TRUMP
CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW HE PLANS TO STEAL THE ELECTION
The president wants everyone to know he hopes
the Supreme Court will force states to stop counting ballots and just declare
him the winner.
BY BESS
LEVIN
OCTOBER
28, 2020
With six days to go until the 2020 election, Donald
Trump seems to have realized he has little chance of winning based on
votes alone. So he‘s hoping that this year, the process by which the victor is
determined plays out a little differently, in that not all the ballots are
counted. Last night at a rally in Michigan, he once again baselessly suggested that mail-in voting
is rife with fraud, asking the crowd “Who’s sending them? Where are they going?
Who’s sending them back?” And on Wednesday, he just gave up the entire game:
“We’ll see what happens at the end of the day
[on Election Day],” he told reporters. “Hopefully it won't go longer than that.
Hopefully the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after
November 3 to count ballots, that won’t be allowed by the various courts.”
Of course, in America, unlike in dictatorial
countries that hold sham elections just for show, we count all the ballots that
are cast. That’s particularly important this year, with COVID-19 scaring many
people off from voting in person, and with the postal service curiously taking longer than
usual to deliver stuff. And clearly, someone has alerted the president to the
fact that the majority of ballots being sent via mail probably aren’t for him:
Democrats
have amassed significant leads over Republicans in pre-Election Day
voting in key states, raising the stakes for President Donald Trump,
who will need blockbuster Election Day turnout to close the gap. Party registration
doesn’t predict how individuals will vote. But the data shows that Democrats
are following through on their strong preference for mail-in voting,
while many Republicans still plan to vote in person on November 3.
Wednesday was obviously not the first time
that Trump has explicitly described how he might steal a second term,
regardless of the actual outcome of the election. Asked last month if he would
commit to a peaceful transfer of power even if he lost, the president told reporters, “Well, 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. Get rid of the ballots and...we’ll
have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a
continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it.”
As The Guardian notes, despite Trump’s open calls for the Supreme
Court to determine the election, the most likely scenario is that voters will
decide who is the next president, even if it takes a little while.
For all
its flaws and added complications this year from the coronavirus pandemic, the
U.S. elections system has basic features to ensure a high correlation between
the vote that is cast and the result that is announced. It is highly
decentralized, with thousands of jurisdictions staffed by members of each major
party, all using different technologies and independently reporting results,
which can be reviewed or recounted, with both sides and the media watching out
for irregularities before, during and after election day. It might take awhile,
and the tragic story of disenfranchisement in the United States continues, but
elections officials have vowed to deliver an accurate count.
On the other hand, “in an era of nihilistic partisanship, court
fights during elections are becoming increasingly common,” and luckily for
Trump, the Supreme Court currently not only has a conservative majority, but
three justices he installed, one of whom gave a clear indication on Tuesday how
he’d rule should a Trump v. Biden case reach the high court:
On
Monday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling prohibiting Wisconsin from counting
mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day. In a concurring opinion,
Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised troubling concerns about
whether he'll be independent of the man who named him to the court. Kavanaugh
wrote, “If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing
due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode.”
Of course, the “winner the morning after the
election” wouldn’t actually be the winner if counting all the ballots actually
puts his opponent ahead, but nice to have confirmation that Kavanaugh plans to
hand Trump the election, should it come to that.
Remember when we didn’t have to worry about
(1) the president of the United States attacking random U.S. citizens and (2)
that his crazy followers would then threaten bodily harm on said random
citizen? Those were the days:
The
CIA’s most endangered employee for much of the past year was not an operative
on a mission abroad, but an analyst who faced a torrent of threats after filing
a whistleblower report that led to the impeachment of President Trump. The
analyst spent months living in no-frills hotels under surveillance by CIA
security, current and former U.S. officials said. He was driven to work by
armed officers in an unmarked sedan. On the few occasions he was allowed to
reenter his home to retrieve belongings, a security team had to sweep the
apartment first to make sure it was safe.
The
measures were imposed by the CIA’s Security Protective Service, which monitored
thousands of threats across social media and Internet chat rooms. Over time, a
pattern emerged: Violent messages surged each time the analyst was targeted in
tweets or public remarks by the president.
Over
the past year, public servants across the country have faced similar ordeals.
The targets encompass nearly every category of government service: mayors,
governors and members of Congress, as well as officials Trump has turned
against within his own administration.
For example, earlier this month, the FBI announced it had disrupted a
plot to kidnap the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer—a frequent
target of the president’s attacks—and days later, Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60
Minutes he must have “near-constant security because of threats
against him and his family,” which is probably the first time the immunologist,
or any immunologist, has found himself in that position. It’s “sad,” Fauci
said, that “a public health message to save lives triggers such venom and
animosity that it results in real and credible threats to my life and my
safety.”
Unsurprisingly, a White House spokeswoman
insisted Trump has never encouraged threats against Fauci, Whitmer, and others
because nothing is ever the president’s fault except when everything is.
“President Trump has never advocated for violence against those he disagrees
with—unlike Democrats,” said Sarah Matthews. Sure, he’s merely
whipped his followers, some of whom are violent, into a frenzy by describing Fauci as an “idiot”
and saying things like “Failing
Michigan Governor must work harder and be much more proactive” and “Governor
Whitmer of Michigan has done a terrible job.”
