They ARE already scheming to cheat the American people.
Fears that Trump will nix the November general election have been circulating for quite some time. I've pointed out (correctly, I hope) he has not one iota of authority to do so. If the election isn't held, then Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House, becomes President on January 20, 2021. We can safely surmise that GOP power brokers would not let that happen.
If you're thinking of ways he can make it happen without cancelling the election, you could be on the right track. Let's not lose as a result of any failure of imagination.
The Grand Old Party (aka, Greedy Old Pricks) has a LONG and shameful history of gaming the system. There's Gerrymandering. Consider the Hofeller Files. After Thomas Hofeller, the long time mastermind of GOP Gerrymandering, passed away, his daughter Stephanie came to possess the files. She gave copies of the files to Common Cause which submitted them as evidence in North Carolina redistricting litigation which made a huge difference for the good.
Then there's the fact that Trump lost the 2016 popular vote. As did George W. Bush in 2000.
The first president to lose the popular vote but win the presidency was Rutherford B. Hayes. More on that election later.
Last week, Newsweek.com ran a story with one scenario,
This spring, HBO aired The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of how an authoritarian president could grab control of the United States government using emergency powers that no one could foresee. Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.
Something like the following scenario is not just possible but increasingly probable because it is clear Trump will do anything to avoid the moniker he hates more than any other: "loser."This story lists 14 bullet points of such a scenario then states,
We cannot let ourselves believe that this is a far-fetched scenario. We have just seen Trump threaten to invoke emergency powers under the Insurrection Act of 1807 to call up the U.S. military against domestic protesters. The remarkable apology by Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley, stating that it was wrong to create a perception that the military would get directly involved in a domestic political protest and intervene against American civilians, underscores the corrupt use of executive powers Trump is willing to employ. As Fareed Zakaria recently said in summing up the lessons of former national security adviser John Bolton's new book: "Donald Trump will pay any price, make any deal, bend any rule, to assure his own survival and success." [...]
So what do we do as citizens to face the impending reality of The Plot Against America? We must "out" this scenario—and do so loudly and consistently. We have an imperative to build a "people's firewall" that reaches deeply across the country and reflects public revulsion at the potential for Trump to undermine our entire democratic system of governance. [...]
There needs to be an outpouring at all levels of society that this will not be tolerated—from government officials and lawmakers at all levels; to civic associations and civil rights groups; to business groups and trade associations, who have to recognize the economic chaos that would result from this kind of coup; to lawyers, academics and student groups practiced in resisting government policies; and, of course, to the editorial voices of the press, both local and national. [Let's not forget the voices of THE PEOPLE].
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Next there came the shocker that Kanye West, who has been in cahoots with Trump for quite a while, has announced that he THIS year is running for president. We've yet to see any of the steps to make such a run a reality. But the ONLY thing such a pursuit would accomplish is to potentially chip off from Biden's voting base a number of Black voters.
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Then today we see Washington Post columnist Max Boot set before us another scenario,
On his present trajectory, President Trump is heading for a whopping defeat in November. The Economist says there’s nearly a 99 percent chance that Joe Biden will win more popular votes and around a 90 percent chance that he will win more electoral college votes. But what if Trump won’t concede defeat? That is a nightmare scenario for our democracy that could make the 2000 showdown over Florida’s hanging chads seem like a grade-school dispute by comparison.
Trump is already laying the foundation to dispute the election outcome with his incessant claims that “Mail-In Ballots will lead to MASSIVE electoral fraud and a RIGGED 2020 Election.” Election officials label such concerns as “preposterous” and “false.” But they will serve as an excuse for the Republican Party to purge voter-registration rolls, limit mail-in ballots, close polling stations in minority areas and challenge in-person voting by minorities. Whatever it takes to win.
It’s doubtful that anything Trump does will produce a popular-vote victory; he lost by nearly 3 million votes in 2016 and will probably lose by a greater margin this year. But it won’t matter if, by election night, he is within spitting distance of an electoral college victory.
I recently took part in a “war game” to see what would happen under those circumstances. The session was organized by the Transition Integrity Project, a nonpartisan group founded by Rosa Brooks of Georgetown Law School and Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute. The scenario we were given predicted a narrow Biden victory in the electoral college: 278 to 260. Various participants played the role of the Trump campaign, the Biden campaign, Republican and Democratic elected officials, the news media, and other key players to see what would happen next.
I was on Team Trump and, needless to say, we did not concede defeat. Instead, we went to work, ruthlessly and unscrupulously, utilizing every ounce of power at our disposal, to secure the 10 electoral college votes to swing the election. We focused our attention on three of the swing states that Biden won in our scenario — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — because, in all three, Republicans control both branches of the legislature. Normally, the governor certifies the election results, and in all three states the governor is a Democrat. But there is nothing to prevent the legislature from certifying a different election outcome.
Something similar happened in the 1876 presidential election: Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was leading on Election Day in both the popular vote and in the electoral college, but the results were contested in three states. Congress appointed a commission to adjudicate the dispute, and it voted along partisan lines, 8 to 7, to hand all three states to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. That gave Hayes a 185 to 184 majority in the electoral college, and the presidency along with it.
In our scenario, there was no congressional commission. Instead, the Republican Party bombarded the airwaves with claims of electoral fraud and insisted that Trump had been cheated of victory. The GOP filed suit to prevent the certification of the results. Attorney General William P. Barr, who in real life is already making specious claims about mail-in voter fraud, supported this effort in our mock exercise by claiming to have detected efforts by Chinese intelligence, Antifa terrorists and other enemies of the people to steal the election. The goal was to tie up the proceedings in the courts, initially at the state level, and quickly force the Republican-dominated Supreme Court to intervene.
While this was going on, chaos reigned in the streets, with pro- and anti-Trump activists mobilizing massive protests and violence erupting. Democrats believed that mass protests could force the government to respect the election outcome. But, as Team Trump, we calculated that such chaos would help persuade the Supreme Court to intervene to shut down the dispute. In 2000, even two of the more moderate conservative justices — Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy — voted to end Florida’s recount and hand the election to George W. Bush. Could we count on Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — the current swing vote — to resist similar pressure to vote for the “home team”?
The danger of an undemocratic outcome only grows in other scenarios that were “war gamed” by other participants. For instance, what if there is no clear-cut winner on election night, with Biden narrowly ahead in the electoral college but with Michigan, North Carolina and Florida still too close to call? The participants in that war game concluded the result would be “near civil war in the streets.” Far-fetched rumors are enough to bring out armed right-wing militias today; imagine how they would respond if they imagined that there was an actual plot afoot to steal the election from their hero.
It is impossible [and if not impossible, then most imprudent] to write off such concerns as far-fetched given how many seemingly far-fetched things have already occurred in the past four years.Trump got himself impeached by trying to blackmail a foreign country into helping his reelection campaign. He will stop at nothing to avoid the stigma of being branded a “loser.” Unless Biden wins by an electoral college margin that no one can credibly dispute, our democracy may be imperiled as never before. We had better start thinking now about how we would handle such an electoral crisis.
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Given that the Cheater-in-chief, whenever possible, employs Putinesque propaganda tactics, one of which is the Firehose of Falsehoods, don't expect those strategies listed in this post to be the last ones his minions will come up with.
But if we GOTV (Get Out the Vote) in record numbers, Trump WILL lose. Let's make it happen.
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