 6 comes just after the new Congress is sworn in. Control of the Senate will be crucial to the presidency now.

"And I Won't Lose One Voter" by Nancy Ohanian

Pence, as president of the Senate, would hold in his hands two conflicting electoral certificates from each of several swing states. The Twelfth Amendment says only this about what happens next: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

Note the passive voice. Who does the counting? Which certificates are counted?

The Trump team would take the position that the constitutional language leaves those questions to the vice president. This means that Pence has the unilateral power to announce his own reelection, and a second term for Trump. Democrats and legal scholars would denounce the self-dealing and point out that Congress filled the gaps in the Twelfth Amendment with the Electoral Count Act, which provides instructions for how to resolve this kind of dispute. The trouble with the instructions is that they are widely considered, in Foley’s words, to be “convoluted and impenetrable,” “confusing and ugly,” and “one of the strangest pieces of statutory language ever enacted by Congress.”

If the Interregnum is a contest in search of an umpire, it now has 535 of them, and a rule book that no one is sure how to read. The presiding officer is one of the players on the field.

Foley has produced a 25,000-word study in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal that maps out the paths the ensuing fight could take if only one state’s electoral votes are in play.

If Democrats win back the Senate and hold the House, then all roads laid out in the Electoral Count Act lead eventually to a Biden presidency. The reverse applies if Republicans hold the Senate and unexpectedly win back the House. But if Congress remains split, there are conditions in which no decisive outcome is possible-- no result that has clear force of law. Each party could cite a plausible reading of the rules in which its candidate has won. There is no tie-breaking vote.

How can it be that Congress slips into unbreakable deadlock? The law is a labyrinth in these parts, too intricate to map in a magazine article, but I can sketch one path.

Suppose Pennsylvania alone sends rival slates of electors, and their 20 votes will decide the presidency.

One reading of the Electoral Count Act says that Congress must recognize the electors certified by the governor, who is a Democrat, unless the House and Senate agree otherwise. The House will not agree otherwise, and so Biden wins Pennsylvania and the White House. But Pence pounds his gavel and rules against this reading of the law, instead favoring another, which holds that Congress must discard both contested slates of electors. The garbled statute can plausibly be read either way.

With Pennsylvania’s electors disqualified, 518 electoral votes remain. If Biden holds a narrow lead among them, he again claims the presidency, because he has “the greatest number of votes,” as the Twelfth Amendment prescribes. But Republicans point out that the same amendment requires “a majority of the whole number of electors.” The whole number of electors, Pence rules, is 538, and Biden is short of the required 270.

On this argument, no one has attained the presidency, and the decision is thrown to the House, with one vote per state. If the current partisan balance holds, 26 out of 50 votes will be for Trump.

Before Pence can move on from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, which is next on the alphabetical list as Congress counts the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expels all senators from the floor of her chamber. Now Pence is prevented from completing the count “in the presence of” the House, as the Constitution requires. Pelosi announces plans to stall indefinitely. If the count is still incomplete on Inauguration Day, the speaker herself will become acting president.

Pelosi prepares to be sworn in on January 20 unless Pence reverses his ruling and accepts that Biden won. Pence does not budge. He reconvenes the Senate in another venue, with House Republicans squeezing in, and purports to complete the count, making Trump the president-elect. Three people now have supportable claims to the Oval Office.

There are other paths in the labyrinth. Many lead to dead ends.

This is the next constitutional crisis, graver than the one three weeks before, because the law and the Constitution provide for no other authority to consult. The Supreme Court may yet intervene, but it may also shy away from another traumatizing encounter with a fundamentally political question.

Sixty-four days have passed since the election. Stalemate reigns. Two weeks remain until Inauguration Day.

Foley, who foresaw this impasse, knows of no solution. He cannot tell you how we avoid it under current law, or how it ends. It is not so much, at this point, a question of law. It is a question of power. Trump has possession of the White House. How far will he push boundaries to keep it, and who will push back? It is the same question the president has posed since the day he took office.

I hoped to gain some insight from a series of exercises conducted this summer by a group of former elected officials, academics, political strategists, and lawyers. In four days of simulations, the Transition Integrity Project modeled the election and its aftermath in an effort to find pivot points where things could fall apart.

