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A week or so before the election I was listening to an episode of Radiolab, which began by introducing Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown, and someone who is, beyond that, very well connected in DC. The episode begins with Brooks telling the story of being at a dinner party sometime in 2019 (when people still had dinner parties) and posing a hypothetical to one of the other guests, “gosh, you know, what if Trump loses and he won’t step down…” The guest had a ready response, “oh, the military will never let that happen.” This answer surprised Brooks, though in turn I’m surprised that Brooks was surprised, I mean yes, I can understand how the exact mechanics of the military stopping things might be fuzzy, but it’s surprising that a DC insider, and someone, who in fact worked in the Department of Defense for several years, would be so ignorant of how power actually works.
To her credit, Brooks paid attention to the fact that she was confused, and decided to do something about her ignorance. She decided to war game the election. As it turns out this election was uncertain enough, that lots of people decided to do the same thing. You may have heard of Jeffrey Toobin’s fall from grace after he did something he shouldn’t have during a similar “election simulation”. (There are so many jokes that could be and have been made about this situation, but I will forebear.) In any case Brooks’ war games explored four different scenarios, one of which was an ambiguous result and other of which was a narrow Biden victory. Trump supporters seem to be acting as if it’s the first, when it seems pretty clear that it’s the second. Regardless it was while Brooks and the people she had assembled were working their way through the various scenarios that the answer the other dinner guest had offered finally played out:
The Joint Chiefs of Staff…sort of let it be known unofficially through leaks that they had decided that Biden was the legitimate winner and… that he was the guy who was getting the nuclear codes and so on. And that was the thing that proved decisive.
And so in that [scenario], Biden was eventually inaugurated. But in the [ambiguous scenario]… The partisans on both sides were still claiming victory, leading to the problem of two claims to commander in chief power, including access to the nuclear codes, at noon on January 20.
And it was left totally unclear what the military would do.
The possibility that at noon on the 20th, the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have to hand the nuclear codes to someone.
Who holds the nuclear codes? They can come in and take them from Trump and hand them to Biden. They can do nothing, which means Trump holds them. But it was sobering as a sort of a non-warmongering, peaceful American citizen to realize that it’s the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military who will decide who the president is.
And that was both amazing and, also, as a strategist – oh, well, then we got to work the military. Those are the refs, and you got to work the refs.
To generalize those conclusions, when everything is stripped away, things are decided by force. The referee is always, when all is said and done, those who have the guns (and the tanks and the nuclear missiles). These rules are unsurprising to anyone who’s even remotely familiar with libertarian thinking, where the central tenant is that all laws are eventually enforced at the point of a gun or historically at the edge of a sword. This is especially the case when you’re talking about who is going to rule an entire country, which is to say who is going to have a monopoly on the use of that force. As Brooks herself was eventually forced to admit at the end of her war games, “I think we collectively put a little too much faith in the law and in institutions as if they exist outside of politics and power, but they don’t.”
None of this is to say that we haven’t made progress, or that things aren’t better, in fact they’re so much better that people like Brooks, despite their education and experience, have essentially forgotten the fundamental rules, because these rules haven’t been necessary since the Civil War (more or less). Despite how long ago that was, I think the distance we’ve actually travelled is less than people think. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that recently we have reversed course and we’ve been moving closer to the time when those fundamental rules will come into play.
This is not the venue for detouring into a huge discussion of history, but in the pre-democractic era, when power changed hands in a country, the person who ended up with the power was generally the one with the biggest and most powerful army, and if there was some doubt then armies would engage in the true test of power and fight. Of course all of this fighting and uncertainty over the transfer of power wasn’t good for the country and so various methods were arrived at to transfer power peacefully: laws, assemblies, and of course the idea that power could be inherited and passing it from father to son. But in a sense this just made the person who could draw on these various customs, laws and traditions more likely to have the biggest army because those things made power easier to call upon.
Eventually, of course, we arrived at a democratic system. Most people understand that a democracy is supposed to work under the idea that the course favored by the majority of the citizens is more likely to be the right one, but it’s also a way of tallying up the size of each side’s army. Of reminding those vying for power that it’s best to stick with a peaceful transition of power, because, when they’re voted out of power, it was in consequence of the other side having a bigger “army”. So resisting that transfer is less likely to succeed, it’s already been demonstrated that you have the smaller “army”. Obviously this is overly simplistic, both because there’s a lot more that goes into an “army’s” power than the number of people in it, and also because people are not the only source of power. But it has the advantage of being simple, reflecting something real, and being tied into larger principles of civic duty, participation and decision making.
