On November 3, 2020 Joseph Biden, the nominee of the Democratic Party, decisively won the election for President of the United States, along with his running mate for Vice President, Kamala Harris. Biden won the national vote by more than five million votes along with 306 Electoral College votes. There is no doubt about the result of this election; it was more conclusory than President Trump’s election in 2016. Biden is indisputably the choice of the American people.
Yet Trump is contesting the election. During the campaign, he always declined to agree to the peaceful transfer of power, the essence of democracy. He defined a fair election as an election where he was the winner. Any other result would be fraudulent, he said. During the early hours of the vote counting he tweeted, “Stop the counting! Stop the counting!” in states where he was initially leading and “Keep counting” in Arizona where he was behind.
The result? Biden’s clear victory in a free and fair election as envisaged by the Constitution. The Department of Homeland Security, charged with protecting the integrity of the election, on November 11th released the following statement:
The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result. When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence supporting Biden’s victory and without producing any evidence himself, Trump continued to insist that he won the election and that the Democrats stole it from him. He continues to reach out to his own committed followers, largely through the extremist TV channel Newsmax and via social media, with his most ardent supporters increasingly using Parler to spew a cascade of blatant, fantastical lies and conspiracy theories, reminiscent of lies propounded by the far right in Germany after its defeat in World War I. By promoting the so-called “Stab in the Back” theory that Germany had been winning the war until traitorous “communists and Jews” in the government surrendered to the other side, a permanent violent opposition to the government was established and subsequently exploited by Hitler to support his Third Reich. Given his current TV campaign of lies, Trump could create something similar in America, supporting the destruction of democracy now or in 2024.
Trump has abandoned governing (as has much of his government), choosing instead to spend his time agitating for the overturning of the recent election. Trump is behaving this way while the people, whose president he still is, pursuant to the Constitution, until January 20, 2021, are suffering severely from a huge escalation of the Pandemic. Millions are becoming sick, thousands are dying. Trump is paying no attention to this crisis and his government is doing nothing to ameliorate it. In normal times this neglect would be grounds for impeachment. Trump continues his unhinged, illegal incitement to violence. Long ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the United States Supreme Court said in a famous opinion that the protection of free speech found in the First Amendment to the Constitution does not extend to shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater. Trump is shouting “Fire.”
Does such behavior make Trump a modern-day Don Quixote, the Man of La Mancha, causing chaos and tilting at windmills to cover his ignominious and embarrassing (as he sees it) exit from the government? Or is he the Manchurian Candidate (Russian Candidate) aiming at the destruction of American life and democracy and his establishment as dictator in alliance with Vladimir Putin of Russia? Is this all just fantasy or is it a coup plot, however improbable? A comment by Masha Gessen in a November 11, 2020 New Yorker article by David Rohde, “William Barr Can Stop Trump’s Attempted Coup” is worth noting here. She said that—
Trump is trying to achieve an ‘autocratic breakthrough’ and to discredit the election results that would end his rule. His chances of succeeding appear low, but it is important to state that the President of the United States is attempting to carry out a coup.[1]
Gessen should know; she was a journalist in Russia for many years and was an acquaintance of Putin. And, if Trump’s chances are low in 2020, what might they be in 2024 after four years of inciting his base? Rohde goes on to say that “a new Politico/Morning Consult survey finds seventy percent of Republicans do not think that the 2020 election was ‘free and fair.’ False vote-fraud claims are gaining enormous audiences on Facebook, energizing and enraging the president’s supporters.[2]
The president is refusing to allow Biden’s presidential transition team to begin working with the incumbent government. He has fired the Defense Secretary, the official who oversees the nuclear arsenal, and replaced much of the top echelon at Defense, all of whom have been succeeded by sycophants. The Directors of CIA and FBI appear to be next on the to-be-fired list. This not only gives Trump a large degree of control over the national security part of the government, but it also fills this important branch of the government largely with incompetent stooges.
Rohde also comments that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “. . . in a speech on the Senate floor defended the president’s right to challenge the election results.”[3] Several prominent Republicans also have said that the president is within his rights to do so. Only four Senate Republicans have called Biden to congratulate him as President-Elect and four or five others have called for Trump to at least allow the transition process to begin so that Biden can receive necessary intelligence information. Statements by Senators in response to the question, “Have you congratulated Mr. Biden?” suggest either that “maybe Biden didn’t really win” or “maybe there is nothing to congratulate him for.” They are of a sort one would expect in Hungary or Turkey but not in America. The remaining more than forty Republican senators have not publicly recognized Biden as the President-Elect. They are joined by Vladimir Putin. As Glasser notes, “. . . when Governor Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, said on CNN, ‘Joe Biden is the President-elect,’ it was treated as breaking news. Merely acknowledging basic math, it seems, is now considered an act of political courage.”[4] Thus, Republican leaders have responded to Trump’s trashing this most sacred rite of democracy, the peaceful passage of power, just as they have “to virtually all of Trump’s norm shattering behaviors for the last four years: by enabling it.”[5]
When Rohde concludes near the end of his article that “there is no excuse for allowing a sitting president to flirt with authoritarianism,[6] he illuminates the problem with the Republican Party itself. It appears to have become an anti-democratic party interested only in power, with a minority that is pro-democracy—a minority in every situation like this one. In the interest of democracy and as a better reflection of political reality, It would be better to split the party in two—one authoritarian, the other conservative democratic.
