It’ll never happen.
Having just watched the conventions, DNC last week and the RNC that just ended, the incumbent President has a gigantic advantage that’ll be tough to beat. But not impossible. Bush senior, Carter, and Ford all lost that advantage.
ETA: @k9bfriender, that’s nice fiction there.
Yes, the book is fiction.
But the sentiment of “it can’t happen here” is all too real, as you have expressed.
It encourages the exact complacency that does allow it to happen here.
The only reason that it can’t happen here is that we would not let it, and if we assume that it can’t happen here, then we will.
Agreed. And we WON’T let it happen.
Great to hear!
We are heading to a constitutional crisis, one that our founding fathers did not leave instructions for dealing with.
It will be the actions of people, not writing on a parchment, that guides us through these next few months/years.
This is heavy-duty shit. 
In a sign of the growing concern that President Trump might not leave office voluntarily or might attempt to use the military to hold onto power, two moderate Democratic lawmakers posed a series of written questions to the secretary of defense and the military’s top general about their obligations to the Constitution and the country.
Reps. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) addressed their questions in writing to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, setting a deadline of Thursday evening.
Milley responded to the queries, but Esper has not yet provided answers.
The questions would have been almost unthinkable at any time in the nation’s history outside of the Civil War. The two asked Milley if he was aware that the Uniform Code of Military Justice “criminalizes mutiny and sedition” and if he understood that he was legally bound to follow the lawful orders only of the legitimately elected president.
“I recognize that there is only one legitimate president of the United States at a time,” Milley replied late Thursday.
They also asked Milley and Esper to forswear any military operations launched this fall for political purposes, rather than the security of the country, and pressed them to refuse any order to employ service members in uniform at the polls on Election Day.
They also asked Milley and Esper to forswear any military operations launched this fall for political purposes, rather than the security of the country, and pressed them to refuse any order to employ service members in uniform at the polls on Election Day.
…
My bold.
Phrased that way, it’s a judgment call and completely up for grabs.
Trump is LOVING how he’s scaring the libtards. But I’ll admit, I’m worried.
Of course it’s a judgment call, and it’s a judgment call that they’re not prepared for. Military officers are trained not to think in political terms; they’re not trained to make political calls or judgments about who is and isn’t legitimate. Not trying to pick on Bullitt, but the optimists among us who categorically reject the notion that the president could somehow overstay an election in which the vote count indicates he lost, are operating under the assumption that the election produces an incontrovertible result. The creeping dark reality that is beginning to settle in is that this election is likely not going to be without controversy, regardless of what the results on our screens tell us on election night. That is the point of the GOP right now: make us believe – or make 95% of their complicit voters believe – that they cannot trust the results, that their leader was thrown out of office in a soft coup or scam election, and that this is a result that cannot be tolerated.
So then it goes to the courts, it goes to the airwaves, to social media, to the streets, back to the courts, back to the state legislatures, to the electoral college, to the House and Senate. The intended result is chaos and confusion, with half of Americans violently, either through aggressive rhetoric and calls to arm or through outright violence, reject any result in which Trump does not come out the winner.
The Pentagon is not trained to say “This guy is legitimate and this one is not, and America must move on.” I bet they are not trained to resist orders from an incumbent lame-duck president and its entire administration, along with the full backing of Congressional republicans. They are not trained to take on the entire political apparatus of the United States Executive Branch. They are part of that apparatus, not the head of it.
America is not the first country to have encountered attempts to undermine its democratic institutions. This is how we know that this is a potentially dangerous and unprecedented situation. It’s not fiction. It’s a warning about where we are headed, based on what we know of past facts .
People are already storming into state capitals armed with guns over masks.
What is going to happen in a state capital when there is a decision as to who to assign electors to?
If the state narrowly and possibly controversially went for Biden, but you have a group of armed Trump supporters in the gallery, how will you vote, as a state legislator, on who to send to Washington?
These are pretty cliched shots and camera techniques for this sort of thing.
Just a reminder that the presidential election is not over until January 6, 2021 when Congress counts the electoral votes and it’s not even necessarily over then.
I think your comments about the RNC convention are spot on. I don’t think Putin’s entrance video is necessarily relevant to what Trump did. For all I know, Trump deliberately ripped him off, but I have no way of knowing that, and Trump is aware of the power of military imagery anyway, I’d assume. Remember the military parade our President-child wanted? As for Trump finding some way to keep power if he loses, I have no idea, literally, how he would do that, but I’d be happy to comment on scenarios you believe are possible.
I don’t think it’s coincidental; it is well-documented that Putin is obsessed with his image in media and has been from the beginning. He cultivated an image that was based on ethnic and patriarchal nationalism, which is what Trump is attempting to do to some degree. To be sure, Putin is using what he already observed about Trump’s persona, and Trump already knew how to project an image of authority and power. But Putin is helping Trump (and those around him) by teaching him how to build a political regime based on power, and more to the point, how to build a regime that does not rely on democratic power.