All of this takes us to the current situation, which is no longer a war game, but a battle which is really happening, and in essence Trump supporters are claiming that they had the bigger army, but that the Deep State used their other forms of power to deny them the victory that was rightfully theirs. But isn’t that precisely what a battle is? Two sides bringing their power to bear, with the one who brings the greater power to bear winning?
To put it more concretely there are basically three options:
- The election was broadly legitimate. There might be some fraud, but if so we’re looking at something on the order of a few ballots here, or a few ballots there. Nothing even close to the 14,000 ballots which would be needed to tip even Georgia, which has the narrowest margin. And even if Trump could prevail there that would just make the race 290 to 248. Trump would need at least two other states on top of that to actually win the election. Two states where the gaps are even larger.
- The election was stolen by the Deep State. Either through some massive, unheard of level of fraud or through actually messing with counts at the level of the voting machines. The battle was joined and the anti-Trump forces were able to bring a huge amount of power to bear and quite frankly whether they beat Trump fairly with votes, or unfairly with power that Trump and his followers couldn’t match, they won, it’s over. And in the final analysis it doesn’t matter if the war was fought in the manner Trump supporters expected or if it was fought with dirty underhanded tactics they never saw coming. The war is over and Trump and his supporters have lost.
- The same as 2, but Trump and his supporters have power of their own, that they are in the process of bringing to bear. The power of being on the right side of the law, because there really was massive fraud. Or the power of a 6-3 Supreme Court which will eventually rule in Trump’s favor despite the prima facie vote totals. Or the power of the military, who, when January 20th rolls around, won’t take away the nuclear codes. Or we’ll find out that there’s enough hardcore Trump supporters in the military that there will be a bona fide violent coup. Or the power of a violent and bloody revolution, with armed Trump supporters (of which there are many) rising up and storming the Bastille.
To be clear, I have seen very little evidence that it’s not option 1 (I’ll get to the “very little” part of that in a minute.) Because of this I’m very confident that it is option 1, I don’t think there’s some massive coverup, some huge source of undetected fraud. I do think that the mail in balloting which was implemented in response to COVID which was always going to result in the slow counting of urban ballots which were, additionally, always going to be heavily Democratic, happened at the worst possible time. That it provided fertile soil for people to plant conspiracies in. But not only do I not believe any of the election related conspiracies, even if I did, I still think it would be best to ignore them. Which brings us to option 2. What I’m trying to get across by having you consider this option is that once you start from the premise that the election was stolen (which by the way is a significant filter that will distort all subsequent reasoning) then you have already admitted that we’re not playing the game of “count the legitimate votes”, we’re playing the game of “exercise power in whatever way you can” and if that’s the game we’re playing you’ve not only lost, you’ve lost so comprehensively, that continuing to play the 2020 round of the game is only going to make you look foolish. That you should regroup, realize how inadequate your own power has been and start preparing for the 2024 round of the game.
Now I understand that, despite labelling it as a game, that this is a dark view of the world and to reiterate, it’s not my view, I’m just saying that once you’ve accepted that view, then you’ve ceased to think of the election as the legitimate and law-abiding counting of votes, and you’ve moved to thinking of it as an exercise of raw power, and my point is, that even reframing it in this way, you’ve still lost. But perhaps this part of the post is unnecessary, you’re already comfortable with the idea that we’ve moved into the realm of raw power, you just think that whatever power the anti-trump forces have mustered, the pro-trump forces can match. Which takes us to option 3, and the various ways the pro-trump side might exercise their power, given that this is the game you’ve decided we’re playing. I already listed several, let’s go through them in more detail:
The power of the law: This is what Trump’s defender’s claim that he’s doing. I personally think that he has moved beyond this, but we’ll start here. First as I already mentioned Trump has to change the results in three of the close states, and his arguments for doing it in even one are extremely tenuous. I went to a friend of mine who’s very intelligent, and who has a far greater tolerance for conspiracies than I do. (As a side note I’ve gotten far more benefit out of respectfully engaging with this friend than I ever would have by dismissing him.) And I asked him for the single most compelling evidence of fraud he had come across. He gave me a few, and so I looked into them. At first glance they were all pretty compelling, but after digging in deeper, (see the afterword for a dissection of one of them) none of them represented the kind of clear evidentiary smoking gun necessary for courts — which by the way should be less susceptible to accusations of bias having recently received an influx of Trump appointees — to exercise enough power to overturn the results of the election in three different states.
