trump's Public Coup

trump is not winning at the polls.

trump is not going to win the Popular Vote.

trump is looking at the reality that he won't win enough states to trick the Electoral College.

trump is going to cheat.

And he's not even hiding it anymore.

From Barton Gellman at the Atlantic, with a serious look at how far trump is willing to go to destroy our voting rights:

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights...

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice...

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before...

Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives...

All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects...

trump has already set the groundwork, laid the accusations of mass voter fraud that won't even stand up in court... and we have to contend with the possibility that a Republican-tilted Judiciary - packed the last four years by an eager McConnell - will twist the known law to fit trump's desires.

Just this afternoon, trump refused to answer any question about conceding the election if he loses to Biden this November (via Alana Wise at NPR):

President Trump on Wednesday suggested that he might not accept the election results if he is not declared the winner in November.

"We're going to have to see what happens. You know that. I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster," Trump said, alluding to his unsubstantiated arguments about widespread mail-in ballot fraud.

"Get rid of the ballots and you'll have a very peaceful — there won't be a transfer, frankly, there'll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else."

trump is accusing the Democratic Party of cheating while he himself is preparing to send 50,000 paid "observers" nationwide to precincts in a likely attempt to intimidate minority voters into turning away from casting their ballots.

trump is openly refusing to play by the rules of our elective system. he's going to try to intimidate the voters into not voting in person, and then he's going to demand that the mail-in ballots for Democrats get tossed as "fakes". And even if trump loses to Biden by five points in the Popular, and even with Biden securing 332 Electoral College votes (basing this on the 2012 Obama results, which the current polling suggests is going for Biden as well, plus Arizona and maybe North Carolina), trump will lie about the results and convince the GOP-held state legislatures and district courts into denying Biden the win.

he's not hiding this anymore. This is no October Surprise getting unleashed. This is trump, exposed and revealed as the bullying con artist he's always been.

Except this time he's sitting in control of the Executive branches of the federal government - especially in control of Barr's corrupted Justice Dept. - willing and eager to bully and con his way through the 2020 results.

America, we dare not let him.

For the LOVE OF GOD, vote. If there's early voting in your state, do it now. If you're balloting by mail, use your county Elections' office drop-off box if you think the mail system is broken. If you have to vote in your precinct, go. Risk the coronavirus, and face the Republican-bought enforcers already threatening to hassle voters on Election Day.

Your vote is YOUR voice and YOUR power. Use it, spite trump's attempt to steal it away. Make the results so lopsided in Biden's and the Democrats favor that no amount of trumpian lies will hide his doom.

This is trump's War on our power. This is the Republicans' War on America, finally with battle lines drawn.

We must win, America, against trump's threat to steal our nation away.