"It's no secret that Trump plans to do whatever he can to steal the election. But by openly demanding that ballots be thrown out, Trump confirmed publicly what many activists, historians and legal experts have been warning may be coming: An actual attempted coup against democracy."
If ever there was a "break-glass-in-case-of-fire" moment, this is it.
Marcotte continues:
"Trump has lined up his legal team to fight this in the courts. He's indicated that he expects his nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to join a conservative majority to rule in his favor. He's also been stoking the paranoia of well-armed angry white men, encouraging them to join up with militias that can be leveraged in the upcoming fight over whether all the ballots will be counted."
Trump comes with more than just a craven desire for total power.
He comes with an obsequious Republican party apparatus prepared to do everything--legal or not--to maintain its hegemony.
As Barton Gellman wrote in The Atlantic:
"The worst case...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 un certainty to hold on to power...It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.""
That's why he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are so laser focused on replacing the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in record time.
Again, Trump blurted it right out.
In their Newsweek piece, "How Trump Could Lose the Election-and Still Remain President," CNBC founder Tom Rogers and former Senator Tim Wirth (D-CO) explain:
"This is how it happens, Biden wins. I don't just mean the popular vote, he wins the key swing states, he wins the electoral college. President Trump says there's been Chinese interference in the election. He's been talking about Biden's soft on ChinaChina wanted Biden to win so he says a national emergency; the Chinese have intervened in the election."
This is particularly ironic considering Trump's former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, documents in his new book that Trump, during trade negotiations with China, pushed Chinese President Xi Jinping to agree to purchase American agricultural products as a means to bolster popularity with U.S. farmers to help with 2020 re-election prospects.
Tom Rogers adds:
"Just ten days ago [June 23] he [Trump] tweeted, he actually tweeted, 'rigged 2020 election,' millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries it will be the scandal of our times. so he's laying the groundwork for this. So he does an investigation and [Attorney General Bill] Barr backs this up with all kinds of legal opinions about emergency powers that the president has."
"Then what happens is it's all geared towards December 14th. Why December 14th? Well, that's the deadline when the electors of the states have to be chosen. Why is that key? Because that's what the Supreme Court used in Bush v. Gore to cut off the Florida counting. They keep this national emergency investigation going through December 14th. Biden, of course, challenges this in the courts and says, 'hey, we won these states, I want the electors that favored me named. The Supreme Court doesn't throw the election to the Republicans as it did in 2000; instead it says, 'look, there's a deadline here.' If they can't be certified in these states because of this investigation going on, there's a constitutional process for this."
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