Continuing further on the issue of whether Trump is seeking a coup now or perhaps later in 2024, Fareed Zakaria in the November 13 Washington Post, after referring to the so-called “stab in the back” myth in Germany in 1920, quotes Newt Gingrich as follows, “I think [Biden] would have to do a lot to convince Republicans that this is anything except a left-wing power grab financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level. . . . It’s very hard to understand how we’re going to work together.”[7] Zakaria notes,
A political system is not simply a collection of laws and rules. It is also an accumulation of norms and behavior. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) says Trump is ‘100 percent within his rights’ to behave as he is, he is missing this crucial distinction…Democracy is above all about the peaceful transfer of power. Trump is destroying this norm and his present actions . . . will have a large and lasting effect on this country’s politics for decades, creating a cancer that will metastasize in gruesome ways.[8]
Michael Gerson concurs:
What America is experiencing is a massive failure of character—a nationwide blackout of integrity—among elected Republicans. From the president, a graceless and deceptive insistence on victory after a loss that was not even close. From Congressional Republicans a broad willingness to conspire in President Trump’s lies and to slander the electoral system without consideration of the public good. Only a few have stood up against Republican peer pressure of contempt for the constitutional order.[9]
The Washington Post lead editorial on November 13 asserts:
President Trump is attempting to overturn the lawful results of a free election by spreading lies and suborning local officials to abet the conspiracy. He is not likely to succeed, but the toxic effect on U.S. democracy will not soon dissipate. Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY) who think they can pander to Mr. Trump’s lies with no harmful effect, are complicit in the damage.[10]
On the assumption that Trump is trying now for a coup, there are three possible routes. The first would be to persuade Republican dominated state legislatures to override the results of their state election and introduce a Republican slate of electors to send to Congress when the voters of that state cast their ballots in the majority for certification by the Election Commission of a Democratic slate. Few if any state legislatures are likely to do this as it would be a blatantly illegal act, frustrating the will of the people. State courts, federal courts and, if necessary, ultimately the Supreme Court would not allow it. The one place where this strategy seems to have been seriously advanced has been Michigan, won by Biden by 148,000 votes. The Election Commission is composed of two Democrats and two Republicans. If the two Republicans could be pressured to fail to agree to certification for whatever reason, perhaps the legislature would intervene. This is most unlikely. On November 13, a state judge at the County level in Detroit dismissed the Republican suit saying he saw “no convincing evidence of election fraud.” Similar action was taken by courts in Arizona and Pennsylvania.[11] All other legal efforts in the states have fallen flat.
Second, there could be a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court alleging some kind of fraud, which could be said to justify disallowing the entire election. This legal appeal appears to be a non-starter.
Third, with his decimation of the top defense and intelligence officials and installation of presidential stooges, Trump could order the Army to occupy the cities and declare the election disallowed because of some fabricated domestic emergency. Or he could order the military to do something like invading Iran with Special Forces and destroying its nuclear installations, claiming there was a clear and present danger to the national security, possibly with a war following. The response of our military almost certainly would be, “We were trained and educated not to obey illegal orders. Our loyalty is to the Constitution, not to Donald Trump.”
Thus, whereas Trump may be a Manchurian Candidate desirous of carrying out a coup and abolishing our freedoms and our democratic way of life, his chances of success are small. In the relatively near future he is likely to leave and Joe Biden be sworn in as our next president.
2024 could be a different matter. Quite possibly Trump will try over the next four years to follow Hitler’s game plan and influence his base to support him in establishing some sort of neo-fascist type dictatorship after being reelected in 2024. Of course Trump must first somehow get past two significant criminal actions pending against him in New York State as well as his hundreds of millions of debt. Likely, if past history is a guide, the Republicans in the Senate will try during this timeframe, to prevent the Biden administration from accomplishing anything that would make things better for our country. This would set the stage.
The above concerns are a subject the media and analysts must closely follow now and for the next four years. Sunshine is the cure for evil and corruption. Sam Adams (leader of the Boston Tea Party, co-founder of the Sons of Liberty, signer of the Declaration of Independence and Governor of Massachusetts) enjoined:
“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks… Let us remember that if we suffer tamely a lawless attack on our liberty, we encourage it and involve others in our doom.” – Samuel Adams, 1771
“It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of our loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions.” – Samuel Adams, 1748
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” – Benjamin Franklin, 1776
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” – Thomas Jefferson, 1808
“Tyranny can scarcely be practiced upon a virtuous and wise people.” – John Adams, 1796
“It is substantially true that virtue or mortality is a necessary spring of popular government.” – George Washington, 1796
John Jay
[1] Rohde, David. “William Barr Can Stop Trump’s Attempted Coup,” The New Yorker, November 11, 2020.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Glasser, Susan B. “Is this a Coup or Just Another Trump Con,” The New Yorker, November 13, 2020.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Rohde, op. cit.
[7] Zakaria, Fareed. “The damage he is causing will far outlast Trump himself,” The Washington Post, November 13, 2020.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Gerson, Michael. “A massive failure of character,” The Washington Post, November 13, 2020.
[10] Editorial. “Mr. Trump and his GOP Enablers,” The Washington Post, November 13, 2020.
[11] Knowles, Hannah, Farenthold, David A. Halderman, “Courts reject Trumps claims”, The Washington Post, pp. A-1, 6, November 14, 2020.