As far how he loses and hangs on, he does so essentially by refusing to acknowledge defeat and then hoping that Republicans support efforts to delegitimize the voting in certain states. I’m not saying it would be simple or without controversy, but one of the key characteristics to understand about this administration (this regime) is that it does not care at all about what the rules say. It does not care about public outrage. They assert power and privilege, people say “That’s illegal or unconstitutional,” and then they simply challenge their opponents to stop them.
Look no further than the failed impeachment, but if you want to keep looking, look at the firing of civil servants (illegal retaliation against whistle blowers), the firing of Inspectors General (undermining oversight), the reliance on “acting” secretaries (essentially circumventing the Senate’s constitutional authority to sign off on appointments), undermining the post office (possibly unconstitutional and against federal law), deliberately undermining the Census (probably unconstitutional), the well-documented use of federal troops against the wishes of local authorities and to break up peaceful protests. I could go on, but you get the idea. They are not bound by laws. They are going to assert power, and they will dare their critics to stop them.
Here’s a horrified former Republican politico who put out this as a possibility:
In terms of the law and Trump delaying the election or doing other things? He is not going to ask permission. He will just do it. I have challenged Republicans with the following scenario. I have not found one who can sensibly respond.
In November there are reports of voting irregularities in Dade County, Florida. There usually are. They usually do not mean anything. Donald Trump orders Chad Wolf to send those camo-wearing paramilitaries who were deployed in D.C. and Portland into the Dade County Courthouse and they seize the boxes of votes. The courts go crazy. They order the boxes returned. But let’s say some of those boxes are opened. Now there is a problem with the chain of custody.
What happens then? Are the votes in Dade County thrown out? How do you have a national election without Dade County? Who would stop this? Security guards at the Dade County courthouse aren’t going to stop guys in camouflage with automatic weapons. Trump would give those orders to seize the boxes and interfere with the 2020 election. Trump is testing whether the Republicans will stand up to him. Bill Barr won’t stop him. That is for sure.
Refusing to acknowledge defeat is not a workable strategy on its own, as you implicitly must believe here, since you say he also needs Republicans to offer support. Okay, fine, what kind of “support”? That is, for your possible plan to work, first you need Trump to refuse to accept defeat. What if he does? What is the exact next steps for Republicans? Then we can go from there. As for not caring about the rules, surely. But so what? It doesn’t mean that the rules of the way presidential transitions happen just disappear overnight.
If it’s one candidate refusing to acknowledge the results, that’s one thing. But what if it’s the entire party that refuses to accept the results? What if it’s tens of millions of supporters who refuse to accept results? What happens when Sean Hannity and right wing media take to the airwaves and encourage Republicans to refuse to accept the results?
It depends on what states Trump-Pence legitimately lost and won, as well as the state of GOP public opinion two months or so from now.
One possibility:
GOP legislatures of states Biden won according to CNN, and lost according to DJT, are told by Trump to pass a bill stating that his electoral slate won, and then send a registered letter to Mike Pence affirming his victory in the state.
Trump then instructs GOP tellers, and Pence, to reject the electoral slate letter sent in by a Democratic governor like mine, and to ignore any veto of the bill, at the official electoral count vote before a joint session of Congress.
There are a lot of steps here that have to go just Trump’s way for this to work for him. A reasonable guess is that Trump has a 30 % chance of winning legitimately and a 10 % chance of winning by post-election cheating.
A safer prediction: If Mike Pence announces before the joint session that his ticket lost, Donald will be extremely angry and blame it on mother.
But that’s not an answer to my question. You could ask such questions all day. I want to know exactly what the steps are that the entire party would take, not based on fantasy, for lack of a better word, but based on things they may have done in the past that suggests they would support Trump’s scheme.
My (probably) final words on this: There are way too many things that have to happen for a scenario like the one you suggest to play out to the end, that require a LOT of people to be in on a scheme that would, in my opinion, take way more guts than they possess.
I’ve made this prediction before and I will make it again: if Trump loses, he will use all the shit he and his followers are setting up now to make excuses for himself, and give him a way to save face as he walks out of the Oval Office for the final time, humiliated beyond anything he could ever imagine. He will have nowhere near the guts and chutzpah to try to pull off staying in office. He is a coward. It ain’t gonna happen. (Reiterating, IMHO!)
