Who the hell is going to be the muscle for a coup?
The military leadership hates his guts and has zero desire to run things.
Federal goons (CPB,ICE) are way too small in number.
Right wing militias lack the numbers and organization for straightforward confrontation. They are set up largely for small
scale stochastic terrorism, not nationwide muscle for a wayward regime.
This is the syphillitic brain farts of a president who never had a clue what his position ever meant. He never wanted to actually run things and sucked at it.
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Vote Blue, democracy depends on it.
Send money to key local campaigns. Double check your registration status.
Trump lost the popular vote. By a lot. So did Bush The Torturer. People vote, the problem is their votes don’t count. The electoral college is so broken that a farmer in Ohio has 1000 times more voting power than any Californian. I saw one study that said the same 18000 people in three counties in the rust belt elected the last four presidents.
You’re not wrong about the electoral college, but I’m not sure what that has to do with what I posted. Their votes may not count, but they are being counted. It’s not as though non-voters are a myth. I know he lost the popular vote, which is why I said:
We should get rid of the electoral college, but that’s a separate issue from low voter turnout- and it would be a lot easier to get rid of it if the non-voting ~45% of the country would make their voices heard in a progressive way instead of standing idly by and supporting the status quo through their silence.
Precedent is important, though. Il Douche disputed an election he won. I have serious doubts that any “blown out of the water” would be enough to have him accept the results. What a HUGE margin would do is make it much harder to finagle the results to his liking. Voting counts, even if we aren’t wild about our choices.
Y’all are placing a lot of trust in and hope on an institution that has not, historically, been staffed by the most stable or law-abiding of individuals.
Moreover, merely remaining passively in their barracks while Il Douche’s goons run roughshod is not going to help. DHS may not have the firepower to stand up to the military, but if you have militarized police and fed thugs going against the general public, the chance for massacres is not trivial.
Apologies, I didn’t make that point very clearly. I interpreted your post as saying not enough people vote and that’s why we have people like Trump. So what I was trying to say is that enough people do vote to reflect the will of the country, but the system fails them. Yes, it would be nice if voter turnout was higher, but a secondary point I was trying to make is to ask whether it would matter?
Note that I am in no way condoning people who don’t vote. Everyone needs to vote for lots of reasons, including downticket races and local things. Specifically on the question of president though, I think it’s fair to say voter turnout is not the primary issue. To me it’s gerrymandering and the electoral college that keep giving us minority rule by monsters.
That’s not how coups work when the majority party is in power. They change the rules using the courts and legislative powers, and it keeps that power by a desire for normalcy until it’s too late for normalcy.
It’s not like Honduras had the military assassinate politicians, the party that established single party rule packed their Supreme Court and had their opposition forced into exile following the letter of the law and then used legal pressures to maintain power. Because it doesn’t take anything but a lack of resistance for stuff like this to happen.
So instead of “who will instill the martial law?” the question needs to be “who will lead possibly violent resistance to a legal dissolution of democracy?”
We don’t have a tradition of military control of civil infrastructure/politics like your average dictatorship or teetering democracies. The military can’t even keep its numbers stable. They don’t want the job of running things here. They’re busy enough. I am simply relying on their exhaustion and lack of ambitions here.
I would say that it takes muscle to maintain a single party rule once you’ve eroded democracy away. Resistance comes almost immediately.
There are several repressive regimes which come to mind who collapsed because there was no will of the military (or a paramilitary secret police) to massacre people to maintain it.
A kleptocratic regime which is fucking up a response to plague like Trump’s is not winning over the people it needs to end democracy.
Are they going to have one of those debates where they field questions from the audience (or viewers from home)? Because I’d like to see Trump answer this one: If the election’s so flawed, why have it at all?
