In the past year President Trump has expressed admiration of China’s creating the post of president for life. He indicated he would like to try that. Many took his comment as a joke, but it probably wasn’t.
Now would-be dictator Trump has found that he really does operate in a constitutional system. For the just-decided financial records cases in the Supreme Court, he had argued that he had, as president, “absolute immunity” from criminal proceedings and subpoenas from federal and state courts. The Supreme Court decided both cases against President Trump. The state court case resulted in the Chief Justice’s majority opinion, a concurring opinion and two dissenting opinions. The case was decided 7-2, All opinions rejected President Trump’s “absolute immunity argument,” the Chief Justice also noting in his opinion that no one was above the law in the American constitutional system. The vote against “absolute immunity” was 9-0. It is reminiscent of a similar vote on an argument by President Nixon seeking to shield the tape recordings of his possible criminal conversations at the White House. That argument was rejected by the same score, 9-0.
Turning to the election scheduled for November 3rd in which Trump will be seeking a second term, one wonders what he might do after that to stay in office permanently—wrecking the American constitutional system—or at least trying mightily to do so. But he may not be elected to a second term. Reliable polls show 57 percent of American votes oppose him compared to only 27 percent for former Vice President Biden, his opponent. And unparalleled in American presidential history 49 percent “strongly” oppose him. Usually this number is small.
Some believe that if he can’t win the election, he will reject its outcome and try to stay in office. He will summon thousands of well-armed supporters to Washington to sow chaos. Already he is claiming, falsely, at every opportunity that mail-in ballots are subject to unlimited fraud and are essentially unreliable—despite the fact that mail-in ballots have been used by various jurisdictions in the United States for many years and that he himself has used them. Attorney General Barr, who seems intent on matching Trump lie for lie, supports his fake claims about mail-in ballots.
Could the plan be to create widespread chaos in the days after the election? The sheer volume of voters who will opt for mail ballots because of the pandemic will be beyond anything in American experience. If the vote is close, it could be weeks before a winner is clearly determined. Currently it appears that Joe Biden will win by a wide, irrefutable margin; he is 11 points ahead in Minnesota and Michigan—swing states in 2016 and 10 points ahead in Pennsylvania. Some polls show Biden ahead by well over 10 points nationally. These are landslide numbers. But this lead could narrow by election day.
If the vote is close enough that a winner cannot be declared for some time, Trump’s possible plan to create violent chaos in Washington and other cities by rejecting a mail-in election as fraudulent could be a major threat. He would ask the Supreme Court to rule as they did in Bush v. Gore in 2000. His armed mobs could try to intimidate both the Supreme Court and also the Electors spread around the country in state capitols. But the Supreme Court appears to have made clear in the two opinions on financial records that does Trump not have “absolute immunity” nor will they be Trump’s enablers should he attempt some extra-constitutional ploy in relation to the election. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs also delivered a similar message as well after Trump co-opted the Chairman and the Secretary of Defense to associate themselves with his bizarre photo-op in front of St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square from the White House, having violently clearing peaceful demonstrators from the square.
We must all be alert to this threat. It hangs over the election like a black cloud and only the American people with a decisive vote on November 3rd can dispel it. As the Washington Post in the lead editorial, “Unforgiveable” said on July 11th, “The president seems to be doing his best, within the confines of the U.S. constitutional system, to emulate the gangster leadership of Russian president Vladimir Putin, a man whose ruinous reign Mr. Trump has always admired. If the country needed any more evidence Friday [after commuting the sentence of a guilty Roger Stone] confirmed that the greatest threat to the Republic is the president himself.” In the same vein Roger Cohen in his July 11th New York Times column entitled “The Most Dangerous Phase of Trump’s Rule” opines that “…the overarching threat the United States faces in the run-up to the November 3rd election is from Trump. The fascism in the air is on the far right of the political spectrum… Trump is preparing the ground to contest any loss to Joe Biden and remain president, aided no doubt by Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department. I know its unthinkable. So was the Reichstag fire…”
“If the federal government should overpass the just grounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have found, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify.” – Alexander Hamilton, 1788
“We should be unfaithful to ourselves, if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties, if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party, through artifice or corruption, the government may be the choice of a party, for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good.” – John Adams, 1799
John Jay