Donald Trump has a lot of trouble keeping secrets.

He feels compelled to deliver them on a silver platter to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister right in the Oval Office, to wave them around in front of the Japanese prime minister over dinner, to brag about them to an Australian businessman, and even to steal them and illegally stash them in his bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. His terrible sense of OPSEC was on display again the other night at his Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden when he bragged that he and Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have a “secret,” presumably having to do with winning the election.

Memo to Donald: It’s not a secret if you go around telling the whole country about it.

Nevertheless, this Nixon-like secret plan has me very worried.

Actually that is a disservice to Trump, because unlike Nixon, I think he really does have a plan, even if it’s not very secret, and even if it’s destructive to the country—in installing a homegrown autocratic right wing regime—rather than constructive, like an end to the Vietnam war five years earlier than it actually did end.

So what is this not-so-secret? We dunno, exactly. Maybe Don and Mike like to dress up like French maids, sing Edith Piaf songs, and engage in the vice anglais. But it seems more likely that the “secret” is this:

That Trump, Johnson, various Republican governors and state legislatures, and possibly the Supreme Court (indirectly) could be colluding to deliver the upcoming election to the Donald irrespective of the results of the vote, and in a very specific way that involves something called a “contingent election.”

SECRETS AND LIES (AND THEN MORE LIES)

I have written about GOP election-stealing schemes before, in broad terms, but what we are talking about now is more specific.

For some time now Trump has been going around openly saying that he doesn’t need votes to win. I’m not a poker player (I like Rummikub), but that’s a tell and a half. He said it again at the Garden, while looking in Mike Johnson’s direction: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact.” Then he actually pointed at Johnson, adding, “He and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Asked later about the cryptic remarks, Johnson told the press, nearly as cryptically: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared—and I don’t intend to share this one.” So that’s actually a fucking confirmation of Trump’s remarks, which he might otherwise have dismissed as just rhetoric. But he didn’t.

Later, Johnson elaborated a little, but not much, telling a crowd in Pennsylvania: “It’s nothing scandalous, but we’re having a ball with this. The media, their heads are exploding.” Given Republicans’ demonstrable disregard for what is genuinely “scandalous,” that doesn’t reassure me either. (He went on to claim, nonsensically, the “secret” remark was merely a get-out-the-vote strategy.)

Basically, these assholes are proud that they plan to steal the election.

Writing in The Nation, the great Elie Mystal explains that a “contingent election” is one in which no candidate gets the requisite majority of electoral votes, causing the decision to be thrown into the House, where it’s settled by a straight-up state-by-state vote. Since the GOP controls 26 of the 50 states, the presumption is that this Republican majority would then award the presidency to Trump. (And because I’m sure you’re wondering, even if the Democrats retake the House next week, that current GOP majority will remain in power until that new Congress is seated on January 3, which is after the presidential election would be settled by that chamber.)

But Mystal actually thinks Trump might be trying something even sneakier:

I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.

Nobody has tried this before, but Trump specializes in new presidential frontiers, doesn’t he? Like refusing to release his tax returns, or divest his business interests, or engage in a peaceful transfer of power. Elie again:

The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections. In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don’t even have to get “fake” electors submitted but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines.

All slates of electors are supposed to be certified by December 11, and those electors are supposed to vote by Christmas Day. So the Republicans don’t have to win, “they just have to stall.” If states are allowed to delay the certification of their results past the deadline, Team Trump’s lawyers will be in what Mystal calls a “heads I win, tails they lose” situation.

They’ll say either the unappointed electors don’t count toward the overall number, and Trump wins a majority of the electors present, or they’ll say the electors not present should count toward the overall number, which means no candidate has achieved a majority of electors and the election must be decided by the House.

Mystal notes that “There are currently 27 states with Republican state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. There are currently 26 Republican governors running states like Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia. If some of these people are able to delay certification past the deadline, the ‘whole number of Electors appointed’ would be diminished, lowering the number of electors Trump would need to hold a majority.”

If the race is close enough, a single state—say, Wisconsin, with its ten electors—could trigger this claim simply by not submitting its slate before the December 11 deadline. “In this scenario, the new total number of electors becomes 528, not 538—and Trump needs only 264 electoral votes to ‘win.’ If you take Wisconsin and Nevada’s six electors out of the mix, Trump needs only 262 electoral votes to ‘win.’ He’ll likely achieve those numbers without having to win one of the ’blue wall’ states.”