Mechanically, it’s not even entirely clear what Trump supporters imagine is going to happen. A full audit of results would be ideal, but so far unless I missed something that’s only taking place in Georgia. And I am willing to bet substantial real money, at favorable odds to whoever takes me up on it, that this audit will not change the results of Georgia. But even if it did that wouldn’t change the results of the election. Also even if people wanted to do audits in all the states that are close, we’re running out of time. Recall that in Bush v. Gore the decision came down to the idea that they couldn’t do a full recount in Florida in the time remaining. That was one state where only a few hundred votes separated the candidates, here we’re talking about thousands of votes across a minimum of three different states. Though, speaking of Bush v. Gore, that takes us to the next form of power the Republican’s might be able to exercise:
The power of the Supreme Court: These options are basically in order of how damaging they would be to the long term civic health of the country, and mostly that maps to their probability as well, but not in this case. The idea that the Supreme Court, because of its conservative majority, would hand Trump the election, given the evidence as it currently stands, is insane. There is zero chance of it happening, even more so after the lukewarm reception the justices gave to the recent Obamacare case.
A decision by the military: I’m trying to be somewhat comprehensive here and as one of the war games I mentioned in the beginning was finally resolved by the Joint Chiefs using back channels to indicate their support, I thought I should cover that option, but it seems even more disruptive and more improbable than the Supreme Court deciding the election. I know that there’s a common perception that the military is strongly Republican, but a quick review of recent stories on the subject seem to indicate that this is not the case with Trump, and I see no reason to suspect that it’s different at the highest levels. In the situation we’re in, I agree we may see exactly the scenario mentioned in the war game played out. And by “exactly” I mean we may see backchannel support for Biden. We won’t see it for Trump.
An actual military coup: Of course historically, those times when a country’s military decided to intervene in an election generally took a more dramatic form than subtly making it know who the next leader should be. Typically, if the military intervenes in the transfer it’s to seize power through the use of force and at the point of the sword. This is another thing which is incredibly unlikely to happen in 2020 as a way of Trump “winning” the election. But as an option it’s always going to be lurking in the background because as I’ve been trying to explain, power is ultimately implemented through force, and there is a lot of force in the military.
The power of a popular uprising: It seems clear that Trump is already trying to access this power, and while I don’t see too many problems with him doing that if it just takes the form of some peaceful protests like the Million MAGA March that happened over the weekend (what’s good for the goose, and so on), there’s a very fine line between 1st Amendment Freedom of assembly and violence. Also as I have repeatedly urged people to consider, “What if you’re wrong?” What if you rise up in anger over a fraudulent election and it wasn’t? What if you’ve been misled? And even if you’re 100% sure you’re right, not only is this exercise of power fraught with danger for the country, it’s also unlikely to go the way you expect. To use a quote I’ve used several times before in this space, from a post by David Hines:
Political violence is like war, like violence in general: people have a fantasy about how it works.
This is the fantasy of how violence works: you smite your enemies in a grand and glorious cleansing because of course you’re better.
Grand and glorious smiting isn’t actually how violence works…
I’ve worked a few places that have had serious political violence. And I’m not sure how to really describe it so people get it.
This is a stupid comparison, but here: imagine that one day Godzilla walks through your town.
The next day, he does it again.
And he keeps doing it. Some days he steps on more people than others. That’s it. That’s all he does: trudging through your town, back and forth. Your town’s not your town now; it’s The Godzilla Trudging Zone.
That’s kind of what it’s like.
Everyone imagines that they will rise up in a grand and glorious smiting, but that’s never how it works. Let me repeat: that’s NEVER how it works. As a consequence of this mismatch between expectations and reality, everyone vastly underestimates the value of stability. And here I’m going to lay my cards on the table. I’m a huge fan of stability. Which is to say at this point even if I was convinced that the election had been stolen on behalf of Biden (I don’t think Biden himself is capable of stealing it) and even if Trump was and will be every amazing thing his supporters claim. It would not be worth taking up arms. It would not be worth a violent insurrection. It would not be worth bloodshed.
I think it’s clear from my record that I am not an apologist for the left or the Democrats. Headlines like “Biden Fills Economic Posts With Experts on Systemic Racism“ fill me with unease. But discrediting and denying the results of the 2020 election is not the place to have the ideological fight. Whether through legitimate voting (by far the most likely scenario) or through an enormous exercise of vast and unmatched conspiratorial power, Biden won. And the longer it takes people to admit that and the more they fight that the greater chance there will be that we’ll all end up losing.
