Is
This a Coup, or Just Another Trump Con?
A post-election report
from Minsk-on-the-Potomac.
Nov
Ever since Saturday
morning, when Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential
election, Donald Trump has been hunkered down in the White House, refusing to concede
defeat, raising money for an “election-defense task force,” and pushing vague
conspiracy theories about voter fraud to his millions of followers. That part
we expected. What was not entirely clear in advance was how Republicans, when
faced with decisive results pointing to Biden’s victory in every single one of
the remaining battleground states, would choose to respond. It turns out they
have reacted as they have to virtually all of Trump’s norm-shattering behavior
for the last four years: by enabling it.
The
exceptions, as of this writing, have remained so few as to be notable and, at
the national level, countable on two hands: four sitting senators who have
dared to call Biden the President-elect (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt
Romney, Ben Sasse), a handful of House members, a few governors, and a host of
formers, including former President George W. Bush. Another half-dozen or so
Republican senators, trying to split the difference, have stopped short of
congratulating Biden or calling him the next President, but say that Trump
should at least let the official transition process begin or allow Biden to
start receiving intelligence briefings. On Thursday morning, when Governor Mike
DeWine, Republican of Ohio, said on CNN, “Joe Biden is the President-elect,” it
was treated as breaking news. Merely acknowledging basic math, it seems, is now
considered an act of political courage. More foreign leaders have so far
acknowledged the outcome of the American election than Republican Party
officials. Needless to say, this is not a good look for the world’s
longest-running constitutional democracy.
At
times, during this unnerving week in America’s capital, it has felt as though
we were watching events unfold in Minsk or some other dictator stronghold where
elections are not stolen the day votes are cast but in the weeks afterward, as
the defeated President holes up in his palace, defying reality and increasingly
urgent crowds in the streets. Here in Minsk-on-the-Potomac, Trump has been
perpetrating the Big Lie, claiming the election was stolen from him and
apparently persuading millions of Americans to go along with this evidence-free
fantasy. Biden, so far, has urged calm. It’s an “embarrassment,” he told
reporters Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he continued to plan his
transition, took congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, and appointed a
White House chief of staff. The official line from Biden has been clear and
simple: concession or no concession, Trump will have to leave office at noon on
January 20th, and that is that.
But
is it? That we are reduced to even asking this question is a defeat for the
United States and a win not only for Trump but for all the Trumpists to come,
who will forever have the example of a President of the United States flouting
the most basic principle of American democracy: accepting the election results
and the consequences that come with them.
On Monday, after a
weekend of jubilation in America’s heavily Democratic big cities—where the
unofficial anthem was a rap song by YG, “Fuck Donald Trump”— the President left
off sulking on the golf course long enough to fire the Secretary of Defense,
Mark Esper. He was “terminated,” Trump tweeted at around noon.
I
found out about the Pentagon chief’s ouster from Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications
director, who has since become a fierce critic of Trump, as we were about to
start an interview. It seemed somehow appropriate to hear the news of this
latest firing from someone whose own short-lived tenure in the Administration—a
mere eleven days—has since become a unit of measurement signifying the attenuated
life cycle of a Trump-era official. Scaramucci has fully embraced the
linguistic legacy of his brief government service. Trump, he told me, “will
have been President for 132.78 Scaramuccis, and unfortunately right now for the
country we have six and a half more Scaramuccis to go. I think the last six are
going to be really tough on the country, because the guy’s basically a sore
loser and a big-time baby.”
Trump
himself has declined to offer an explanation for just what exactly he is doing.
Throughout the week, he remained publicly silent, aside from various tweets
denouncing the “Rigged Election,” complaining that Fox News has abandoned him,
and insisting, “WE WILL WIN!” At the same time, unnamed senior Administration
officials and outside advisers to the President told reporters that Trump was
not, in fact, serious about defying the election results to remain in office.
With Biden on track to receive far more than the two hundred and seventy votes
needed to win the Electoral College, Trump was reported to be “very aware there
is not a path to victory,” as the NBC correspondent Peter Alexander put it.