They found plenty. Some of the scenarios included dueling slates of electors of the kind I have described. In one version it was the Democratic governor of Michigan who first resorted to appointing electors, after Trump ordered the National Guard to halt the vote count and a Trump-friendly guardsman destroyed mail-in ballots. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair in 2016, led a Biden team in another scenario that was prepared to follow Trump to the edge of civil war, encouraging three blue states to threaten secession. Norm-breaking begat norm-breaking. (Clinton herself, in an August interview for Showtime’s The Circus, caught the same spirit. “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances,” she said.)

A great deal has been written about the proceedings, including a firsthand account from my colleague David Frum. But the coverage had a puzzling gap. None of the stories fully explained how the contest ended. I wanted to know who took the oath of office.

I called Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown professor who co-founded the project. Unnervingly, she had no answers for me. She did not know how the story turned out. In half of the simulations, the participants did not make it as far as Inauguration Day.

“We got to points in the scenarios where there was a constitutional impasse, no clear means of resolution in sight, street-level violence,” she said. “I think in one of them we had Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and we had troops in the streets... Five hours had gone by and we sort of said, ‘Okay, we’re done.’ ” She added: “Once things were clearly off the rails, there was no particular benefit to seeing exactly how far off they would go.”

“Our goal in doing this was to try to identify intervention moments, to identify moments where we could then look back and say, ‘What would have changed this? What would have kept it from getting this bad?’ ” Brooks said. The project didn’t make much progress there. No lessons were learned about how to restrain a lawless president once a conflict was under way, no alternative moves devised to stave off disaster. “I suppose you could say we were in terra incognita: no one could predict what would happen anymore,” Brooks told me in a follow-up email.

The political system may no longer be strong enough to preserve its integrity. It’s a mistake to take for granted that election boards and state legislatures and Congress are capable of drawing lines that ensure a legitimate vote and an orderly transfer of power. We may have to find a way to draw those lines ourselves.

There are reforms to consider some other day, when an election is not upon us. Small ones, like clearing up the murky parts of the Electoral Count Act. Big ones, like doing away with the Electoral College. Obvious ones, like appropriating money to help cash-starved election authorities upgrade their operations in order to speed up and secure the count on Election Day.

Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing. Expecting other­wise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

If you are a voter, think about voting in person after all. More than half a million postal votes were rejected in this year’s primaries, even without Trump trying to suppress them. If you are at relatively low risk for COVID-19, volunteer to work at the polls. If you know people who are open to reason, spread word that it is normal for the results to keep changing after Election Night. If you manage news coverage, anticipate extra­constitutional measures, and position reporters and crews to respond to them. If you are an election administrator, plan for contingencies you never had to imagine before. If you are a mayor, consider how to deploy your police to ward off interlopers with bad intent. If you are a law-enforcement officer, protect the freedom to vote. If you are a legislator, choose not to participate in chicanery. If you are a judge on the bench in a battleground state, refresh your acquaintance with election case law. If you have a place in the military chain of command, remember your duty to turn aside unlawful orders. If you are a civil servant, know that your country needs you more than ever to do the right thing when you’re asked to do otherwise.

Take agency. An election cannot be stolen unless the American people, at some level, acquiesce. One thing Brooks has been thinking about since her exercise came to an end is the power of peaceful protest on a grand scale. “We had players on both sides attempting to mobilize their supporters to turn out in large numbers, and we didn’t really have a good mechanism for deciding, did that make a difference? What kind of difference did that make?” she said. “It left some with some big questions about what if you had Orange Revolution–style mass protest sustained over weeks. What effects would that have?”

Only once, in 1877, has the Interregnum brought the country to the brink of true collapse. We will find no model in that episode for us now.

Four states sent rival slates of electors to Congress in the 1876 presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When a special tribunal blessed the electors for Hayes, Democrats began parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct the electoral count in Congress. Their plan was to run out the clock all the way to Inauguration Day, when the Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, would have to step down.

Not until two days before Grant’s term expired did Tilden give in. His concession was based on a repugnant deal for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they were protecting the rights of emancipated Black people. But that was not Tilden’s only inducement.

The threat of military force was in the air. Grant let it be known that he was prepared to declare martial law in New York, where rumor had it that Tilden planned to be sworn in, and to back the inauguration of Hayes with uniformed troops.

That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.

Neofascism and the Trump Phenomenon-- A Guest Post By Liam O'Mara

 

Liam O'Mara is a history professor running for a Riverside County congressional seat held by Trump enabler and crook Ken Calvert. Because there are so many incorrect conceptions about fascism floating around, and because Professor O'Mara teaches his students what it actually is, I asked him to do a guest post on how fascism and the Trump Regime intersect.

