In a way it is a good thing Kushner said what he did, as now there is an explicit public dialogue about it.
I’d always heard this as “There’ve always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm.”
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No, not under ordinary law. But with an emergency martial law approved by a possibly-shrunken SCOTUS and enforced by loyal troops, elections are irrelevant. Mao was right – political power grows from the barrel of a gun. And a living POTUS commands lots of firepower. Which would be worse, a coup, or lack of a coup?
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Well anybody can start with, “What if Trump just declares himself dictator-for-life?”
and then write any kind of story they want
It doesn’t seem likely that the “loyal troops” would go along with it, but anything’s possible
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Good thing I didn’t say that.
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So, I’m going to respectfully add my opinion here and I hope I’m wrong but here is what I think will happen.
The election will take place and then the next day McConnell, Barr and Trump will go on tv and tell everyone that the Democrats tried to cheat, were unsuccessful and that Trump won the election. They will further add that anyone who counters this narrative is guilty of treason against America.
Why?
It’s because this is what they have been waiting for. The Civil War in the US never ended, it just went underground until lately. The Republicans have become the Confederates. Geez, they don’t even try to hide it anymore. Every time they protest they show up with confederate flags and military weapons. They even call Mar a Lago the Southern White House and what does their leader do consistently and perfectly every time- be a racist. The timing is perfect because the current pandemic crisis has given them the cover they need to push through their agendas one after the other. And this time they don’t have the settle for half of the US- they’re going for the whole enchilada.
And just to be sure they could get away with it they have been pushing the bar all this time and nothing has happened. Lock up kids in cages? Sure. What happened? Some people protested. Did they raid the facilities and save all the kids? Nope. March into the Capitol building in Michigan armed to the teeth and did anybody send in the National Guard? No again. Over 100,000 people have died in the States in the last few weeks and the Republicans haven’t blinked an eye. Instead they have talked about denying funding to blue states the way you would talk about cutting off enemy supply lines.
The argument that other nations will intervene on the behalf of the American democracy is also mute. The Russians will agree with Trump in a heartbeat. So will Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary. The Germans will never endanger their automobile productions facilities that are principally located in red states and the Chinese will say it’s none of their business, though secretly delighted that the Americans have done themselves in. The rest of the hopelessly helpless EU will have a series of intense meetings to discuss the matter.
And if we are looking for a historical comparison- the National Socialists took over Germany in nearly the same way in the midst of the biggest economic depression the country had seen. What did the US do? Yup, nothing. Not until Pearl Harbor.
I wish I was wrong and I wish I could say that I could see Trump getting up and shaking Biden’s hand after a resounding defeat. After which he and his ugly crew just pack up and slink off to Florida but I really, really doubt it.
Kushner has done a bit of a slip and forgotten that he wasnt in a meeting where he could speak freely but on national tv. They have 100% spoken about ways to delay the election until they can be sure that they can change the result. They keep showing their true selves every single day and people are still in denial.
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This is terrifying, but I agree with pretty much the whole scenario. Odds that most of us on this BBS are on a list somewhere?
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Recall that all US elections are State-level. (The people of a State choose their electors in a State election. There are no Federal elections.) A strategist would do better to consider how to sabotage specific states’ elections. For instance, states with large cities that have high infection rates might be systematically attacked.
Implausible (?) horror story: Administration announces, “more in sorrow than in anger” that the cities are hotbeds of infection and demands that the polling places in cities larger than a half-million be closed there, and there only - and that the risks of mail-in ballots at scale must be accepted. The administrations of red states accept the plan. The blue states are already carrying out more than what was planned, by carrying out their existing election-under-lockdown plans.
The absentee ballots cannot all be counted on Election Night. States report to the media the partial results based on in-person voting - and the result is a landslide for Trump, since only rural voters have been counted by then. Centrists accept what they hear in mainstream media, which simply reports the partial numbers in progress.
As the absentee ballots gradually get counted, the tallies all lurch dramatically to the left. Trump claims that no process other than fraud can account for such a move, and, using the power they granted themselves in Bush v Gore, the Supreme Court decrees that the released results from Election Night may not be altered. The electors of a handful of states that have somehow managed to stay blue on Election Night cast their votes for Biden. All the others either cast their votes for Trump, or, if the legislative and judicial wrangling cannot be resolved by 14 December, are deemed to have abstained from the election. In the final tally, only Oregon (which has absentee voting at scale already) and Vermont (which is no friend of Trump’s, despite having no large cities) are found to have voted for Biden.
Trump cruises ‘legitimately’ to a second term with three-fourths of the popular vote left uncounted forever.
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I don’t think that’s the case any more, not since the 20th Amendment. It now seems to be the newly-elected House that conducts the contingent election, in early January. See e.g. the Congressional Research Service’s paper “Contingent Election of the President and Vice President by Congress: Perspectives and Contemporary Analysis”, pp. 9-10.