Others suggested that the President’s intransigence was merely a “circus,” a
“performance,” or a temper tantrum that would amount to nothing. Republicans, it
was said, were just humoring Trump, or giving him time to accept his fate, or
helping to boost turnout in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections that will
decide control of the Senate. Scaramucci theorized that maybe Trump would
simply retreat to Mar-a-Lago, his winter home in Palm Beach, and never come
back to the White House.
As
for the firing of Esper, what appeared to be an act of pure vengeance by Trump
began to seem even more sinister after the subsequent ouster of several of the
Defense Secretary’s senior advisers. Was this a sweeping purge that might
presage more worrisome acts to come? Some analysts called the post-election
firings a “decapitation strike.” Many theorized that the White House power play
might have something to do with pulling troops out of Afghanistan and the
Middle East—something that Pentagon officials have been publicly feuding about
with Trump’s national-security adviser, Robert O’Brien. Or maybe it was about
politicizing intelligence. Or defending Trump in the case of a truly contested
succession. What seemed clear was that the regime loyalists installed in key
posts at the Defense Department and the National Security Agency weren’t there
just to add a line to their résumés.
Even
after a full four years of watching Trump, this might have been the most
unsettling, and uncertain, few days in his Presidency. On Monday, as
Republicans made clear that they would not publicly challenge Trump’s election
denialism, there were moments when I worried this really was the power grab
we’ve spent the past few years dreading. By late in the week, it seemed more
like much of the tumult of the era: terrible for democracy, but ultimately a
bad case of Trumpian bluster rather than an ominous portent of tanks in the
streets. In private, the President reportedly was already telling advisers he
would like to run again in 2024, which at least sounded a lot less like a man
who plans to barricade himself in the White House rather than leave in January.
On Thursday, five days
into this insane impasse, I asked a dozen of the smartest Washington hands I
know what to make of it all: Was this a coup in the making, or just another
Trump con? Taken together, their responses were modestly reassuring. “A little
coup, a lot of con, and a total and reckless disregard for the health of our
democracy or country,” William Kristol, the conservative leader of the Never
Trump movement, told me. “He couldn’t organize a one-car funeral; he sure as
hell can’t organize a coup,” a leading Republican pollster, who worked with a
number of the Party’s candidates this election and asked not to be named, said.
“Besides, a coup would not stand. It would end the best way possible for the
G.O.P.—with him dead or in jail. He doesn’t want either of those, so it’s a
con.”
Brendan
Buck, a Republican strategist who served as a top adviser to former House
Speaker Paul Ryan, called Trump’s actions this week “a national embarrassment,”
but also “a fantasy with no endgame” that will “not change anything other than
eroding confidence in elections among Republicans.” The dénouement of whatever
this is, Tom Davis, a former Republican member of Congress, told me, will come
when states begin certifying the election results over the next few weeks.
“Republicans know that Biden’s won. They’re just giving him room,” he said, of
Trump. “When these are certified, this all crashes and burns.”
Several
of them said the Pentagon firings—and the threat of additional firings, of
officials like the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, and the C.I.A. director,
Gina Haspel—were even more worrisome than the spectre of Trump refusing to
leave office in January. “The Pentagon purges are most troubling because there
are two months remaining,” William Antholis, the director of the Miller Center,
at the University of Virginia, who has studied Presidential transitions and
their national-security risks, said. Michael Abramowitz, the president of
Freedom House, an N.G.O. that supports democracy around the world, told me that
Trump’s moves resembled “authoritarian tactics” used elsewhere. “Will it be
successful in helping President Trump keep power? I don’t think so,” Abramowitz
said. “But is it a chilling move and a bad precedent? Very much so.” Perhaps
the best-case version of what is going on came from Kori Schake, a Republican
who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and
is now at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. She told me the
Pentagon firings were a “spiteful indulgence rather than an ominous policy
move.”
Miles
Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who later
outed himself as the Anonymous author of a scathing anti-Trump Op-Ed in
the Times and book, may have summed up the whole sorry episode
best. Trump’s outrageous behavior since the election that rendered him the
first one-term President in three decades is the latest, the worst, and the
most worrisome example yet, he told me, of “Trumpism gone wild”—which strikes
me as both quite accurate and not at all reassuring.