The video up top is an ad Blue America is running in Riverside County right now and has nothing whatsoever to do with the post below. The video at the bottom contains a number of lectures Liam sent us from classes he has given on fascism and you might want to watch after you read his essay. Another thing I hope you'll want to do after you read his essay, is contribute to his campaign. Although he is being supported by the California Democratic Party, the DCCC is not enamored of independent-minded progressives taking on Republican incumbents in red districts-turning purple (like CA-42). So, to win this contest, O'Mara is going to need some grassroots love. He has an uphill but winnable battle against a corrupt right-wing slug who is self-serving and without a care when it comes to the benefit of working families in Riverside, in California or across the country. Time for Calvert to go. That's why I've included the Blue America 2020 Making California Bluer thermometer on the right. Please give it a click and consider contributing to Liam O'Mara's campaign.


Neofascism and the Trump Phenomenon
-by Liam O'Mara

Trumpism did not come out of no-where. Forty years of neoliberal policies have shrunk the middle class and strangled the American Dream. That decline has fuelled a reactionary politics that plays on fears, grievances, and insecurity about the future. But is it fascism?

The label of ‘fascism’ is thrown around a lot these days, despite people on all sides of the political spectrum often having an incomplete, or dead-wrong, understanding of the term. I am certainly guilty of using the term myself.

But as a historian of ideas, I often feel it is both necessary and warranted to raise the issue, given the global resurgence of the reactionary and nationalist right, and because I want more people to know what it means and where it ought to be used.

And we should better know what it means, given how many current leaders fit the mould of neofascism, despite rejecting the label. Vladimir Putin tends to call his enemies ‘the real fascists’, while literally quoting Russian fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin in his speeches!

We need to get better at recognizing what pulls together figures as diverse as Putin, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, and Trump. The simplest way I can think of to frame an article on this is to outline the nine essential characteristics I use in my lectures. I will, along the way, point to some applications of those ideas in contemporary geopolitics.

Fascism is anti-liberal – Fascism argues against democracy and/or makes supportive gestures towards authoritarianism and authoritarian rulers, and supports greater policing powers over people. It is critical of human rights discourses and individual rights, and sceptical about universal moral values. It attacks the free press, and argues that respect for difference, for the Other, and often common courtesy, are just a scam to emasculate us.

Have you heard someone arguing, ‘You have nothing to fear if you did nothing wrong’, ‘Don’t resist and they won’t shoot you’, or ‘It’s okay he killed those people because they were commies / gays / criminals /etc.’..?

I Can't Breath by Nancy Ohanian

Have you seen public figures eschew all pretence of civility and ‘political correctness’ in order to delegitimize institutions, the media, and opposing parties? Trump’s constant attacks on the news, and the far-right’s crusade against universities (which they call ‘Marxist indoctrination camps’) are examples of illiberal thinking.

Fascism is anti-conservative – Fascists are often socially conservative, but are reactionaries, not political conservatives. Conservatives believe in preservation for the status quo and for slow, managed change that respects tradition. Fascists argue for a radical regeneration of the nation, and restoration of an earlier golden age.

When someone argues that contemporary culture is ‘degenerate’, or that we need to ‘Make American Great Again’, they are saying that something is wrong and needs major change. In doing so they sometimes call for a return to traditional values, but just as often will innovate in the values they wish to instill in the population.

Fascism does not promise a conservative social vision, but a revolutionary one, with near-messianic promises of rebirth.

Fascism is nationalistic – Fascists focus on the ethnic nation and/or ethné and/or nation-state over the individual, disdain minorities and scapegoats them for problems, and either oppose outright or seek to limit immigration..

Fascism idolizes the military, or at least a particular ideal of military power, and gets caught up in symbolic displays of enthusiasm. Consider the way that Erdoğan shifts attention to the Kurds to cover up criticism of his domestic policies, and unifies the nation by bombing innocents across the border in Iraq and Syria.

To really get this one, we need to distinguish some commonly-confused terms. Nationalism is not like patriotism – they have entirely different objects.

A nation is a group of people with some features in common (shared history, ethnicity, religion, language, culture, etc. – which features are used varies). A state is a collection of institutions (the military, the courts and laws, civil administration, parliaments, borders, etc.). And a country is a state with sovereign control of territory.

A patriot is someone who loves and serves their country or state. A nationalist is someone who loves and serves their nation.

Nationalisms are, by definition, exclusionary, and while based on actual cultural elements and history, are always selective and artificial in their construction of a political identity. Consider the way that Trump’s view of the nation seems to embrace white supremacists but not Muslims or immigrants.

