In the recently released book "Peril" journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa describe in some alarming detail plans by Trump and his capitulating cronies to overthrow the government of the United States.
Mike Pence got some props for not giving in to Donald Trump's fever dream of Pence's role as Vice President serving as a fulcrum to pry the election away from Joe Biden and hand the presidency back Trump.
But not so fast! It seems Pence was seriously down with Trump's whackadoodle schemes until former Vice President Dan Quayle talked him out of it.
John Eastman, one of Donald Trump’s legal eagles, drafted an outline for how Mike Pence could throw the election to the House of Representatives where Republicans could install Trump in office.
Eastman's plan was based on a spurious understanding of the Constitution and how elections work. Eastman's plan was a tale told by an idiot to other idiots signifying nothing.
The lack of any real legal standing in these plans to overturn the will of the people was hardly a deterrent. A lack of facts was never an issue for Trump or his team.
Their job was to make the case there was voter fraud; nobody said anything about having to actually prove it.
When Trump pressed the Department of Justice to say there was widespread voter fraud, the DOJ refused to do so without evidence. Trump's retort to that was to just "say there was fraud. I will take care of the rest."
"You provide the prose poems; I’ll provide the war.”
Charles Foster Kane from Citizen Kane.
There are sadly too many reasons why this is still relevant.
Donald Trump still will not shut the fuck up about the 2020 election being stolen. And he's got a base of 70 million who hang on his every word. Trump's delusional narrative continues to erode the confidence in America's electoral system.
The only reason Trump didn't make his nightmare scenario a reality is that there were just enough people of some decency and good conscience who said "no" to Trump's efforts to overthrow democracy for his own selfish gains.
And guess who is being targeted by Trump and his loyalists in the Republican Party? The same people who stood up to Trump and his lies about the 2020 election are being challenged in the courts, on right wing media outlets and eventually in the voting booth.
If the scenario of post election 2020 played out again, an aggrieved sore loser could more effectively wield levers of power that were now more conducive to such outside influence.
Even as efforts by the Republican Party fail to provide any factual basis of any wide ranging malfeasance in our elections.
The Republican led “audit” of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s Maricopa county found ZILCH of any widespread fraud, voting irregularities or miscounted ballots.
Republicans with every incentive to please their lord and master were unable to prove Trump was cheated in Maricopa County.
And yet...
And yet...
Trump insisted in a statement that the Maricopa audit had “uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD."
Li'l Donnie will NOT! SHUT! The FUCK! UP!
Also not shutting up is Rudy Guiliani but he'll have one less platform to spew his false assertions.
Rudy's been temporarily banned from Fox News.
Which confuses Rudy.
“It’s really strange that I’m on probation [at Fox News] at a time in which just about everything I said [about the 2020 election] is being corroborated.”
God, what a lying dumb ass. No, nothing you have said is being corroborated. Rudy, you have been laughed out of every court in the land with your specious arguments about election fraud with not even a smidgen of a smudge of any evidence.
Among the revelations in the Bob Woodward book is that Rudy Giuliani and other attorneys making scurrilous accusations of widespread voter fraud knew all along there was no basis in fact for these accusations.
Rudy Giuliani persists with this false narrative and insists he's being proven right when even his own party in couldn't prove anything in Arizona and even Fox News whose pundits have their lips firmly affixed to Trump's ass want nothing to do with you.
And Donald Trump (big surprise here) is refusing to pay you.
And Trump goes on.
Trump has pressured Gov. Abbott to conduct an audit in Texas.
Wait! Didn't Trump win Texas?
Well, yeah but apparently not by enough.
The Texas audit will target some of Texas' democratic enclaves (like Austin) where Biden did carry the day.
Why is all this relevant? Oh as much as I wish we could expend less energy giving a god damn about any thing this lying fat fuck has to say, the problem is Donald Trump was a bigger danger to democracy than we realized and continues to be a threat with the knowing and willing complicity of a Republican network of sniveling sycophants ready to do his bidding.
As Adam Serwer wrote for The Altantic on September 23, 2021 in Trump’s Plans for a Coup Are Now Public, a lot of Trump's attempt at a coup were right out there in the open all along.
Here are five pressure points along Trump's path to usurp the 2020 election and hold on to power
1. pressure secretaries of state
The most notorious example of this pressure was Trump leaning on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find more votes for Trump to overcome Biden's lead. Raffensperger refused to capitulate to Trump's threats and now is facing a primary challenge within his own party by Trump loyalists.
Trump failed in his efforts because secretaries of state were more devoted to facts and law than to Trump's ego. Trump and the Republican Party are seeking to replace these people with candidates who feel differently.
2. pressure state legislatures
Trump personally attempted to coerce state legislators to overturn election results based on the very questionable legal theory that such legislatures could simply ignore the results of the popular vote in their own states.
Again, these legislatures realized this was not an actual authority they had and now Republican state congressmen who held to the rule over law over loyalty to Trump are being challenged on the right by Trumpist candidates.
3. pressure the courts
Almost unanimously, every judge who heard every challenge responded with a "oh HELL no" and kicked Trump's legal lackeys out the door.
The amount of support these efforts received from Republican elected officials was alarming. These same Republican elected officials are in positions of authority at the state and national level to appoint judges to the bench that may place loyalty to Donald Trump over the constitution.
4. pressure Mike Pence
Trump publicly hounded Pence to reject the results prior to the traditionally ceremonial electoral-vote count in Congress. Pence said no but apparently thought about it a minute first. If Quayle had not convinced Pence otherwise, could Pence had tried to exercise a power he did not possess to keep his boss in power? How would the events of the January 6th insurrection played out if Pence put loyalty to Trump over his oath to the Constitution.
5. pressure the angry mob
Trump egged on the crowd gathered on January 6th, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The angry mob of Trump supporters breached the Capitol and presented a real and present danger to the lawmakers gathered inside.
The mob didn't succeed but if they had reached and harmed even just one legislator, the outcome of their violent efforts would'v been much different.
On each of those of five pressure points, democracy was placed precariously on the edge of an Occam's razor where if one person had acted differently, in a manner less beholden to the Constitution and more in deference to Donald Trump, the outcome would have been drastically altered from what we experienced. The will of the people would have been subverted to Trump's ego.
But as horrific as it is to imagine "What might have been?", it is important to acknowledge what can be. Donald Trump is not going away (damn it!) and the Republican Party is even more devoted than ever to making loyalty to Trump the ultimate litmus test for the party and it's candidates.
As Rick Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine, said, “You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal."
Trump lost in 2020. But that was just a battle.
Trump and the Republican Party are waging a war.
A war they could still win.
Most civilizations have worried about the threat of barbarians at the gates.
For the United States, the barbarians are inside the gates.
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