I’m trying something new, adding a brief appendix/afterword. Let me know what you think. If you like it (or anything I’ve written) the easiest way to show it is by donating. Even if you hate it, I think you’ll have to admit that softening the criticism with money is the right thing to do.
Afterword
First I’d like to refer you back to my deep dive on the ADL’s numbers on extremism for a reminder that going deep into something is rarely as productive as one might hope. It can take an enormous amount of time to verify even one claim and I think at this point there are thousands. Still, it’s a useful exercise.
In looking through the claims my friend sent me, the one that jumped out as both incredibly damning if true, but easy to verify was one that said that in Georgia, on those ballots where people only voted for the president (and presumably no one else) those ballots went 818 for Trump and 95,801 for Biden. While those ballots which had votes for more than just the president went 2,456,915 for Trump and 2,376,081 for Biden. You can see an example of this on twitter here, and Donald Trump Jr. retweeting it here.
Well the first question is why would people go to the effort of creating approximating 95,000 votes for Biden, and not also create 95,000 votes for the two Democratic senate candidates in Georgia. Arguably when it comes to frustrating the Democrats, particularly over the long-term, Mitch McConnell and his Senate majority have been far more effective than Trump. Did the conspirators think that they had the Senate locked up but they needed all the help they could get when it came to Trump?
The next obvious question would be whether there are even 95,000 more votes in the Presidential vote pool than in any of the other pools. Taking the Ossoff-Perdue race (this will be important later) we find that there were a total of 4,945,704 votes, and in the Trump Biden race there were 4,992,004, for a difference of 46,300. Only half the number required for just the math to check out. (The numbers are from Fox News and include third party candidates.) But of course the question is where are these numbers coming from in the first place? Is there some official site I can look at? Some dusty corner of the Georgia state election office where I can find the paperwork?
Nope, the data the person making the claim is relying on, is right out there on every election website. It’s all based on the fact that Biden received 99,922 more votes than Ossoff and Trump received 785 votes less than Purdue. I’m going to assume that it was 95,801 and positive 818 respectively at the time the information began spreading, and that the late arriving votes which skewed Democratic are what moved it into the current position. So, in the end, I guess the mistake is not realizing that people don’t have to vote straight party?
Fortunately, this time around, the explanation was straight forward. It didn’t reflect anything extraordinary, and there’s no reason to suspect shenanigans. In fact when it comes down to it, it’s kind of embarrassing for the people making the claim once you realize what they’re doing. But at first glance it was something that seemed really damning. If anyone out there still thinks they have some smoking gun, let me know, I don’t have time to look into everything, but I’d be happy to look into something else you think it’s particularly convincing.
I do like the afterward, and I appreciate debunking conspiracy claims as well. Doing them efficiently is the challenge. Right off the bat the data presented could not possibly have been produced. People can leave ballots blank in full or in part but I’ve never seen any data published on ballot combinations. As in how many ballots went for Biden as President but a Republican for Senator versus how many ballots left the Senate blank but voted for president etc. etc. In this case I’d demand to see their source and as you pointed out they are making an assumption about ballots by looking at vote totals, which you can’t do obviously.
Another test I try to pull out is looking at how advocates of fraud behave. What I see is mostly a last minute cash grab from the gullible. Note the funds to challenge the elections have fine print that say only donations greater than $8,000 actually go to challenging the election, anything less goes to whatever Trump wants to do with it and even over $8K, 60% can be used to retire ‘campaign debt’….which means either money Trump lent to the campaign or inflated bills from his businesses for holding events for it. If you read about what the lawyers actually do when they show up in court, the contrast with reality is sharp. At best nitpicking over a few hundred ballots for petty things like the voter signed the envelope but didn’t write out their home address.
I also hit the RadioLab podcast on Tuesday, and it was freaky hearing it after the election had already happened. Stress levels on Nov 3 and before were probably high enough for me. I guess you could go deeper, so what if the military refused to hand one guy the nuclear launch codes? The launch codes don’t actually launch anything, just tell crewmen (I was going to say soldiers but I think missiles are run entirely by the air force) to launch. Would they?
Military coups often come about when the democratic system breaks down but they have a moral hazaard problem. Once the taboo is broken, it becomes easier for the military to take over and it also becomes easier for civilian gov’t to push the limit since the military becomes a type of supreme court that could be appealed too as a last resort.