The Democrats, of course, have surely anticipated this plan and will have an army of lawyers standing by to challenge it, led by Marc Elias. But if it ends up in the Supreme Court, as it likely will, we all know what’s going to happen.

As John Roberts and his cabal of antidemocratic goons (and their wives) have repeatedly shown this year, the Supreme Court is willing to do Trump’s dirty work. In 2020, the Supreme Court rejected almost all of Trump’s various nonsensical claims to overturn that election. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’ll do so again, especially because this time the Trump people will not necessarily be asking the court to overturn the results of a state’s election. They’ll just be asking them to delay certification of those results, until some later date. In addition to ruling for the Trumpers outright, the court could simply delay hearing the case for as long as the delay is helpful for Trump. The Supreme Court can put its thumb on the scale for Trump simply by pretending to “stay out of it” and allowing the “process” to play itself out.

Scared shitless yet?

Then, in a bitter irony, we on the left will be in the ones saying the election was stolen….and even though we would be correct, the GOP and the rest of MAGA Nation will pounce upon that with howling cries of hypocrisy. False cries, but unhelpful nonetheless.

But just to be clear, what we are talking about would very much be a stolen election. This “contingent election” scheme would not be the GOP cleverly exploiting a perfectly legal mechanism within the US Constitution; the whole plan hinges on one or more Republican-controlled states breaking the rules and defying the will of the voters by not delivering its slate of duly chosen electors. One can easily imagine them doing so under the false veneer of some sort of “electoral irregularities,” a canard that—not coincidentally—the right wing has been carefully promoting for decades, and ramped up over the past five years.

And they just might get away with it.

PLANS A, B, AND C

Mystal thinks this plan accounts for Trump’s otherwise counterintuitive and self-destructive campaign behavior. “Trump and his people really don’t think they have to win. They think they can stop certification of states they lose long enough to let Mike Johnson shut the door on democracy.”

When Nancy Pelosi was Speaker in 2020, such bullshit was a non-starter. (Mystal suggests she would have just extended the deadline.) Magic Mike is a different story. “If electors are not submitted by December 11, he’ll likely declare the process ‘over’ and say that the electors appointed by that date are the only ones allowed to vote for president.” The chances that he would not go along with Trump’s plan are roughly the same as a fan reaching out and yanking a fly ball out of an opposing outfielder’s glove.

Wait—strike that. I’ll come up with a better analogy later. 

In fact, it’s perfectly likely that this plan originated with Johnson’s office, or someone like that, rather than with Trump’s brain trust, and certainly not with Trump himself, whose familiarity with the Constitution is a lot like his familiarity with the Bible (and his favorite chapter in it, “Two Corinthians: The Sequel”).

Johnson’s insistence that he will certify a free and fair election, as he recently told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is not reassuring, as the GOP will certainly claim that the election is not free and fair if Trump loses. Do you dream that it would not? (Mike then went on a Fox News-style tear about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Hunter’s laptop, and the Russia “hoax.” I’m not kidding.)

As usual, Trump’s defenders say his critics are overreacting, that we should not take him literally—or seriously, or both—and that he was just owning the libs, as Johnson suggested. (Memorandum for record: That’s acceptable, shrug-inducing behavior for a presidential candidate now?)

The New York Times—which for all its flaws, did at least endorse a presidential candidate this year—reports:

Mr. Johnson’s blustery statement was striking not just for its groundless claims presented as facts. It also seemed to validate that Mr. Trump was actually referring to something specific, and not just speaking with his regular vagueness that allows listeners to hear whatever they want.

But of course, this being the New York Times (in an article to which—you guessed it—Maggie Haberman was a contributor), it has to bothsides it with the classic “to be sure” trope:

Democratic nightmares about what havoc Mr. Johnson could wreak may, in fact, be overblown. It is the vice president who presides over the certification of the election, not the speaker. And an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which Congress passed after the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack, tightened the safeguards around the process to make it less likely to happen again.

Yeah! Democrats are always overreacting to what Donald Trump might do, and he never goes as far as we fear, right Ross “There Will Be No Trump Coup” Douthat?

