Over the past week, we have wrestled with a problem well described by the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan:

How do you cover something that, at worst, lays the groundwork for a coup attempt and, at best, represents a brazen lie that could be deeply damaging to American democracy?

“You don’t want to fearmonger. You don’t want to underplay something this dangerous, either,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Daily Beast, told me.

The trickiest part: “Figuring out whether these bogus accusations are actually dangerous to the republic or just the last, lame gasps of a doomed administration.”

Sullivan doesn’t answer the question, though she does deftly assess the state of play:

I’d argue that they’re both. Not because they pose more than a sliver of a chance of overturning the reality that Joe Biden will take office in January. Rather, because the constant drumbeat that the election was somehow illegitimate does harm all by itself.

Lately we have seen reports that Trump knows he lost the presidential race (I guess he is “like, really smart” after all, as he has often bragged), but is “challenging the 2020 election results primarily just as ‘theater,’ as he puts on a “performance” for his supporters.” Alternatively—or perhaps in conjunction—we are also told that this is a face-saving attempt to craft a narrative that will give his fragile ego the necessary psychological cover to leave office without conceding. (Both of these theories according to The Week.) Kori Scahke, in The Atlantic, suggests that Trump’s worrying moves at the Pentagon and in the US IC—which look very much like the marshaling of loyalists ahead of a coup—are really just on-brand Trumpian spite. Certification of the vote seems on track, Arizona was just called for Biden, some key Republicans are taking his side (sort of), Trump’s lawsuits continue to go nowhere, the Supreme Court seems content to run let the clock run out.

So maybe we’ll be OK……but maybe not. David Sirota, in a piece for the Guardian called “Republicans Aren’t Conceding—and Democrats Are Bringing a Knife to a Gun Fight,” definitely doesn’t think so.

The title of Sirota’s piece inspired me to revisit a post of my own from 13 months ago that presents a near-worst case scenario. I’m re-printing a condensed version here, not to dunk on anyone, or to fan the flames of alarmism, but because much of it is playing out to a tee, and remains instructive as we try to keep its obsidian endstate from coming true.

The piece took off from “Sharpiegate”—remember that?—when Trump used a magic marker to change a NOAA weather map to prove his claim that a hurricane was menacing Alabama when scientists knew it wasn’t. In the piece, I stated plainly “what surely must be the most obvious thing in the world to anyone paying even casual attention”: that Donald Trump and the Republican Party did not intend to surrender power in 2020 regardless of the outcome.

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From September 2019:

Last week…..(we) saw the President of the United States take a black Sharpie and crudely, almost comically, alter an (outdated) National Weather Service map to include Alabama in the danger zone. The fact that he did that boggles the mind. The fact that he thought he could show that map to reporters on national television and no one would notice what he’d done is even more astonishing. That he would later respond to a reporter’s question about who wielded that Sharpie by putting on the most unconvincing pokerface ever and bleating “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know” was the stuff of an SNL sketch. (For a guy who lies as readily as he breathes, he sure is bad at it.)

Though the episode itself was kind of trivial (unless you live in Alabama and were needlessly afraid for your life), Trump’s insane reaction to it was anything but. The Swiftian spectacle of our Dear Leader at war with the weather and demanding that federal officials bend objective reality to project his eggshell-like ego ought to have sent a chill down the spine of every sentient American.

I also submit to you that we ought to recognize it as a terrifying harbinger of what awaits.

Sharpiegate is the ultimate example of Trump’s malignant and infantile stubbornness, his refusal to admit error or defeat, and willingness to go to absurd and terrifying normbreaking lengths (and possibly lawbreaking ones) to achieve his ends.

If he went that far over a weather forecast, how far do you think he will go to remain President of the United States, and by extension, avoid the criminal prosecution that awaits him as soon as he is not?

POCKET LININGS PLAYBOOK

Here is my fear. My fear is that while we sit here discussing electability, and which states are red or blue or purple, and whether Biden’s “record player” comment will hurt him in Iowa, and generally treating this like a normal election—a high stakes one, for sure, but still within the bounds of what we have always thought of as an orthodox American presidential contest—Donald Trump and the Republican Party are not approaching it that way at all. They are approaching it like a gang of armed robbers walking into a bank.

They will suppress the vote where it doesn’t favor them. They will create obstacles to voting among demographics they think will go against them, like young people and minorities and immigrant communities. They will interfere with registration efforts, spread disinformation, close polling places and create confusion. (In 2016, Republican efforts to suppress the vote through insidious “voter ID” laws are believed to have cost the Democrats around 200,000 votes Wisconsin alone. Trump won that crucial state by a paltry 22,000.)

They have already tried to manipulate the census, likely knowing it would fail, but still succeeding both in intimidating even legal immigrants from voting and likely in skewing the drawing of congressional districts for the next decade.