Wrapping oneself in the flag, preaching distrust of foreigners, calling for an ‘America First’ policy that disdains alliances, and blaming problems on perceived Others in society are characteristic of nationalism. Lost your job? ‘Mexicans took it’! Company closed down? ‘Competition with China is to blame’! Need to justify a war? ‘Muslims all support terrorism, donchaknow’!

Fascism is conspiracist – Fascism is defensive, and sees the world in terms of mortal struggle between the forces of good and a nebulous, hidden enemy. It sets up a mix of internal and external enemies which must be opposed by patriots and challenged aggressively by the nation.

But those enemies cannot be so strong as to be a real threat – fascists use them to motivate fear, but it must be a flexible fear without real consequence, and thus the enemy must appear rhetorically as an all-powerful existential danger, but one that can easily be contained by state policy and the Great Leader.

Conspiracies are illogical by definition, and not dependent upon empirical evidence. You can read between the lines and find support for the beliefs in almost anything, since it is the emotional satisfaction of the conspiracy that matters most. Belief in élite paedophile rings run out of pizza places by Satan-worshipping liberals determined to eliminate all borders and turn the country over to Jewish financiers is somehow appealing to people confused by a more interconnected world. But such Illuminati-style nonsense only works if it isn’t real. It has to be something that you can address by voting for your side, joining a ‘patriotic’ organization, and sending e-mails to your friends.

Fascism is anti-rational – One of the reasons fascism is so hard to understand is that it does not have a strong philosophical foundation that can be supported logically. Instead, it focusses on emotional appeals and rhetoric, setting aside the need for statistics or evidence and calling for belief instead.

Fascism addresses the fears of working people by talking about their victimhood, about how things are changing and seeming to up-end their idealized picture of the world. Building on public fears, fascism distracts from them with big rallies and patriotic displays, and puts on events that celebrate the nation’s power, such as military parades.

Folks like Duterte, Bolsonaro, or Trump do not depend upon reason, facts, or policies for their appeal, but rather on simple messages & images, on slogans, etc. It doesn’t matter if their ideas are incoherent or if they would bankrupt the nation – the details are invisible to their fans because of their presentation.

Human beings have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize beliefs and paper over contradictions. It is possible for someone simultaneously to claim support for liberty and individual rights, yet ignore the presence of literal concentration camps and the systemic abuse of innocents within. These things are either ‘not happening’ – it’s just ‘fake news’ – or they are entirely justifiable for this or that reason, and do not call into question their commitment to freedom.

Fascism is charismatic – One of the things that helps to sell the contradictions and hypocrisy is the charisma of the Great Leader. Fascism requires a leader-cult focussed on a central figure, showing that leader as the solution to problems great and small, and slapping his name and/or image everywhere. Fascists will argue that his/her pronouncements are more valid than the media or experts, so they denigrate the media and tell people to trust the leader and/or the party first, and to disdain higher education and/or experts and/or the universities. It thus builds on a long history of anti-intellectualism on the reactionary right.

While running for office, Trump sold himself as a god-like figure, a saviour, telling us that ‘only’ he could ‘save’ us, that only he knows what has to be done. He said that knows ‘more than the generals’, ‘more than the scientists’, that he has ‘secret plans’ to defeat our enemies and that the scientists don’t actually know anything.

Because there is no substance to the claims, he sells everything with ‘believe me’ appeals to his own credibility, and disparages any source which undermines his narrative, including his own government. This kind of leader-cult is not a feature of democratic societies, but of failed democracies and totalitarian states.

Fascism is corporatist – Fascism is both capitalistic and anti-capitalistic; it argues for private enterprise and markets, sometimes mixed with state-owned businesses, but geared always toward serving the nation. This means that it can criticize big banks and corporations, but refuse to address the private nature of them and their profit motive, since it views the cut-throat competition in markets to be beneficial, in the same way that it favours competition among individuals.

Consider again the ‘America First’ rhetoric – fascists tend to support tariffs and trade wars, viewing all foreign exchange in terms of competition and dominance or submission. The US is not buying from Chinese companies – China is taking advantage of America!

Corporatism is another commonly misused word in American politics, with many thinking that it means support for corporations (meaning, the business model). The corporations that it means are a kind of public middle-man layer where something like a guild will speak for the workers in the place of trade unions.

