I wrote recently in these pages about the brazen, quiet-part-out-loud attempts of the Party of Trump to steal the 2024 presidential election.

Yes, the first and preeminent danger is that he could win outright, thanks to the travesty of the Electoral College. On that count, the race remains terrifyingly close, which is a damning indictment of our country on two counts: first, that tens of millions of our fellow Americans are openly supportive of a fascist demagogue, and second, that we have a blatantly anti-democratic, countermajoritarian system of government that allows that rabid right wing minority to impose its will on the rest of us.

But despite the unfair structural advantages that the system gives it, the Republican Party—which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump Inc.—knows that it stands a very good chance of losing that election nevertheless. (As well it should, owing to the wretched policies it promotes, and the fact that it tried to overturn the results of the last one, by force.) Therefore the GOP is also openly preparing to ratfuck the upcoming election every way it can, by sowing chaos, mucking up the counting of votes, undermining public faith in the results, and for the second straight time convincing its army of suckers that their boy actually won no matter what those results really are.

We better be ready.

The New Republic reports on just a few of the tactics in play:

The Trump campaign is building a team of more than 150,000 partisan poll workers and watchers, renewing concerns about voter intimidation. Republicans are trying to turn Nebraska, which has allowed split votes, into a “winner take all” state, to eliminate essential electoral votes that would likely go to Harris. More than 30 cases affecting voter rolls are making their way through 19 states, including important swing states Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Two legal cases from Mississippi and Nevada allowing officials to trash legitimate mail ballots received after November 5 could end up in front of the conservative Supreme Court.

And then there’s what’s happening in Georgia, another crucial swing state, where last Fridaythe state Board ofElections “ordered all ballots cast on Election Day to be hand-counted, which experts say will delay the count and throw the postelection period into disarray.”

And it gets even worse:

(E)arlier this week, a joint report from The Guardian and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington revealed emails between a network of Georgia county election officials in the state strategizing to help Donald Trump win. The scheming includes communications from David Hancock, a member of the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections, and Janice Johnston, a member of Georgia’s MAGA-leaning State Election Board, with the Tea Party Patriots and the Election Integrity Network, a group founded by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell.

Writing in her Civil Discourse blog, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance said the emails show that Georgia’s Election Integrity Coalition is drawing up “a recipe for a coup.” 

“Recipe for a coup” is an understatement.This story of Georgia election official conspiring to help Trump win should be front page news and a national scandal. But instead we just shrug and let the Republican Party carry on with their rape of democracy.

But we don’t have to.

The following excerpt from my new book Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, out now from OR Books, discusses how Trump ginned up the Big Lie four years ago, and the implications for its sequel this November.

THE SOREST LOSER

Rejecting the peaceful transfer of power is the most fundamental sin against democracy. But as far back as 2016, Donald Trump had declined to say whether he would accept the results of that election if he lost, making him the first US presidential candidate to refuse to do so.

He did not add that he would also question the results even if he won.

That itself was a kind of norm-breaking that would have elicited a hair-on-fire reaction from Republicans had Hillary said it. (For her part, Mrs. Clinton wryly noted her opponent’s history of crying foul when he lost any contest, even when his TV show “The Apprentice” failed to win an Emmy.) But the crickets of 2016 would be even more deafening four years later when Trump, hedging his bets, mounted a months-long campaign to undermine public confidence in the vote ahead of Election Day.

The widespread expectation, even among Republicans, was that Trump would sulk and pout for a while before submitting to the inevitable. “What’s the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” one senior Republican infamously—and anonymously—told The Washington Post in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s victory. “No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20.”

Ever since his rise in the 2016 primaries, we had been asking when the GOP would finally break with Trump. With each successive outrage and scandal, we wondered: Was this the moment at last? But it was the wrong question from top to bottom. Republicans don’t want to break with Trump. Why should they? He has delivered to them almost everything they ever wanted. All they had to do was surrender every last shred of decency they had, a stockpile that was already running dangerously low. Not even a violent attempt to overthrow the government was enough to make the party change course.

It was a grim and sobering moment when it became clear that the January 6th would not be the end of Trumpism at all, but only the beginning of a new and even more disturbing phase. Incredibly, defense of the Insurrection and fealty to the Big Lie would instead become dogma in the GOP, a non-negotiable prerequisite for any candidate running under its banner. Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University, an expert on authoritarianism, and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, noted that the “genius of the Big Lie” was not only the physical attempt to keep Trump in the White House, but also that “it prevented his propagandized followers from having to reckon with the fact that he lost. And it maintains him as their hero, as their winner, as the invincible Trump, but also as the wronged Trump, the victim.”