I think the danger Trump has exposed is our country is close to a type of incompetent fascism. European fascism supposedly was immoral but it “made the trains run on time”. This type of fascism, the trains don’t run on time and in fact start running even worse but if you suck up enough you might get appointed direct of trains and cash in big time until you’re fired by tweet and someone else gets it. In this way a country can set itself on a path of decline and ruin but its gov’t is insulated from the consquences of failure. Russia,, Hungry, Turkey, Poland, the UK, and Venezuela all seem to be experimenting with this type of government of failure. China seems to be toying with some aspects of it as well. The question here is if democracy ultimately ends up in a position where you just get a ‘king of failure’ who presides over a country as it declines, then what alternatives actually work? Work meaning different policies have to be continuously considered, implemented, and evaluated. Fascism’s answer has been somewhat post-modern….”don’t worry about that, instead worry about perceiving things being great and go from there!”.
(Fasicsm, let’s keep in mind, has a longer and more diverse history than Hitler and Germany. Just because no one is opening up camps for Jews, starting World Wars and goose-stepping thru the streets doesn’t mean all is well).
The whole nuclear launch system is a giant source of fragility and I’m surprised it hasn’t bit us in the ass already. The fact that the President has sole discretion is madness even if you really like the President, but because the time to react is so limited it’s considered difficult bordering on impossible to expand the number of people who have to sign off on it.
My understanding of actual launching is the same is yours, but I have no idea what would happen if Trump ordered a full nuclear strike. It might be stopped before it could even go out, or maybe he’s got a more direct connection to silos and submarines. If it actually made it to the people turning the key, I’d be willing to bet that somewhere there’s a collection of Trump loyalists and that missiles would be fired. So logistically maybe saying that it all comes down to who has the launch codes is inaccurate, but the idea that the military are kind of the ultimate refs is very pertinent.
I think labeling Trump as a fascist, even with “incompetent” adjective conceals more than it reveals. He’s certainly something bad, but I think the most important story is how divided the country is, not whether half would do X if given the chance. One thing that people overlook about the fascists is they had enormous amounts of unity at all levels. Hitler had academia, the media, the military, and a majority of the population. Trump is 0 for 4.
An interesting book is “Command and Control”. There was a section in there where the military wondered just how safe are nuclear weapons in the hands of 18 yr old kids. One of the reports assembled a list of accidents that had happened with bombs and shells….things like two soldiers banging a shell back and forth with a hammer, and then it blew up killing them. What are the possibilities then? Trump would try starting a war with another nation to establish the need for him to remain President or he would nuke an American city as ‘payback’. I think the second option would likely be meet with a flat out refusal to comply. Even the first might be refused, as a commander with a key I would ponder such an order & possible war crimes trials later on.
Hitler did have more power, but as I said Hitler kind of overshadows fascism. Treating Hitler as the only type of possible fascist power is a mistake.
A test here, suppose the election was reversed and Biden was raising questions about voter credibility with equal or better evidence than Trump. Do you think for a moment Trump and his supporters wouldn’t be ballistic? It’s pretty obvious here we are not having a debate about what the rules should be or how the rules should be applied. Trump is playing a game where democracy is just the window dressing to raw power, he just doesn’t have the intelligence or energy to play that game effectively. He is somewhat indifferent between remaining where he is and running some rouge TV network. Other players around the world have shown the game could be played more effectively (see Turkey for example).
I know the point here is to war game the whole situation, but I think a lot of the war gaming has assumed far more has happened than has actually happened. In the era of Trump, this refrain is all-too common. What, for example, has Trump actually done to ‘undermine the legitimacy of elections’ other than talk about fraud while utterly failing to prove anything in court? I don’t hear most pro-Trump Republicans claiming that Trump should never concede the election, just that he should be allowed to continue all legal challenges available to him.
I’m sure some of them will change their tune once all legal challenges have been exhausted. 70+ million people voted for the man, I’m sure “some of them” believe Biden is controlled by the Lizard People, or whatever. It’s trivial to show that among 70 million people there are dozens of one-in-a-million examples. For a coup-like crisis, you need a large majority. That’s a high bar. I see a lot of unfounded assumption that a critical mass of his supporters will not accept the results of the legitimate process once all legal avenues have been explored. That is an extraordinary claim for which I see mostly speculation, not hard evidence. Indeed, the smart money would be that most of Trump’s conservative base of support would reject him if he tried to illegally occupy the White House.