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I don’t know, evicting a crazed ex-President from the White House sounds like it would fall under the rubric of protecting the new President.
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Not much I’d say. trump didn’t expect the job to be so full of paper work and tiny details, he’s more of a big picture kind of guy…4k with fox news on.
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Maybe it is. Maybe they’ll swear themselves to Scientology and try to put David Miscavige in charge.
Point is it’s not as simple as anyone “just” doing as Trump says. None of this is clear, and that situation is well beyond clear ways things are supposed to be done or play out. And Trump not doing it.
Everyone wants to predict and warn like it’s a forgone conclusion that it’ll happen and that it will work without complication. There’s a lot of how and why left on the table.
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The “who throws him out” isn’t really the point though.
Everything starts with “One side says the election is invalid” and ending up with two competing factions. Each side saying the other other is illegitimate.
It’ll create chaos as people at every level of government are forced to decide which side they personally think is the the legitimate governing body.
It’s complicated by the fact that one side is completely willing to just state it as “fact” with no basis at all that something is true beyond their own force of will, and plenty of people including senators go along with it. While the other side tries to use the controls of government and law to work out the issue.
Say, Trump loses a totally normal election. Or that he tries to suppress it as much as possible, and loses whatever is left. Declares it was a tampered with election, the outcome is invalid, and republican congressmen back his statements. Democrats go to court, and Trump stalls, motions, disrupts beyond January 20th. What happens next?
Say, Trump wins, and the Democrats say it was because of illegal voter suppression or the election was hacked. They take it to court. There’s probably less risk of government melt down here, as they’re focused on court battles reversing the outcome instead of force of will reversing the outcome. Which still doesn’t mean the legitimate people are in control.
Everything in our government functions at all because people trust elections and respect the outcome. Or, at least use respected processes to fight about the outcome, and even then they largely respect the process as a whole and are fighting about smaller details while respecting the decisions of that process.
Where we’re at, the Democrats have been trying to pass increased security measures to strengthen and increase this belief while creating elections that have stronger controls and more voters. While the other side is actively blocking any change and simultaneously trying to make it both harder to vote and less transparent.
It’s not a great spot, and depressing on a good day.
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The biggest hang up to this scenario is that the federal government is still almost entirely made up of career civil servants who have served for multiple administrations. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of them. And they hate Trump. Who is going to execute these orders? Even if they just walk off the job, the Trump administration is screwed; nevermind if they actively resist. His approval rating in the military is under 50%.
It would be like having the coaches of a football team lose all authority and all but a few players walking away in the middle of a game. OK - you’ve got a guard, a cornerback, and the field-goal kicker left, along with 5 coaches. How are you going to finish the game? Oh, you’re not. You’re done.
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They’re not going to do that. At least not the hundreds of thousands, probably not even the hundreds. They might do work slow downs, and not put forth their best effort, but even that has some limits.
It’s not because they support or don’t support Trump, or agree or disagree with any policy. It’s because they’re just people working jobs with bills to pay. Walking off means you’re out of job and not getting paid. Just look at how many turned to food banks when the government was shutdown for a few weeks. They simply cannot afford to stand on principal and not get paid for most of them.
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Why not both? ‘failson-in-loser’? too cumbersome? maybe ‘scum-in-law’?
I have seen the term “President Kushner” darkly, and I hope sarcastically, bandied about as well…
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FTFY.
Just thinking out loud here… and assuming Barr and the compromised DOJ and SCOTUS will cheerfully enable cancellation and/or delay: what is the upshot of such a scenario? what are the next events most likely to happen?
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In the case of a dictatorship grab by Trump? Hell yeah, they’ll walk off the job. It’s not whether they do or do not support Trump at that point - it’s whether they support a fascist dictatorship. These are people who take their oath to defend the Constitution seriously. They could make more in the private sector, but they’ve chosen service over money. They aren’t perfect and they aren’t heroes, but there is a line they won’t cross, and “business as usual” during an unconstitutional coup is across that line for most.
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The states can appoint but apparently have no official mechanism to dismiss electors. Even “faithless electors.”
Have been watching and listening this week with interest:
Listening to [what we are allowed to hear in the way of] oral arguments before SCOTUS made me queasy:
Here’s the Gray Lady pat pat patting our worried lil’ heads:
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Except that presidential elections are run by the states, as per the Constitution.
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I’m thinking in terms of how many different scenarios there are. And how many moving parts each one actually has. Because I don’t think it’s realistic to think they could actually pull it off before the end of the year.
I mean the most likely outcome is that since the executive just doesn’t have this authority in explicit on paper terms. They try, the election happens anyway as the inevitable court fights spool out too slowly. At best Trump get’s a chance to cry foul and sew chaos over a loss. Which is dangerous, but not the same as staying in power.
So what would some one have to do to get over that? How many things do you need to change, in 5 to 7 months, for it to result in Trump in solid control of the country without an election?
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