Even as he slunk out of office in disgrace—still fulminating with recriminations and self-pity and insisting he had been robbed, with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands and boxes of top secret documents in his possession—Trump managed to convince between 30 and 40% of all Americans that the new administration was illegitimate, and encouraging them to crippling obstruction, if not armed uprising. The insurrectionists who were prosecuted for their actions are presented in right wing media as political prisoners. The lone rioter who was shot and killed as she broke through a glass barrier and tried to breach the Capitol’s inner sanctum where members of Congress were sheltering is held up as a martyr, and the police officer who shot her as a “thug.” Trump has announced that, if re-elected, he would pardon or consider pardoning most of those convicted in the uprising (possibly himself included). In that regard, it was not the attack on the Capitol but the aftermath that truly marked the nadir of Republican degradation, venality, and cowardice.

Prior to November 2020, an American politician who refused to yield power would have been radioactive. Trump has made it OK—attractive, even—for Republican officials to openly reject the legitimacy of the electoral process, often in advance of a given election itself. According to reliable polls, the vast majority of Republicans—some 70%, as measured in the summer of 2022—continue to believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. 47% of Republicans don’t even believe Trump lost that popular vote to Clinton in 2016. Other polls show 52% of Republican respondents blaming Biden, not Trump, for the attack on the Capitol, according to The Hill, while The Washington Post reported that a quarter of all Americans believe it was a false flag operation by the FBI.

When a significant percentage of the American public has come to believe that our elections are no longer legitimate, the most foundational element of our system of government has been fatally damaged. And once a political organization makes that wholesale rejection of the integrity of the vote a matter of party dogma, that party is no longer engaged in participatory democracy.

When Trump ultimately failed in his legal, extralegal, and flat-out seditious attempts to hang onto power, there were self-congratulatory op-eds aplenty crowing that “the system had worked.” But it had not. Trump’s coup failed only because of his ineptitude in carrying it out, and the integrity of a few stalwart officials in key positions at the federal, state, and local levels, not because of impenetrable barriers in our constitutional framework. In the end, it may well have come down to just a handful of Capitol Police officers who prevented a bloodthirsty mob from lynching Mike Pence and seizing the Electoral College ballots.

Off the Big Lie, the GOP has embraced the notion of widespread election fraud as a pretext for undermining American democracy full stop, such that it will never have to face the nuisance of a free election ever again. Trump and his allies—Giuliani, Flynn, Eastman, Graham, Stone, and the rest—had tried something truly difficult: to reverse the results of an election after the fact. What the GOP is now seeking is to ensure future victories by obtaining a chokehold upstream from the certification of the electoral votes, such that it can control the outcome of elections well before the results are tabulated: no Capitol-storming, Pence-lynching, or bear spray necessary.

The primacy of the vote in a democratic society can hardly be overstated. Every other nightmare, no matter how horrible—whether it’s a policy of forced birth, or of kidnapping immigrant children, or of accelerating an environmental catastrophe that threatens the very future of human life—can be addressed so long as we have recourse to free and fair elections as a means to eject elected officials with whom we are unhappy. But once that is gone, democracy is gone with it.

The GOP has long ridden the hobbyhorse of alleged electoral fraud as justification for manipulating the vote to its advantage. But this new crusade is an order of magnitude more extreme. It is a path to power for Republicans at a time when they face a losing demographic battle in the United States, and with grim electoral prospects going forward. It is also the specious premise under which Republicans have given themselves permission to do anything and everything to seize that power. Because the Democrats are, allegedly, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to steal elections, nothing is off-limits in the GOP campaign to fight back.

Ironically, there is an American political party that is actively trying to rig our elections, but it’s not the Democrats. But as we have seen, projection is now the guiding principle and go-to modus operandi for the American right wing on pretty much everything. It’s page one of the fascist handbook: Accuse your enemies of your own crimes.

Therefore, a new, mind-bogglingly cruel irony now looms. Should the Republican Party manage to win the presidency through skullduggery, voter suppression, or even more nefarious means, the reasonable majority of American citizens may also lose faith in the legitimacy of our democracy, and with good reason. In that scenario, right wingers will surely rediscover their belief in the integrity of the electoral system, even as they make their own lie come true. That is a conundrum worthy of Kafka. For Democrats to say the precise thing that Trump and his followers said last time—“The election was fixed!”—even if fully justified in this case, will invite charges of howling hypocrisy, with the victorious right wing sure to deny us the very means of legal recourse that it embraced in 2020.