As such, I’m calling it: this is all baseless fear-mongering. Unless someone can provide me HARD EVIDENCE to the contrary. Maybe there is hard evidence out there. I’ll admit I haven’t paid as close attention as most. But if there is so much hard evidence, why do I keep seeing all these baseless hypotheticals? Has Trump actually claimed he won’t leave the White House if his legal challenges fail? No. He has instead ignored the question, and instead assumed he will succeed and proceeded apace as though he will. That’s normal Trump, not revolutionary/fascist/preparing-for-a-coup Trump. It’s how he talked and behaved for the last four years when he tried things that had to go to court, but then when he lost in court he went along with the system.
For example, when he tried a “Muslim ban”, he talked a big game, but then lost in court. So he modified his strategy, lost in court a few more times, and eventually implemented a system the courts agreed to. All the while talking like he wouldn’t lose and refusing to contemplate the counterfactual.
Given his poor track record of legal challenges, I don’t see where there’s significant harm in Trump’s legal challenge strategy post-election. It’s not like claims of fraud and/or challenges in court on that basis are new to politics or even presidential elections. For all his supporters like to claim Trump is “not a normal kind of politician”, he acts a lot like a normal politician (tweets aside).
Indeed, the attitude shouldn’t be, “There’s no fraud, folks, nothing to see here!” That kind of talk feeds into the conspiracy theory playbook, and to the extent they actively try to silence Trump and his supporters it engenders sympathy for their cause. “We just want a little sunshine on the process, but they’re trying to cover it up,” looks a lot more legitimate when you actually silence people. And for what? Because you’re concerned there’s going to be some sneaky court challenge where expert lawyers slip one past the judges and get the election overturned? Anyone who has paid attention to Trump’s legal track record – and not just this election cycle – should laugh that scenario off.
The reply should be, “If you believe there is election fraud, you need to actually prove it in court. You need hard evidence, and you need to be able to prove it before expert testimony to the contrary in our adversarial legal system. The court of public opinion in echo chambers you control isn’t good enough.” And so far, they’ve entirely failed in nearly every issue they’ve brought before the courts.
Two months ago, we were hearing media outlets and pundits telling us that we were looking less at an election day, and more at an election month. Republicans whined that we needed instant gratification, and they were mostly wrong. But then less than a week after the election everyone switched sides, and pundits claimed that Trump failing to concede right away was damaging the republic and preventing the transition from proceeding apace. All this hand-wringing and fear-mongering is just more political gamesmanship – as are most of Trump’s legal challenges. It looks to me like Biden clearly won the election, and that Trump will clearly lose the legal challenge. Once again, I see a lot of claims that Trump will stop playing by the rules of the game ‘some time in the future’. I’ve seen this show before, and I know how it turns out.
Show me hard evidence, please, before asking me to care.
“. What, for example, has Trump actually done to ‘undermine the legitimacy of elections’ other than talk about fraud while utterly failing to prove anything in court? I don’t hear most pro-Trump Republicans claiming that Trump should never concede the election, just that he should be allowed to continue all legal challenges available to him.”
Well in Michigan the county board of electors consists of 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans, they voted to certify the election results and send it up to the state board. Trump called the 2 Republicans and now they are saying they want to take back their votes, which they can’t do.
So essentially Trump is trying to get states where the vote didn’t go his way to ignore the vote, or only count places he did better. That seems pretty damming to me and quite frankly I’m getting a bit tired of the claim that Trump can’t be dangerous because he’s childish, or stupid, or we shouldn’t take him literally.
The court cases, for example, have been a clownshow with no evidence being presented, or claims of fraud withdrawn and disputes picking over issues that involve maybe a few hundred ballots at most. There is a purpose to them, though, to sew confusion and enable those seeking to subvert the election to declare something like “where there’s smoke”.
Not sure what the case in Michigan shows, other than that Trump has to pursue legal processes in order to win. So he made a call. Has it actually resulted in the certification being reversed – outside a court order to do so? In order to usurp the current process, Trump has to actually win in court – something he’s not good at. If he attempts to disobey a court order, then he should be called out for hypocritically calling on the courts while disrespecting court proceedings.
Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of the claim that Trump must be dangerous because he might do something he never said he would do. Partly because I’ve been hearing about these outrageous things Trump is going to do, but that have so far NEVER panned out. Yet I’m supposed to believe there’s some urgent need to stop him before he gets the chance to do what only his opponents claim he intends to do.
The clown show is getting a lot less press in conservative circles than the attempt to suppress the clown show. Seriously, the court battles haven’t reflected well on Trump so far, and aren’t looking like they will in the future. His supporters aren’t pointing to battles he has one, but those they ardently hope he will win. What WILL reflect well – and change minds – is a reflexive attempt to stop Trump’s legal challenges.
