Scenario:
Long line at the polls, people waiting for hours.
Patriot poll watchers come up, start questioning the credentials of those in line.
Fight breaks out, doesn’t matter who started it, the police who have been dispatched to “protect the polls” break it up and disperse the crowd, arresting anyone who does not leave the area.
Worse, someone hanging around the area fires a few ‘warning shots’ in the air, causing panic.
Yeah, but we should probably stop giving them ideas…
I think this next linked article, ridiculous if taken literally, is an example of that foundation:
Will Democrats use the nuclear option to blow up the election?
What’s ridiculous about my link is the idea that Democratic state legislatures, in swing states that go for Trump, can reverse the decision of the electorate. They can’t, because in almost all the critical swing states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the GOP controls both houses of the legislature. So the link only makes sense if the GOP decides to use the imagined Democratic threat of state legislatures overturning ballot box results to actually do the same themselves.
As to how to prevent this, I’m not sure. However, I think that Biden should strongly say that if the election electoral count goes against him at the ballot box, and any legal recounts are complete under law and judicial rulings, he will concede. Hillary Clinton’s extremely unhelpful statement regarding this should be repudiated. Democrats can only win at the polls and in the ballot box, after any legal recount. To suggest otherwise only gives justification for the anti-democratic nuclear option descripted in my link.
At any rate, we can be sure Trump is not in a position to mount a coup. The military officers have made clear they won’t back him in any political way.
Now that it’s been put out there, I’ll bet Trump is seriously considering it. I see only four possible outcomes from this, which I’ll list in order of what I think is best to worst.
Trump doesn’t take Stone’s advice and goes away if he loses, like all previous POTUSs have.
Trump gives orders to the US Marshalls to conduct the interventions Stone recommends but they refuse the orders.
Trump gives the orders to the US Marshalls to conduct the interventions Stone recommends. The US Marshalls cary out the orders. The top generals, seeing that Trump is declaring a coup begin to take orders from either John Roberts, Joe Biden, or even working on their own under General Milley, or some combination of the three. They mobilize the military to arrest Trump and any civilian LEOs following his orders, using deadly force if necessary.
Trump gives the orders to the US Marshalls to conduct the interventions Stone recommends. The US Marshalls cary out the orders. The top generals, wanting to avoid bloodshed or following their own separate orders, possibly issued by the Secretary of Defense, also stay in their barracks rather than intervening.
Agreed, although not for the same reason.
It might be that, if there was some dispute as to who was the actual President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have to make a decision as to who they would consider their commander in chief (and secretary of.defense). In that unhappy case, I expect we would hear loud cries, concerning there having been a coup, from the losing political side. But that would be a misuse of the coup d’etat phrase.
I do not think the United States is anywhere near a condition where there would a coup d’etat. But if it did happen, the military coup plotters wouldn’t so easily deliver the country to a never-in uniform civilian.
I’m not sure under what authority the top generals would feel they were justified taking the actions you describe in #3. While I think #2 is the most likely in that situation I don’t rule out #1 or #4. There are a lot of things, and I mean A LOT of things, that would have to take place for your #3 to happen.
This assumes that the results are without controversy, but my fear is that controversy is the point. I think the evidence clearly points to a 99% chance of Biden winning the popular vote and probably an 80-90% chance of winning the pledged number of delegates needed to win, assuming there’s a ‘normal’ election. However, Trump and his allies are doing what they can to make sure that the election isn’t normal so that he can claim he didn’t really lose.
I think a lot of us agree that Trump will refuse to acknowledge defeat, but whereas some assume it’s because he merely wants to protect his fragile ego, which is certainly a factor, I think it goes beyond that. Casting doubt on an election serves a political purpose that goes well beyond protecting the ego of the person who lost. It gives the loser a reason to claim that they still have the legitimacy to govern.
…The worst case, however, 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 uncertainty to hold on to power.
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”
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“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go?
…
Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing. Expecting otherwise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.
If you are a voter, think about voting in person after all. More than half a million postal votes were rejected in this year’s primaries, even without Trump trying to suppress them. If you are at relatively low risk for COVID-19, volunteer to work at the polls. If you know people who are open to reason, spread word that it is normal for the results to keep changing after Election Night. If you manage news coverage, anticipate extraconstitutional measures, and position reporters and crews to respond to them. If you are an election administrator, plan for contingencies you never had to imagine before. If you are a mayor, consider how to deploy your police to ward off interlopers with bad intent. If you are a law-enforcement officer, protect the freedom to vote. If you are a legislator, choose not to participate in chicanery. If you are a judge on the bench in a battleground state, refresh your acquaintance with election case law. If you have a place in the military chain of command, remember your duty to turn aside unlawful orders. If you are a civil servant, know that your country needs you more than ever to do the right thing when you’re asked to do otherwise.
Take agency. An election cannot be stolen unless the American people, at some level, acquiesce.
…
My bold.
Is there anyone left here who thinks trump is going to give up the WH peacefully, like a grownup? After all, he contested the last election that he won!
Oh come on, you’re just being paranoid. It’s not like he’ll have a 6-3 advantage on the SCOTUS … oh, wait …
Well, I’m afraid two never-in-uniform civilians are the only plausible options here.
I was just watching CNN, and the analysts were pretty sure there is no set of events in which Trump will concede the election. Which is not to say he won’t be ejected from the white house, but he’ll never admit defeat, just as he never admits anything.
I agree with their analysis FWIW.
The scary thing is that if trump says the election is fraudulent, the trumpists will of course believe it, regardless of whether there’s any evidence. At this point around 20-25% of the country is so in the trump camp that they believe, and rationalize, anything Trump says.
Well, golly-I never realized that both candidates are exactly the same!
No, he’s not. He has about one in four shot at winning, and that’s without cheating.
The idea that President Donald Trump could refuse to leave the White House if he loses the election was a serious enough concern that White House staffers discussed the possibility several weeks ago, a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence told CNN Friday.
Given what Olivia Troye has seen of the president, she doesn’t find it surprising that Trump has been emphasizing the possibility that he may not step down if he loses in November, she told Wolf Blitzer.
Troye left the administration in August after working on the coronavirus task force and serving as an adviser to Pence on counterterrorism and homeland security.
Just because Trump’s behavior might be predictable doesn’t make it any less worrisome, Troye said.
“It’s frightening to me, because, to be honest, during my tenure at the White House, I’ve had conversations behind closed doors with White House staffers and other government officials — including people in the intelligence community — where we’ve actually discussed ‘what if,’” she said. “What if he loses and refuses to leave, or … What if his plan is four more years of Donald Trump should he win, and will he even leave after that?”
Even threats Trump later shrugs off or claims were jokes should be taken seriously, Troye warned.
“The president when he’s joking, if he says that he’s joking, he’s telling you a half truth,” Troye said. “And in there is something fairly frightening and scary” in that.
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Looks like the idea is getting some traction in lots of places-- an idea that was laughed off the stage when it first came up…