Almost lost in all the meat Cohen has tossed out in his testimony was the warning that if trump loses in 2020 that he will not go peacefully. Most folks are postulating a scenario in which there is a “normal” election, which he loses and then refuses to surrender power, at which point he is escorted from the Oval Office kicking and screaming “fake news”. Well, there is another, more ominous, scenario in which trumpees disrupt the election itself, then use that very disruption to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the results. Then, of course, there is also the Riechstag fire scenario. Or a competent MagaBomber. I can think of half a dozen ways that could be pulled off.
If half of what Cohen says is true, trump makes Richard Nixon seem a saint by comparison. What do people think?
The question isn’t: “Are you paranoid?” The question is: “Are you paranoid enough?”
Whether he loses normally or abnormally, the Secret Service agents would drag him out of the Oval Office by 12 noon on Inauguration Day if he’s not out of his own accord. What difference does normal vs. abnormal election outcome make?
Maybe so, but I think the threat to cast doubt on the legitimacy of an election and to incite violent backlash, such as he suggested when he appeared to be losing in the polls in 2016, is a threat to take seriously.
I think what Cohen and those who have some knowledge of Trump are trying to tell us is that Trump thinks like an authoritarian kleptocrat, and he will do whatever he can think of to survive.
Trump isn’t smart enough to pull off a coup. I doubt he’s smart enough to hold up a liquor store successfully.
He’s staying in power because he got elected legally and our system of government is following the law and propping him up. But if Trump ever tries to defy that system and rule illegally, he’ll fail.
And Trump’s supporters are less capable than Trump is.
I don’t follow politics close enough to know if what I’m saying is 100% correct, but I’m amazed at the amount of people that worked for him or were otherwise ‘on his side’ that have, more or less, defected. That is, they’ve gone from defending him no matter what to saying ‘nope, he’s nuts, I’m out’. Seems like every few weeks there’s another one. I’m sure some of them are angry for getting fired, some, I think, just couldn’t do it anymore.
It always seemed odd to me that he kept screaming ‘voter fraud’ after he won. Even if there were, in fact, 5 million illegal votes for Clinton, it doesn’t matter now. You’d think he’d be concerned that the election could be overturned if he kept requesting it to be investigated. I know, it was a vanity thing since he lost the popular vote, but it’s moot.
If Trump refuses to go peacefully, then he can go in handcuffs if he’d like. No worries. And his supporters revolting in some violent manner? These are the guys with the backyard tiki torches and Doge Challengers. Sure the loonier ones can hurt a small number of people, but it is hardly the stuff of revolt.
Is it worth worrying about? Yes, absolutely. Is it likely to happen? No, not very. In fact, it’s unlikely to happen precisely because the right people are worrying about it, and hence taking actions to prevent it.
As Cohen noted, Trump didn’t want the job in the first place and his only motivation for trying to stay in the role would be to forestall prosecution. But the more likely prosecution is, the stronger his desire to stay may be but the greater the forces of law and public opinion will be to remove him. The Republicans may pull every trick in the book, fair and foul, to swing the next election but if Trump stays in office it will be because he was elected via the usual means.
My greater worry is the utter capitulation of Republicans in Congress who have, to an unprecedented degree, abdicated their powers as the legislative branch to check the executive. Even if Trump goes, it sets a very poor precedent that may allow future less-inept Presidents to collude [sic] with Congressional Houses controlled by the same party to pursue even greater end-runs around those intended checks.
The election results are certified in a joint session of Congress. I can see McConnell refusing to accept the result of a Democratic victory and somehow prevent the election from being certified.
It’s a tough argument to make. People with working eyes and brains can see Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the media and his “What you are seeing isn’t what you should be believing” rhetoric is straight out of the autocrat playbook. And yet the media is still able to say critical things of the president every single day without getting dragged off to the camps, and reporters are able to report the truth without being forced to issue retractions under duress. The problem, then, is that Trump supporters can dismiss any warnings about how Trump is behaving like an autocrat. “See,” they’ll say as they point to a scathing NYT article, “The system still works fine. Quit your bitching.”
Of course that’s true, we’re not living under an all powerful despot. However, we used to run away from anything remotely resembling those power structures, and now we’re seeing how close we can get and still have the workings of democracy function as normal. Why anyone is OK with this, I can’t fathom.
And so I think it will go with Trump’s transition of power. Trump will, of course, leave office in the end, and the next president will assume power and everything will go on like normal. But Trump and his die hard supporters won’t accept it and will continue to rabble rouse on the internet for years, inching us closer to an acceptance of autocracy that we’re not supposed to tolerate. And at some point, maybe, we’ll show the world that we’re not that special, as we tiptoe over that line without realizing it.
Or scared and desperate enough. Prosecutors will be coming after him in full force once he’s lost the protection of the office.
But yeah, he’s going to spend his remaining days (when he’s not in court) bitching furiously on his nighttime Fox News show about how the Deep State kept undermining all the fantastic things he was doing for the real patriots of the country.