As the saying goes, never interrupt your opponent when he’s making a mistake.
Three things:
1- Up until pretty close to the election I more or less felt the same way you did. Trump was a joke, there’s no harm in letting the process play out. Etc.
2- Recently I have been alarmed by the confidence playing out among otherwise intelligent Trump supporters. As I said I kind of assumed that we’d have the clownshow, he would lose and people would move on, but there are a significant number of people (on my FB feed, on blogs I read, relatives, etc.) who are convinced that the only possible way Trump could have lost was massive fraud. Who are convinced that the election was stolen. Some numbers put it at 80% of all Republicans. See for example this story:
https://in.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-fraud-insight-idUSKBN2801D4
3- My post was an effort to show true believing Trump supporters that if they’re convinced he didn’t lose electorally that he lost in some other way, and in the end it amounts to the same thing.
But perhaps we’re talking past each other. I’m not sure what Trump himself is going to do, but I agree, he’s almost certainly not going to succeed. But I’ve very concerned what his supporters are going to do, way more concerned than I was a couple of months ago. As I said I have been consistent in saying I think the danger of right-wing violence is overrated. But the last few weeks have convinced me that the right-wing ability to accept a false narrative is not.
On a more meta-level, I think there’s an argument to be made that modern democracy is different in where it derives its power from than traditional monarchies. Most nominally monarchical/dictatorial systems derive their power from an oligarchy/military structure that controls sufficient amounts of resources to establish a regime capable of exercising a monopoly on the use of force. In order for a new regime to take power, another entity would need to upset the balance that supports the established regime; usually by persuading a new coalition (including some from the current ruling oligarchical/military powers) to support a different leadership.
In our current system, you can kind of squint and try to see that in there, but it doesn’t actually operate that way (unless you believe Trump that the deep state controls who gets to be in the White House and is entirely unaccountable to the people). But I don’t think that’s helpful, because then you’d have to define a bunch of exceptions to the point your model is more reactive than predictive. Instead, I think a better model is that the republic operates on a perception of systemic legitimacy. People participate in and accept the perpetuation of institutions based on whether there is a general perception that there’s a continuity of legitimacy to the process over time. It’s telling that people who complain about the current system often refer to a point in the past where the system was different in order to claim there is a broken chain of legitimacy. Indeed, SCOTUS has talked about this in numerous decisions over the years (as have many SC justices speaking publicly). The entire doctrine of stare decisis (a long-standing legal concept that a large swath of the public only recently became aware of) supports this idea that they have to keep their decisions in line with perpetuating public perceptions of legitimacy (though that’s not all stare decisis means, of course).
The riots/protests over the summer also support this idea of systemic legitimacy. When a group attempted to disrupt the political system by rejecting systemic legitimacy they failed (so far) to obtain a sufficient critical mass of the population to disrupt the continuity of current institutions. (By which I don’t mean who holds specific political offices, but the continuation of the underlying political structure itself. CHAZ/CHOP roundly failed to displace city leadership and/or control with a different system; that many of these protests resulted in changes to legislation or policy is evidence they were more effectively able to continue functioning within the system than they were at usurping it.)
There is a lot of experience in democratic systems suggesting that over-use of police action is more likely to result in a public backlash against those police actions, in support of demonstrators. This is one explanation for the police not using force to disrupt, for example, far-Right squatters claiming their grazing rights were violated who then occupied federal buildings. In order to justify police/military use of force in a democratic republic, you have to do so under the guise of supporting the perpetuation of legitimate institutions (they were getting violent, endangering the lives of people who didn’t support them) before you can justify the use of force against civil disobedience. Otherwise, your use of force will be pushed back against by the public, and established institutions will require that use of force to pull back.
What about military takeovers and who hands over the codes? I think the example from the OP ends the scenario prematurely. Let’s take the most likely current scenario: that after all of Trump’s legal challenges are exhausted he has failed to reverse the current lead of Biden in enough swing states to change the election results. In that case, let’s say nearly all of Biden supporters agree with election results, and at least 50% of Trump supporters agree that the system legitimately considered Trump’s challenge and legitimately rejected it. Now, let’s say Trump successfully keeps the nuclear codes, withholding the office from Biden.
In that case, at least 75% of the public would perceive that there is an attempt to usurp the system’s legitimate continuation. The only way for Trump (and the military/oligarchy that supposedly supports him) to stay in power would be in contradiction to the people and current, legitimately perpetuated institutions. In essence, he would be attempting to set up a new regime that would need the ability to suppress the dissent of a majority of the public. This is equivalent to saying that the loser in the legitimate process can only stay in power if they are successful in persuading a critical mass of those in power to knowingly usurp the current government.
