Trump's plans to challenge an election loss should scare the shit out of you
They negate any talk of pivoting to a message of "unity"
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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT
Donald Trump is not running to win this election; he is using the election to seize power.
While the GOP are mouthing words about lowering the temperature of political rhetoric, they are, at the same time, plotting how to steal this election should Biden win. An incredibly important story outlining precisely how Trump and the GOP plan to do so has gotten lost in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump. But the juxtaposition is wild: political violence unleashed on the man who has incited political violence and plans to overturn a democratic election to install himself in the White House.
In an article titled, “Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat,” the New York Times outlines how the GOP are conducting a “systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.”
The Republican Party and its conservative allies are engaged in an unprecedented legal campaign targeting the American voting system. Their wide-ranging and methodical effort is laying the groundwork to contest an election that they argue, falsely, is already being rigged against former President Donald J. Trump. …
Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.
The idea, as I have repeated ad nauseam, is to create doubt that Biden won and precipitate a political vacuum that Trump and his machine will exploit—through the courts, through violence, through local officials—to install him in the Oval Office.
The rhetoric has already begun. A project director at the Heritage Foundation—home of Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a Trump administration—recently said at an event, “there’s zero chance of a free and fair election…I’m formally accusing the Biden administration of creating the conditions that most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.”
Adding to the chorus, Donald Trump, Jr. told Axios this week the only way his father could lose is if Democrats cheat.
It is possible Trump and the GOP will win some of these court cases. But the scariest part is: they don’t care if they win or lose the legal battle. Either way, they will claim they won the election. As the Times notes:
Even if the cases fail, Mr. Trump’s allies are building excuses to dispute the results, while trying to empower thousands of local election officials to disrupt the process. Already, election board members in several states have moved to block certification of primary election tallies, including in a major swing county in Nevada last week.
What happened last time Trump attempted to stop the certification of the election? His supporters overran the Capitol and people died.
The fundamental problem is this: Refusal to accept the outcome of a democratic election negates any notion of a country based on the rule of law. “The fundamental principle of the system — the rule of law, the finality of the results, the ability to challenge an election but then accept the results if the challenges fail — is being stood on its head,” Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer who broke with his party over Trump, told the Times.
Part of the idea is to overwhelm the court system so that many or most of the legal challenges are not resolved by January, threatening certification of the election. What happens when the process drags out too long? We might arrive at inauguration day with the election winner still being disputed.
While many in the GOP have said, in the wake of the assassination attempt on their leader, that there is no place in America for political violence, these same people have told their supporters for years elections are rigged if they lose and encouraged them to do something about it. As a result, judges, election workers, members of Congress, the FBI, and so many others involved in upholding the rule of law have been threatened with violence, mostly by Trump supporters. Indeed, Trump has even said he will pardon many of those who committed violence on his behalf. Forget about rule of law.
The violence is part of the plan. The legal challenges are meant to create the vacuum—the doubt about the winner—and the violence is meant to finish the job. Since Trump doesn’t control the military, he’ll rely on his supporters to carry out that part of the coup.
The party of grievance and retribution may be paying lip service at the moment to toning down the inflammatory rhetoric, but the party’s supporters have already been indoctrinated. This is the party of “Lock her up!” and accusing political opponents of being pedophiles who traffic children and suck their blood. A party whose supporters laughed when someone tried to kill the husband of the then-Speaker of the House. A party, one of whose members recently said, “some people need killing.”
As Greg Sargent, a columnist at The New Republic, recently wrote, Trump’s idea of unity is everybody unifying “around putting him above the law.” He suggests some real metrics to show Trump truly is ready to be a unifier:
No calling Trump a “unifier” until he renounces plans to pardon the January 6 rioters and prosecute his opponents, stops casting the application of the law to himself and his movement as inherently corrupt, repudiates his threat to terminate parts of the Constitution, unequivocally commits to accepting the election results, and tells his allies to stop planning to treat any election loss as illegitimate in advance. And that’s just a start.
Sargent then declares, rightly, that Trump, “has no intention of doing any such thing.”
Trump has done nothing but seek to divide us, so it has been particularly rich this week to listen to reporters fall for the notion that Trump is pivoting to a message of unity when all evidence points to the contrary.
The Founding Fathers believed in the importance of a free press not to cover all political parties equally, but rather to hold power to account. But this week, I heard Trump’s campaign spokesperson give interview after interview claiming Trump is “obviously” the only person who can unite the country, and reporter after reporter nodding and saying, “Uh huh.” The unchecked interviews lent legitimacy to Trump’s demagogic movement. Far from the idea of holding to the powerful to account.
THE WEEK’S LINKS
A roundup of things you should be reading
JD VANCE
Trump’s VP pick is backed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Here is some background, so you understand what he is promoting:
The Enigma of Peter Thiel (unpopular front.news)
RUSSIAN SABOTAGE OPERATIONS
Inside Russia’s Latvian Sabotage Squad (The Insider)
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?
I appreciate your ability to remain focused in the midst of absolute insanity. Nice piece.
Nauseating fear mongering. We don’t believe you any more.