Trump's election strategy is not about getting elected, it's about seizing power
Here I go beating a dead horse again
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
I have repeated ad nauseam that Donald Trump and his minions are not running to win the election. Rather, they are using the election to ensure he returns to power. I am often told I am being a drama queen when I say this, overreacting because the system has checks and balances. Those check and balances have eroded, however, and Trump and his minions have a very detailed plan to make sure he returns to the Oval Office, even if he doesn’t legitimately win.
Matt Gertz at Media Matters wrote this excellent piece about how Trump et al. will do this. It is the most detailed and most digestible article I have seen on this subject. It is worth reading the entire article, but I will highlight some of the main points here. Gertz opens with this:
With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.
It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary. …
The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.
Gertz goes on to lay out the road map Trump and his minions will use to secure victory.
Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.
MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.
And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.
The narrative of a rigged election is bound to bring a repeat of the violence we saw on January 6, but likely to a more severe degree, supported and amplified by this right-wing information system that has grown bigger and more powerful over the years.
We will see threats against poll workers, judges, politicians, voters. Anything to push people out of the democratic process and to ensure the “right” people step in to determine the winner (rather than the voters deciding).
As Gertz rightfully points out, many of the guardrails that were in place last time to prop up the Constitutional order are now gone, and most media outlets still haven’t figured out (or aren’t willing to figure out) how to cover these events, which only adds to the threat.
Adding Fuel To The Fire
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Intelligence Committee this week that “Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.” Russia will boost Trump’s efforts to cause chaos, sow doubt about a rigged election, and prolong the period before any candidate can be certified the winner. The resulting power vacuum will leave the US vulnerable and isolated, just as our adversaries would like, as I outlined in this post.
The Confluence Of MAGA’s And Russia’s Objectives
All of this plays into the larger hybrid war going on around us, one aimed at destabilizing democracy and ushering in a new world order in which autocracies thrive. Democracy anywhere is a threat to autocrats everywhere. Destroying trust in fair democratic elections is a necessary element of the autocrats’ battle.
Of course, Russia is supporting this chaos in the US in an effort to weaken it. It always boggles my mind that Trump and his minions, then, welcome the interference. The only conclusion is that they, too, want the US to be weaker.
This becomes even more mind boggling given recent reports about Russian plans to launch sabotage operations in the West.
As I’ve written, we’ve seen Russia jam GPS signals of civilian planes and target civilian train systems across Europe. Germany recently arrested two Russians who were scouting for sites to sabotage, including US military facilities. Several facilities that manufacture or house weapons intended for Ukraine have gone up in flames, including in the United Kingdom and the United States.
We might not think we are at war with Russia, but Russia thinks it is at war with us. And it is doing everything to help implement Trump’s plan to cause massive chaos. And as he did in 2016, Trump will welcome that help, happily making the US more isolated and vulnerable, as long as it serves his interest. He is helping our adversary, and our adversary is helping him. I wish more people had a problem with that.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of stories you should be reading
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN US ELECTIONS
Senate intel chief warns of unprecedented election meddling (USA Today)
SANCTIONS
Disabling the Enablers of Sanctions Circumvention (RUSI)
Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?
Aided and abetted by SCOTUS, IMO, the failure to refuse to hear the absolute immunity case ( again, as previous ruling May '20 denied) created a delay in justice being served. Just as having complicit members on the "jury" in impeachment #2 was corrupt, the upside down US flag flying over Alito residence is symbolic of the rot from within, the Supreme Court is compromised.
It’s not bad to discuss this over and over. I brought up this point elsewhere when the campaign (if you could call it that) began. It shouldn’t be about what if he wins as much as what if he loses that people should be concerned about. A few interesting points on it are:
1. Will he have the support of the weapon carrying hillbillies at his back this time? His lack of that support now in his first trial shows that this support is not there. At least not in the major cities where he’s not really welcome.
2. What courts will play into their baseless claims? They didn’t play last time, even with J6 as a culmination. It’s doubtful they will play this time either.
3. The media is only in it for the clickbait and edge lord drama Trump brings. Eventually people tire of the constant hour by hour stories, whining and fake plastic people whose only home seems to be in Florida at swampy Mar a Lago. The media which salivates over his hourly activities will fade when it’s clear he has no path and the militaristic support decides to sit it out.
4. He’ll lose, too many of his base have seen the reality of their money going to him and his cronies to enjoy pate at the pools they are not allowed to enter, save but for a few bot influencers and Q folks who are allowed to partake of the festivities.
5. It’s all horserace lunacy that drives the entire ecosystem. As soon as it’s over and he’s lost by a very wide margin, these lunatics and their fake wealth will fade away. They know it’s coming and there’s nothing they can do about it but eat drink and be merry for tomorrow they ____
We need to focus on priorities in the country and the rest of the world and let them fade from our view. They’ve held forth for far too long and it’s time everyone move on. These losers have nothing but losing ahead. You can only buy so many polls to hype up the non existent voters who support Trump and his attempt to ruin the country.
When Trump finally goes down, so too will Putin, and then the world can get back to the business at hand.