That’s not the case Trump has made, even to his most ardent supporters. I am strongly suspicious of anyone who thinks he will suddenly make a case he hasn’t tried to make to date, to say nothing of whether he could possibly be successful.
As I pointed out above, I’m not sure we’re going to get back to 50% of Trump supporters accepting the election’s legitimacy, since it’s currently at 80%. And I think what Boonton is trying to point out is that Trump’s actions serve to increase that number, increasing the chances that for a certain number of people this election will be always be viewed as illegitimate.
To be fair, polls about the 2016 election show similar numbers of people on the Left feeling like that election was illegitimate. People tend to feel that a result which follows their biases is legitimate, while one that does not is rigged. It’s not a new political phenomenon, or even a very recent one.
I also think there’s a difference between hard core Trump supporters and regular people who were persuaded to vote for the man. I doubt that more than half of the people who voted for Trump could be persuaded that a Republican-friendly court’s rejection of his claimed fraud should itself be overturned through extra-legal means.
What would it mean if a major party candidate claimed election fraud for the legitimate president’s entire term in office? Hilary continues to claim 2016 was a stolen election, having reiterated that point recently.
I think most of the front page fear-mongering is less newsworthy than people give it credit for. Only ‘historically unprecedented’ for those incapable of drawing on the full gamut of US history to see it’s nothing new. Meanwhile, actual power grabs – of which Trump is disappointingly similar to other White House residents – hardly ever make the news. These get passed down to the next president while we’re distracted by the sideshow.
If your best case scenario is the way the Democrats have treated Trump since 2016, that’s still pretty bad…
To make things more concrete I’m going on record as saying that Trump supporters are going to take his loss harder than Clinton supporters took hers (which is already a high bar).
Hillary does not and did not maintain 2016 was stolen. There was some brief interest in a possible recount of one state on the left (mostly driven by the Green Party candidate who used it as a fund raising cash grab) but that was it. The right likes to equate the Russian interference as equal to what Trump is doing but the left never argued that votes would not count if the voters saw so many memes or retweets from Russian sources.
As for the claim that Trump was never treated well by Democrats. Democrats were willing to work with him at the beginning over dreamers but it quickly became clear Trump would not keep any promises he made and couldn’t even coherently negotiate.
The charge against Trump is that his repeated claims have undermined the legitimacy of elections in the US. Hilary Clinton has repeatedly made claims of Russian interference and stated that her claims justify questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election, specifically.
I didn’t say she made the SAME claim as Trump, vis-a-vis fraud. I think a good faith reading of my previous comments makes that clear.
I’m not disagreeing that it matters whether coordinated actions from organized groups consistently favoring one side (whether coordinated directly with the campaign or not) are a problem for long-term electoral integrity. But claiming that a specific election is not legitimate because of this kind of coordinated campaign is fraught on both sides.
As in, Republicans will likely spend the next four years making the same claim, substituting Russia for certain ultra-rich companies doing more than just donating large sums of money to sway public opinion.
None of that changes who won in 2016 or 2020.
Lindsey Graham, who is not Trump but I think we agree has inserted himself so far up Trump’s behind that he might emerge one day from his mouth, called the Sec. of State for Georgia to request……well let’s backup….
The envelopes ballots are sent back in are signed by a voter. A machine tries to match the signature to the signature on file from the voter. Basically anyone under 30, anyone very old, and anyone with certain disabilities tend to get spit out a lot for not matching. Under 30 people were never taught cursive writing and don’t have consistent signatures…. About 97% of signatures kicked out by machine checking end up clearing as ok…….
….asked for any county with a high portion of kickouts to not be counted.
— That’s not asking for any ballot kicked out by machine to not be counted.
— That’s not asking for all mail in ballots to not be counted.
— That is as in asking the entire county, whether in person vote cast, cast by mail with a machine match, cast with an affidavit from the voter asserting their signature was correct…..the entire county be tossed out and not counted.
Now you are correct, *after* Hillary conceeded the election to Trump, she agreed it wasn’t right that Russia was allowed to interfere in our election, which it did. It wasn’t right that Trump colluded thru his agents with Russian gov’t agents, which he did. But I’m not seeing anything even close to an equilivance here.
Will Republicans make claims? Yes they will and that’s no doubt unavoidable but at the end of the day we just surivived an attempted coup in this country. That is troubling.