Well, the doomsday answer would be it’s a backup. First, you try to rig the midterms enough that even with, say, 45% of the nationwide vote you can still hold a majority in the House. Once you see how that works you can refine your strategies for 2028.
Depending on mid-term results and how the situation looks running into 2028 you can either gin up some “emergencies” to modify voting procedures and see if maybe that’s enough. You can definitely try to provoke some rioting in big cities - that’s always been a winning program for the GOP.
And then the final, “break in case of emergency” would be to use your gerrymandered majorities in Congress to rat-fuck the electoral vote counting, or just refuse to do the counting because CA and IL (or whatever) are “in a state of rebellion”.
ETA: Basically keep your options open. Definitely don’t give the opposition a single target to aim at. Maybe Trump runs again. Maybe elections are postponed/modified/cancelled. Maybe DOJ puts out some guidance that “certain people” shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Maybe you do some reapportioning of EVs based on some new census method (don’t count immigrants?). Maybe you declare the Democratic party a supporter of terorrists and confiscate their funding.
As one columnist put it recently, the efforts of Trump and his sycophants for him to stay in power past 2028 isn’t one clearly thought-out plan. It’s more like a constantly-shifting buffet of options.
Canceling elections entirely is probably pretty far down the list, because authoritarians like the veneer of elections. Gerrymandering, suppressing the vote in Democratic-leaning districts, questioning election results and the machinery of elections in advance, or even selectively canceling elections (in Democratic-leaning districts or even whole states) would likely happen first.
Even right now a duly-elected representative from AZ isn’t being seated (ostensibly due to the shutdown, but we shall see). These are all little tests to see just how far they can push around the edges of democrat norms.
Yeah, I expect that they’ll want to continue holding elections (just as Hungary and Russia do) but they’ll try to refuse certification for results that they don’t like, and continue to gerrymander, restrict and suppress adverse voting, and other electoral fuckery to be able to say, “See, we held elections! What more do you want?” On the other hand, Poland has provided an object lesson for autocrats who think they can control elections by splintering opposition and trying to suppress voting only to discover that their grip wasn’t as tight as they believed.
Of course, Trump has openly joked about how we don’t really need elections, told people that “You won’t have to vote any more,” during his 2024 election ‘campaign’, and claimed without any evidence whatsoever that the 2020 (and even the 2016) elections were compromised by voter fraud and manipulation (against him, of course). I know a lot of people want to discount when he talks about not needing elections or being a dictator because so much of what passes his lips is complete bullshit, but on these topics we are getting an unfiltered look at his intentions and contempt for rule of law and democratic norms.
This is the real risk. States holding elections is not a risk. What is a risk is JD Vance, being a fascist, simply saying “I won’t certify this” or agreeing to just count votes for Trump anyway. the Constitution has a hole there; it says Trump can’t be President again, but has no specific mechanism to prevent a Republican Congress from just doing it anyway.
That said, almost any country’s constitution would have some similar holes. What matters in a Constitution is not specifically how it’s written. What matters is whether the populace, for the most part, believes in the spirit of it and what it means. In the USA that appears to be no longer true; roughly half the population does not in fact support rule of law, and would support Trump just being President for Life. The US Constitution is basically dead, or close to it.
If Ronald Reagan had tried to hold on to power in 1988, he would have had no one helping him do so. George Bush and the cabinet would have removed him within hours of him making it clear he was serious about it. Had they not, Congress would have taken action, and I do mean both parties; then, it was simply not thinkable. There were lots of crooks, scumbags and bigots in politics, but there was a common agreement that the rule of law had to be respected. At some point the Republican Party decided they didn’t care about the rule of law, and the American people on that side seem to agree, so the US can’t really be a functioning republic anymore.
In addition to the other reasons people have discussed, gerrymandering may be primarily intended as a distraction drawing attention away from the real plans. The Republican party leaders may be laughing at how the Democrats are focusing so much effort on gerrymandering, when they know that it won’t matter.
I don’t know, the insane and relentless pressure campaign (see Indiana) about this makes it hard to think its just a troll to trigger the libs. While I do agree with the “throw everything against the wall” strategy of MAGA (see 2020 attempts to overturn the election), I try to remember that the number one characteristic shared by the entire MAGA movement is a level of incompetence that is hard to actually fathom.
No, it skips over people ineligible to be president. And the way the 22nd amendment is worded, Trump would be ineligible to be elected president, but it doesn’t say he would be ineligible to be president. SCOTUS loves to hang its decisions on such minutiae. Still, I cannot imagine anyone getting elected and then resigning no matter what previous promises they had made.
My guess is that Trump thinks he’s going to get another term. But he’s been told that he’s supposed to pretend he’ll be leaving office as part of the plan. So he’s okay saying that he’ll leave office and hearing Johnson say it because he’s been convinced it’s just a lie to fool the Democrats.
I don’t think Steve Bannon is much for social graces and subtlety. He’s the kind of weird uncle that shows up late at Thanksgiving with a twelve-pack of Miller Genuine Draft which is already missing two bottles that he drank in the ten minutes it took him to drive from the package store, and immediately flops down in someone else’s place and starts railing on about what the ‘Marxists’ and ‘Antifa college students’ are doing to ruin the country and attack his favorite religion which it turns out is Christmas. His brain knows no filter and his mouth is a hole to consume food as fast as he can shovel it toward his face irregularly punctuated by issuing complaints, critiques, and self-pity at an unflagging pace. He will leave you later than you’d like but before any cleanup with tire ruts on your lawn and a large plumbing bill the next day. God help you if you are on septic.
Trump isn’t capable of playing 4-D chess like that. If that were the plan he’d immediately say something like “I’m not supposed to say this, but they’re giving me another term”.
Yes, I imagine it was a challenge to convince Trump he was supposed to not say something. But on the plus side, they were trying to convince him to tell a lie and that’s the one thing he’s good at.
One solution is to have an alternate way for the state legislature selected the electors if there is, for whatever reason, no popular election.
The only thing I can think of is a lawsuit goes to SCOTUS and they can rule states may (not “must” due to state sovereignty in elections) can keep him off the ballot.
But as of writing this I just thought of another scenario. And I think this might pass constitutional muster as per this SCOTUS. Trump runs and no one gets 270 EVs BUT Trump is one of the top 3. The House then votes him in but he wasn’t elected by the Electoral College. Honestly, I think MAGA could pull that off. Choose electors where there are no faithless elector laws and they cast a ballot for let’s say a Cruz/Vance ticket. If the Democratic candidate and Trump both get less than 270 then it goes to the House and the Pubs may lead in delegations there.