(NOTA BENE: Since the publication of the book, the situation has gotten even more fraught with Biden’s departure from the race in favor of his vice president. Now, if the Republicans succeed in creating havoc after election day—for instance, by challenging the certification of electoral votes in a Democratic win—that Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris herself, as president of the Senate, will the one overseeing the process of formalizing her own victory, even as the Republicans spread violence-promoting lies that she is somehow “stealing” the presidency. You can imagine the shitshow.)

In short, the GOP intends to make sure that it will never again need to overturn an election, because it intends never again to lose an election, and it is remaking American politics to that end. It wants to make sure that its supporters vote in numbers that overwhelm the opposition, and it will not rely only on a passionate turnout but also a skewed system. It wants to make sure Democrats face obstacles in casting their votes, or better yet, are cowed into not voting at all, and that it controls the counting of those votes once cast. It wants districts drawn such that the results give Republicans representation in Congress disproportionate to the actual will of the people, and with it a disproportionate share of electoral votes. Through that same redistricting, it aims to obtain supermajorities in state legislatures and give those legislatures the ability to appoint only Republican electors to the Electoral College. If challenged in the courts, it intends to have a judiciary packed with archconservative judges groomed and installed for the express purpose of ruling in favor of the right wing regime. And this entire system will be supported and enforced not only by the usual mechanisms of state power, but also by the ever-present threat—and occasional application—of politically-motivated violence carried out by right wing militias, vigilantes, and other goons.

As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes in his book On Tyranny, when free elections disappear, few citizens realize they are voting in the last one. That paradigm, of course, is common in many nations that succumb to autocracy. In the modern era, the demise of a democracy via an extralegal takeover, violent or otherwise, is much rarer than one that begins at the ballot box, with an authoritarian party ascending to power through legitimate or quasi-legitimate means, then slowly choking off the very mechanisms it used to gain that power and installing itself in permanent control.  

In How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer voluminous historical examples, including Mussolini and Hitler, of course, but also Fujimori, Chavez, Orban, Erdogan, and to some extent even Putin.Almost all follow the same pattern, which involves capturing the courts, controlling the media, neutering (or co-opting) the legislature, and installing loyalists in every relevant arm of the bureaucracy. Surprisingly, control of the military and law enforcement—the chief tools of old school autocracies—are less important, and typically fall into place once the other goals are achieved. Also omnipresent in these scenarios: vicious demonization of the regime’s critics and opponents that justifies their subjugation. For America to go down that dark path, all that remains is for the GOP to obtain control of the US government, which it very much aims to do in 2024. When it does, it is unlikely ever to give it up.

TWIN PIQUES

As noted at the top of this excerpt, the United States is bedeviled by twin toxins, which in combination are putting the very survival of the republic in danger.

The first is that we have a shockingly large minority of citizens who are committed to authoritarian white nationalist Christian theocracy.

The second is that we have an antiquated, anti-democratic system for choosing our head of state that allows a minority of that sort to take control of the government. Until we address both those problems, this crisis ain’t going away.

Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump by roughly five  to six points nationwide. That puts her on track to beat him by around eight millions votes, more than Joe Biden beat him in 2020 (by 7M) and Hillary beat him in 2016 (by 3M). In fact, no Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote in the last eight elections, except George Bush in 2004, thanks to a short-lived rally-round-the-flag effect as a result of the early stages of the Iraq war. (And we know how that turned out.) Yet twice those GOP nominees would up in the White House anyway, because we, almost unique among wealthy democratic nations, inexplicably don’t choose our president by nationwide popular vote. It could happen again this November. How long are we gonna sit on our hands and meekly put up with this wildly anti-democratic, fascist-favoring system????

Kamala’s decisive nationwide advantage is meaningless so long as the GOP keeps us tethered to an electoral process that puts not just a thumb on the scales on its behalf, but a whole goddam elbow. And just in case, that’s not enough, they’re prepared to throw a hand grenade into the whole damn thing.

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RESISTING THE RIGHT: How to Survive the Gathering Storm is available now from OR Books, from your local bookstore, and from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the other usual outlets.

Photo: Trump supporters on the Ellipse, January 6, 2021. Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP