Democrats and the media are working hard to create an expectation that Trump is bent on extra-constitutional mischief.
Democrats and the media are working hard to create an expectation that Trump is bent on extra-constitutional mischief.
O n the eve of an election that’s expected to be a close-run thing, there’s a lot of media speculation that it might end in tears with a confused result leading to one side or the other seizing power — how shall I put it? — partly constitutionally. Because most of those doing the speculating are in the commentariat and mainstream media, the villain in the majority of speculations is inevitably President Trump. It’s predicted that he will refuse to leave the White House despite being defeated and that the Secret Service or the military will have to drag him out. That would presumably happen on Inauguration Day, disrupting the ceremony, since Trump has a constitutional right to remain there until then. Where he would be dragged to is an interesting question because some of the scenarios include gleeful forecasts of the arrest and trial of the Trump criminal family and conspirators. It should all be very exciting.
I should say for starters that I don’t believe a word of it. If Trump is defeated, he will hand over power and office on Inauguration Day and, in all probability, take a vacation before deciding whether to fight to continue leading the GOP in the Biden-Harris interregnum. That’s because the United States is a constitutional republic whose representatives, officers, and magistrates would refuse to follow the orders of an illegitimate usurper and remove him promptly from the premises. The president himself is well aware of this and has too strong a sense of theater and his own dignity not to depart constitutionally and in high style. That’s been my opinion since these speculations began, and I was encouraged to find that it was shared by a former senior administration official, Michael Anton, when I interviewed him in a Danube Dialogue podcast about his book, The Stakes, on the election.
You can see Anton give his own reasoning both on why the world is talking about how Trump will barricade the White House, shouting “Come and get me, flatfoot” here at 1:18, 30:32, 36:30 and 40:50. And it’s not because the president has threatened to cling desperately onto power if he’s defeated. He has several times said — incautiously, in my view, given the determination of the media to misunderstand him — that he would not resign if the result were uncertain. Why should he? No president would say anything different. But the two-and-a-half-month transition between the election and the inauguration gives everyone plenty of time to resolve that uncertainty.
Why, then, are we all hyperventilating about Trump’s assault on the U.S. Constitution? The answer is that the Democrats and their assistants in the media forget the “uncertainty” qualification and keep up a warning chorus of “coup, coup, a veritable coup.” Their purpose is fairly transparent. It is to create an expectation that Trump is bent on extra-constitutional mischief so that if there is prolonged uncertainty about the results, they can organize all manner of mischief of their own to frustrate the “coup” that everyone “knows” he is planning.
Indeed, this strategy is slyly acknowledged in their wonderfully misnamed Transition Integrity Project (TIP) in which more than 100 academics, politicians, and former government officials discuss four different scenarios as to how a close election might turn out — and the strategies for ensuring that it turns out the right way, i.e., a Biden victory. The “Influence Watch” site here describes the group very soberly as a “nominally bipartisan but functionally left-progressive and Democratic-leaning group of political and media figures that convened in the summer of 2020 to conduct simulations of the 2020 presidential election . . . out of concern that the Trump administration may seek to manipulate the results.”
Just how non-bipartisan the exercise was is indicated by the fact that the Trump team was played in the scenarios by Bill Kristol, Michael Steele, and former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson, all of whom are fervent opponents of Trump. And the rest are all soldiers in the stage army of media and political Left. So it’s not surprising that the four scenarios all assume that Trump will lose the popular vote and win only one of the four elections in the Electoral College.
But what eventually happens in that scenario? We are told in the preparatory texts about the likely course of the transition that the Trump supporters will probably use violence and intimidation to win the post-election battle (though almost all the pre-election violence has been committed by some Biden supporters and justified or minimized by others).
And though the “Trump team” in the exercise engaged in such scurrilous tactics as “turning out their well-organized and committed base to take to the streets in Trump’s favor, in part by disseminating disinformation about the danger posed by pro-Biden demonstrators (e.g., by suggesting likely Antifa violence, etc.),” the Biden team stuck to such gentlemanly initiatives as “organizing a bipartisan ‘National Day for Restoration of Democracy’ and a ‘National Day of Unity,’ both including faith leaders.”
(When I read such proposals, I’m ashamed ever to have thought badly of such noble fellows.)
Until I turn to check out how they strategized the scenario in which Trump wins the Electoral College. That encompasses a number of sharp practices, but this paragraph will give their general flavor:
“The Biden Campaign encouraged Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington, and collectively known as ‘Cascadia,’ to secede from the Union unless Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms to fix our democratic system to ensure majority rule. With advice from President Obama, the Biden Campaign submitted a proposal to 1) Give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico; 2) Divide California into five states to more accurately represent its population in the Senate; 3) Require Supreme Court justices to retire at 70; and 4) Eliminate the Electoral College, to ensure that the candidate who wins the popular vote becomes President.”
At that point it all ends in chaos and constitutional deadlock — or rather it doesn’t end because some force or other would then impose a presidential winner on the country. We’re not told who or what, but there are hints throughout the project that maybe the military would see its duty as one of ending the dangerous misrule of the Orange Authoritarian and installing a peace-bringer in a cardigan and loafers.
Is all this just a wet dream of the angry progressive Left? It’s mainly that, of course, but it’s also an attempt (as I suggested above) to create an atmosphere of expectations in which any defensive action by Trump to ensure the election is not stolen from him becomes an attempted coup and any violence by either side traced back to him. Even before voting day, all the commentary is about whether he’ll refuse to abide by the election result, though the only evidence against him is a handful of remarks about not conceding if the result is unclear. It’s surely significant that Trump and his co-conspirators don’t seem to have carried out this complicated exercise in hypothetical election stealing. As so often in the past few years, the Left is accusing Trump of planning the things that they’re actually doing to him. As Anton says in the Danube Dialogue, the TIP is a vast exercise in Freudian projection.
It becomes more sinister, however, when in an appendix the project asks how a victorious Biden administration and its support base among progressive activists would deal with the remnant of the Trumpist movement in the aftermath of its triumph. There’s a certain amount of lip-smacking speculation on what investigations into — and charges against — the Trump coterie might be adopted by a Biden administration. But there’s nervousness on that score and no consensus around the table. Taking on powerful people on the other side of the aisle might set a worrying precedent. But what about the Trump voters and their broader Trump movement? Well, that’s a different matter:
“More broadly, there needs to be a robust, intentional, and specific strategy to challenge the white supremacist and extremist networks that enabled Trump’s rise to power and were in turn enabled by Trump’s administration. This base will not automatically demobilize if and when Trump leaves office, and it is inimical to the kind of pluralist democracy the founders intended.”
“Inimical to the kind of pluralist democracy” . . . “will not automatically demobilize.” Has the impulsive-tweeting Trump ever said anything quite so chilling as those carefully vague but well-considered words? Vote as if your freedom depended on it.