In any case, we’re not talking about a repeat of 2020’s certification fiasco. We’re talking about a theft of the election upstream from that, in the House, before the Senate’s certification would even take place. And this scenario would actually tee up Kamala Harris to be in a Mike Pence-like position where she would have to choose between refusing to certify—thereby inviting howls of outrage from the right, accusations of wanton hypocrisy, and perhaps even violence—or meekly accepting the GOP scam.

Later, Johnson even bragged to CBS News about all the “great work that’s been done at the federal, state and local level to prevent the chaos that ensued after 2020, the Covid election year, when all the states were changing their laws and regulations.” So even in defending himself against charging of election-rigging, he was obliquely continuing to spread lies about the other side election-rigging last time.

In further response to the furor, Johnson has also claimed that, as “a lifelong constitutional law attorney” he and his party are “going to respect the law. We’re going to follow the constitution to a T.” But his record belies that. As The Hill reports, Johnson” led amicus brief in support of a lawsuit challenging President Biden’s 2020 victory in four states, and voted against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.”

Not sure this dude deserves the benefit of the doubt. Let alone Trump.

In the words of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), my very own congressman, and a former assistant US Attorney in the SDNY: “There’s a lot of ability for a bad actor to mess with the Electoral College if he’s the speaker of the House. If I’m wrong, they should say so. Trump has a lot of secrets: His medical records are secret, his taxes are secret, his phone calls with Vladimir Putin are secret. Clearly he hides a lot from the American people. Now he’s openly stated that he’s hiding something from the electorate.”

All this from that party that brought you the Big Lie and the Insurrection. A political party that is willing to mount a violent coup, and to claim that its perpetrators were patriots—and now, political prisoners and even hostages—can hardly claim to above this kind of electoral skullduggery.

WE MUST GET MOOSE AND SQUIRREL

Speaking of ratfucking, remember how for two whole years America was consumed with the question of whether or not Trump had colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 presidential election? And ultimately, the cautious conclusion was that the Russians had absolutely interfered, but it could not be proven that Trump or his team solicited that help had directly coordinated with them?

OK.

Well now we’re having another presidential election, one in which Russia is again undeniably interfering, and Trump and his allies like Musk are OPENLY coordinating with Putin on a regular basis. And everyone just accepts that as normal.

In that world, is a plan to outflank the Electoral College so hard to believe?

In fact, I am beginning to think that some version of the “thrown-into-the House” scheme is the most likely of all electoral scenarios. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to conceive that Trump won’t try this, or something like it.

Why do I think that? Because it’s so straightforward as a deceitful path to victory, because Trump is known for cheating whenever there’s an opportunity (and sometimes when there ain’t), and because Trump cannot afford to lose this race: it’s go to the White House or go to jail.

Naturally, Trump thinks he can win the election outright—via the Electoral College, though not the popular vote, which regrettably doesn’t matter—and he might. That would make all this moot. He is even trying to win the election, in his way, though he isn’t disciplined enough to run the sort of tight campaign (tacking to the center, appealing to swing voters, etc) that a conventional candidate would run if that was their goal. But given the stakes—that he’s probably going to prison if he loses—he can’t take any chances. So he has this fiendishly simple, if untested, backup plan. All he has to do is it have it be close enough that the abstention of a few rogue GOP-controlled states can make the difference. And it is close.

If some version of this wildly anti-democratic heist unfolds and the Supreme Court rubber stamps it, as it likely will, it will fall to us to collectively rise up and say “Oh, hell no.” And I don’t mean a couple thousand revolutionary fantasists, cosplaying dipshits, and militia member warrior wannabes of January 6^th, but a peaceful, disciplined, nationwide turnout of millions of law-abiding Americans who will make our voices heard and not accept this subversion of the Constitution, or allow this travesty to take place in defiance of the will of the people.

COMING SOON

So watch this space. I will put up one more blog post before the election, on Monday November 4. Look for it here, or wherever you get your self-righteous left-wing bloviating.

We’re in the home stretch, folks. Keep the faith.

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Photo: Halloween edition! For the second week in a row, after his fifteen minute fake shift at McDonald’s, Trump dresses up like a working American. Which he ain’t.

Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.