Technically, something like the above scenario or something similar might be possible. Whether such a scenario is realistic or not is something else:
3 U.S. Code § 15.Counting electoral votes in Congress
Congress shall be in session on the sixth day of January succeeding every meeting of the electors. The Senate and House of Representatives shall meet in the Hall of the House of Representatives at the hour of 1 o’clock in the afternoon on that day, and the President of the Senate shall be their presiding officer. Two tellers shall be previously appointed on the part of the Senate and two on the part of the House of Representatives, to whom shall be handed, as they are opened by the President of the Senate, all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes, which certificates and papers shall be opened, presented, and acted upon in the alphabetical order of the[States, beginning with the letter A; and said tellers, having then read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses, shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates; and the votes having been ascertained and counted according to the rules in this subchapter provided, the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall thereupon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States, and, together with a list of the votes, be entered on the Journals of the two Houses. Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any. Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received. When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision; and no electoral vote or votes from any State which shall have been regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified to according to section 6 of this title from which but one return has been received shall be rejected, but the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes when they agree that such vote or votes have not been so regularly given by electors whose appointment has been so certified. If more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received by the President of the Senate, those votes, and those only, shall be counted which shall have been regularly given by the electors who are shown by the determination mentioned in section 5 of this title to have been appointed, if the determination in said section provided for shall have been made, or by such successors or substitutes, in case of a vacancy in the board of electors so ascertained, as have been appointed to fill such vacancy in the mode provided by the laws of the State; but in case there shall arise the question which of two or more of such State authorities determining what electors have been appointed, as mentioned in section 5 of this title, is the lawful tribunal of such State, the votes regularly given of those electors, and those only, of such State shall be counted whose title as electors the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide is supported by the decision of such State so authorized by its law; and in such case of more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State, if there shall have been no such determination of the question in the State aforesaid, then those votes, and those only, shall be counted which the two Houses shall concurrently decide were cast by lawful electors appointed in accordance with the laws of the State, unless the two Houses, acting separately, shall concurrently decide such votes not to be the lawful votes of the legally appointed electors of such State. But if the two Houses shall disagree in respect of the counting of such votes, then, and in that case, the votes of the electors whose appointment shall have been certified by the executive of the State, under the seal thereof, shall be counted. When the two Houses have voted, they shall immediately again meet, and the presiding officer shall then announce the decision of the questions submitted. No votes or papers from any other State shall be acted upon until the objections previously made to the votes or papers from any State( shall have been finally disposed of.
3 U.S. Code § 6.Credentials of electors; transmission to Archivist of the United States and to Congress; public inspection
It shall be the duty of the executive of each State, as soon as practicable after the conclusion of the appointment of the electors in such State by the final ascertainment, under and in pursuance of the laws of such State providing for such ascertainment, to communicate by registered mail under the seal of the State to the Archivist of the United States a certificate of such ascertainment of the electors appointed, setting forth the names of such electors and the canvass or other ascertainment under the laws of such State of the number of votes given or cast for each person for whose appointment any and all votes have been given or cast; and it shall also thereupon be the duty of the executive of each State to deliver to the electors of such State, on or before the day on which they are required by section 7 of this title to meet, six duplicate-originals of the same certificate under the seal of the State; and if there shall have been any final determination in a State in the manner provided for by law of a controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, it shall be the duty of the executive of such State, as soon as practicable after such determination, to communicate under the seal of the State to the Archivist of the United States a certificate of such determination in form and manner as the same shall have been made; and the certificate or certificates so received by the Archivist of the United States shall be preserved by him for one year and shall be a part of the public records of his office and shall be open to public inspection; and the Archivist of the United States at the first meeting of Congress thereafter shall transmit to the two Houses of Congress copies in full of each and every such certificate so received at the National Archives and Records Administration.
3 U.S. Code § 5.Determination of controversy as to appointment of electors
If any State shall have provided, by laws enacted prior to the day fixed for the appointment of the electors, for its final determination of any controversy or contest concerning the appointment of all or any of the electors of such State, by judicial or other methods or procedures, and such determination shall have been made at least six days before the time fixed for the meeting of the electors, such determination made pursuant to such law so existing on said day, and made at least six days prior to said time of meeting of the electors, shall be conclusive, and shall govern in the counting of the electoral votes as provided in the Constitution, and as hereinafter regulated, so far as the ascertainment of the electors appointed by such State is concerned.
I think it depends on how close the election is. If the stock market collapses later this month or next and puts the cherry on top of this recession, I think that’ll discourage a lot of Republicans, as it would be another indictment of Trump and Trumpism.
The scenario I worry about is that the race turns out to be relatively close across a number of swing states in which the Republicans have legislative or meaningful administrative control over the voting certification process. They wouldn’t necessarily need every single republican up and down the party to give their full-throated support to tinkering with the electoral college; their entire party has demonstrated a willingness to embrace conspiracy theories, and even if they don’t, they don’t challenge him.
If this were 2012 and there were any moderates left in the party, then I’d be less concerned. We could argue that Republicans have future elections to look forward to and something to lose if they went full-on crazy. But that whole ‘autopsy’ thing was 8 years ago; a lot has happened since, and not in a good way. The party has gone full on crazy. They have nothing to lose -except power.