Something tells me that if Trump held a baby in front of himself when an assassin started shooting, his fans would fall over themselves to declare how Smart and Resourceful he was.
Honestly, it’s like praising a professional baseball player for hitting a home run off a Little League pitcher. The checks and balances worked because Trump’s efforts to stage a coup were INCREDIBLY inept. His legal team was headed up by Rudy Giuliani, who is the worst lawyer since Frito Pendejo, and the “Kraken” legal case we’ve been hearing so much about is a typo-ridden QAnon dump by a woman with serious psychological problems. Trump appears to not have started to plan this out until the day of the election.
Had he been preparing this earlier this year, with help from competent attorneys, he might have pulled it off. That is of course purely theoretical, because Trump is quite stupid, and one of his fundamental flaws is that he surrounds himself with people selected for their sycophancy, not their competence.
I don’t think any attorneys had much of a case to make, really. It would take a lot of legal lifting to compel a judge to toss out hundreds of thousands of votes.
I’d argue that the bizarro theatrics were probably about his only path forward. The best bet Trump had was to completely suspend reality, so I’m going to push back against conventional wisdom that Rudy and QAnon poster girl were really a liability.
In the end, there aren’t quite enough people out there who can agree to just ignore votes. Democracy was saved not by Rudy’s incompetence but by the refusal among some people in positions of power to bend reality for a desired political outcome.
A straight up legal victory was never realistically in the cards. The path to a coup was engaging with Republican legislatures to have them vote in Trumpist electors, using a groundswell of popular anger, total Trumpist/GOP denial of the results, and threats of civil unrest and personal violence to push the reluctant ones along. It was theoretically possible but not without a lot of groundwork starting a long time ago.
But the groundwork was started long ago. Trump began by saying well before the election that the only way the Dems could win would be through massive voter fraud. He created a cult following that believe he’s the greatest President we’ve ever had, that he could shoot a man on fifth Avenue and get away with it.
Trump has fed a blinding infatuation of conspiracy theorists, racists, and authoritarian nuts combined with big government paranoids - and that takes some doing. He’s created and proclaimed the myth that the Democrats unfairly have it in for him, and created hoax after hoax to bet him. He’s lied his way through the Presidency, and his supporters believe him.
He’s fit a groundswell of supporters loudly protesting the rigged election, even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud.
And he’s captured the Republican party so much that most Republicans are afraid to speak against him. They are complicit in this whole mess by remaining silent and letting his lies stand.
You are correct in that his plan doesn’t require a legal victory on the merits of any particular case. Take a look at what happened in 2000.
The election was held in question by about 300 votes in 2 counties in Florida. Gore wanted to recount just those counties, but the Republicans pushed and got a full recount of the state. Except the vote counting process was hampered by a clumsy ballot system - the dreaded hanging chads. Anyway, the recount was dragging on and the date for the Electoral College approached,so the Supreme Court declared the vote complete and Bush the winner by the existing count.
Note let’s be clear, that exact strategy wouldn’t work this time, Biden is the default winner. But the strategy of delay and sew confusion and then, with the excuse of an “unclear winner” due to ongoing litigation, he gets the state legislatures to appoint the electors. And they might do it because of the aforementioned hold on the party Trump has.
To create a metaphor, Trump spent four years practicing for this, but pulling off a coup isn’t some amateur event. It’s the Olympic 100m dash final. You need to go past just practicing and into true dedication with a team of experts behind you.
The groundwork has been started, though, and a smarter, harder working fascist now has an easier path in the future.
You know the Overton Window? It has now been moved WAY further towards accepting dictatorship.
Yeah, there were 70 some million who voted to not to have to vote anymore.