The reason for this is that fascism opposes utterly the idea of class consciousness, favouring national consciousness instead. Fascist corporatism is meant to neuter the labour movement, weakening the ability of workers to challenge the powerful, and instead suggesting that all Germans – regardless of class – are allies against all French people, for example.

This is, of course, one of the reasons it is utterly absurd to consider Nazism (or any kind of fascism) to be socialistic. Socialists talk about the world and the economy in terms of class struggle, with the workers held back as a permanent underclass by the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Fascism throws this distinction out completely, subordinating both the workers and the bourgeoisie to the shared interests of the nation.

Fascism is populist – Fascists talk frequently about working class interests and fears. This is the other area of overlap sometimes seen, falsely, between socialist and fascist movements. Socialism can be seen as a form of left-populism, while fascism is a form of right-populism.

Whereas the socialists point to the class enemy as the source of trouble, fascists point to foreign and domestic enemies of the nation. It will talk about the ‘left behind’ and the ‘forgotten man’, but often with a racist or nativist component (whether dog-whistled or overt). And it builds a shared sense of persecution, of the common man as an entitled, aggrieved victim of strange forces beyond his control.

Neofascists movements, from Alternativ für Deutschland to the Rassemblement National in France to the Trumpists in the US will make their appeals to working class, mainly high school-educated voters, by explaining the world in terms of competition with nefarious enemies at home and abroad.

The immigrants are bringing crime and drugs and sexual assault, they are influencing your children and destroying your culture, they are bringing about a ‘white genocide’! And who supports these immigrants? Why, the universities and the left! Communism, socialism, and even liberalism are seen as an existential threat, and the left must be resisted by any means available, including violence, because to leave them alone is to watch them poison and destroy the nation.

All totalitarian movements depend upon fabrication of internal and external enemies to justify the power of the party – but fascism is distinct in merging nationalism and populism to create a philosophy ideally suited to a working class suffering decline in the face of neoliberal globalization and automation.

Instead of addressing the economic structures and bipartisan policies which have created this decline, it offers a a scapegoat, and easy promises of a return to prosperity if only the Great Leader is granted more power and time.

Fascism is misogynist – Another way that fascists exploit the fears and grievances of working class men is through sexism and literal misogyny. All fascist movements have been anti-feminist, because women have been such an easy target for worker fears – ‘She’s taking your job! Shouldn’t she be at home raising your children instead?’.

The fascists offer men an easy way to decrease competition for good work by supporting ‘traditional’ gender rôles and the patriarchy, and suggesting that women are naturally better suited to being mothers and caretakers.

This is intimately tied to nativist and nationalist rhetoric, since a female sex restricted to birthing duties could help to eliminate immigration entirely, allowing populations to replace themselves and grow without ‘harming’ the nation through ‘interbreeding’.

Fascist movements are obsessed with demographic decline, which makes a certain amount of sense given its origins in the early twentieth century. By the early 1900s, the major powers of Europe were already dependent upon immigration for the population growth needed to fuel industrialization, and the movement of peoples from within and without Europe provided an easy target for fear-mongering about a cultural Other who would undermine the nation.

Needless to say, this continues in the anti-immigrant hysteria of neofascist parties in Europe, the US, Australia, Canada, and beyond.

On Trumpism and the GOP – I hope that this run through of the key features present in fascist and neofascist movements has helped, both in clarifying how and when the word should be used, and in underscoring the danger in which we find ourselves in much of the developed world. Nationalist and right-populist movements have been in steady resurgence for decades, moving from tiny fringe parties in the ‘1960s and ‘70s, to forming governments and coalitions in countries on every continent by the early twenty-first century. The present crisis has been a long time coming.

Again and again I try to remind people that Trump himself is neither surprising nor unique, but instead the product of a steady drift on the American right which goes back many decades, and arguably all the way to the same moment in the early twentieth century which spawned the original fascists. In movements as distinct as that of Father Coughlin and the German American Bund we see prototypes for the arguments which began pushing into the mainstream under Reagan, in the campaign of Buchanan, and finally with Trump.

Beating Trump in November may be critical to the survival of our republican institutions, but it is not enough. We need to confront the very real fears and systemic failings that leave so many American vulnerable to the rhetoric of the far right. Until we manage to toss the faulty neoliberal consensus, and begin to build an economy that works for all of us, far too many will be tempted by the easy answers of neofascist demagogues..

Regardless of when we manage to escape Trump himself, the Trumpist movement will carry on, with new right-populist leaders stepping up to claim the Great Leader’s mantle. Whether they succeed in remaking America in their image is up to us.