Trump party preparing another coup attempt

by Tom Maertens

Tom Maertens served in the White House under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

We are only weeks from the mid-term elections, and ex-President Donald Trump and his supporters continue their preparations to hijack the elections (see My View May 27, 2021).

The Washington Post has reported that more than half of all Republican nominees on the ballot this November for the House, Senate and key statewide offices — 299 candidates — are election deniers.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters are moving to replace public servants, through elections and appointments, with more compliant election officials. This is part of the plan to take over election machinery county by county, state by state, which will allow throwing out inconvenient ballots on any pretext with essentially no oversight.

What seems certain if Trump is re-elected, is that he will weaponize the government against his enemies, fire honest officials and install corrupt cronies like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. The FBI, State Department, CIA, Defense Department and Justice Department would all get super loyalists who could be counted on to bend the law for Trump’s benefit, such as John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark.

Trump would eliminate the existing Civil Service and (re)create a MAGA replacement, Schedule F, to place his supporters throughout the government to enforce his decisions.

He was talked out of invoking the Insurrection Act in order to deploy the military for domestic purposes, but if he had a “Q” supporter or a Michael Flynn as secretary of defense, who knows? He was also talked out of another crackpot idea, firing missiles into Mexico to kill drug traffickers.

He withdrew the U.S. from the Asia Pacific Initiative and the Paris Climate Agreement, and he planned to withdraw the U.S. from NATO during a second term.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887 is being re-negotiated to clarify the Jan. 6 electoral vote count. But if Republicans successfully resurrect their fake elector scheme, aided by Trumpist election officials, even that won’t prevent a steal.

Law Forward, which partners with two other voting rights organizations, analyzed 229 bills in 33 states that would change state and local election systems in ways that could undermine the voters’ choices in future elections.

Thirty-six of these election subversion bills were introduced in Wisconsin, the most of any state. Six of them were approved by the Legislature, but they were vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters like Mike Lindell are swamping elections offices with requests for documents, such as cast vote records, which by law must be responded to.

In nearly two dozen states and scores of counties, election officials are fielding what many describe as an unprecedented wave of public records requests in the final weeks of summer, apparently intended to overload an already strained system. The avalanche of similarly worded requests has forced some to dedicate days to responding even as they attempt to finalize polling locations, mail out absentee ballots and prepare for early voting in October, officials said.

The surge of inquiries reflects the extraordinary pressure that election officials have faced since the 2020 election. Since then, state and local election administrators have dealt with the concerted campaign by Trump and his backers to undermine confidence in U.S. elections, including a barrage of threats and personal attacks. Hundreds of officials have left their jobs as a result, administrators say.

The reality, as Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, wrote, is that “The Republican Party is quickly becoming a party of anarchy and lawlessness.” The idea that the law does not apply to Republicans has now become part of the mainstream of the Republican Party, he wrote, which is visible in their treatment of elections, immigrants and abortion.

“Election denialism is a form of corruption,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” and a historian at New York University. “The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity.”

The biggest obstacle to their plans is the fact that their cult leader, Donald Trump, is facing at least four criminal investigations. Based on the most recent Jan. 6 commission hearings, he could be indicted or even imprisoned before the 2024 elections.

As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote: “The Republican Party has become a danger to the American experiment.”

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said of Trump’s possible re-election, “I think it would be the end of the republic.” There is little doubt that Trump tried to overthrow the republic and that he would do it again.