They will flood the campaign with dark money, whip up hatred and division, scapegoat and demonize their foes and vulnerable populations, spread lies and “fake news” (while accusing the other side of doing so), and generally put on a master class in demagoguery. With Trump’s shockingly racist behavior of the past few months (shocking even by the already shocking standards of his own racist history), it ought to be clear just how ugly it’s gonna get.

They will cultivate and exploit and surreptitiously cooperate with foreign efforts to interfere in the election on their behalf. Interference by the Russians and other foreign actors has already begun; why shouldn’t it, given the greenlight that the Republican Party has overtly been flashing, through McConnell’s unconscionable blockage of attempts to harden our cyber defenses, and Trump’s public invitation for foreign help?

Once Election Day itself is upon us they will contest vote counts and sow chaos. They will attempt to rig the actual vote when they can. They will try to falsify the numbers so it appears that Trump won in places where he didn’t, and in places where it’s clear that he lost, they will dispute the results. (For a sneak preview, see how Don’s role model Mr. Putin and his United Russia party behaved in the Russian elections earlier this month.)

Trump himself will refuse to accept results that do not declare him the victor. He will call on his supporters to rise up in his defense and reject the legitimacy of a victory by his opponent. He will say the fix was in and that he really won despite what the numbers show, possibly even to the point of precipitating violent insurrection. Hell, if it looks like he’s going to lose he might even try to gin up a national emergency or foreign policy crisis to justify postponing or even suspending the election even before it takes place.

Think he won’t? Think that’s a line even he wouldn’t cross? You have obviously not been paying attention.

And as I recently wrote, if and when he does any or all of these things, I do not for a second believe that Mitch McConnell or any of the other leaders of the Republican Party, or the 5-4 right wing majority on the Supreme Court, will stand up and try to stop him.

Maybe I’m wrong. But can anyone cite an example of even one time in the last three years when those institutions stood up to Donald Trump?

WHEN SOMEONE SHOWS YOU WHO THEY ARE

It’s incredible that we are even contemplating this possibility, one that was utterly unthinkable just a few years ago, the stuff of bad counterfactual science fiction. But here we are.

As far back as the 2016 campaign, Trump suggested that he might not accept the legitimacy of the vote if he were to lose. It was a unprecedented moment in modern US politics and one that ought to have rattled the American public to its core. Indeed, his constant ranting about the election being “rigged”—in pre-emptive anticipation of defeat—was a regular feature of his campaign until it proved unnecessary and he suddenly decided all was perfectly fair.

Since then he has repeated the trope again and again. He has mused about running for a third term and “joked’ about being president-for-life like so many of the foreign despots he openly admires. He “joked” about it again just last week at a rally in Fayetteville, NC. He even tweeted out a sign reading TRUMP 2024, again using the fig leaf of “humor” to camouflage an obvious test run of an idea he is clearly keen on.

Ha ha—so hilarious! Incipient authoritarianism and the installation of a hereditary kleptocratic dynasty. LOL!

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think Trump will declare a Khmer Rouge-style Year Zero. But I do think he will concoct an excuse that allows him to mount a formidable crusade to stay in office—one that feels more or less justifiable and all-American, if you kinda squint and make your eyes fuzzy and don’t think about it too hard. (And are a fascist.) And I think the GOP will back him up.

For the first two plus years of the raging shitstorm that is the Trump presidency there was always the comforting thought that we live in a representative democracy (sort of), and that another election was coming, painfully slowly perhaps, but inexorably coming nonetheless. If all else failed, we would suffer through four years of this nightmare and then vote the motherfucker out.

I am very worried that that hope to which we have clung, and continue to cling, is going to prove a mirage: not because we will lose the election (though we might, and that will be a bitter pill all its own), but because the Republican Party is going to break every rule in order to win it, or at least successfully claim that it won.

To believe otherwise would be to argue that the GOP is a principled organization dedicated to the integrity of our democracy.

THE TALE OF THE CORNERED RAT

Trump of course has an additional motivator to win a second term besides mere ego and lust for power. As Edward Luce of the Financial Times recently noted, “No other US president has faced the prospect of being re-elected or going to jail.” That exponentially raises the probability of him upending two and a half centuries of peaceful transitions of presidential power and simply refusing to leave office.

In a piece for Slate titled “What Happens If Trump Won’t Step Down?” Dahlia Lithwick notes that folks as diverse as Michael Cohen, Nancy Pelosi and Politico have raised this same disturbing possibility:

(F)or Trump, losing the 2020 election is an existential threat, and he has openly invited foreign interference, while Mitch McConnell refuses to even consider legislation to secure the vote. And even if Trump is truly joking when he tweets that he deserves to be credited two extra years in his existing term, years he believes were lost to the Mueller probe, or riffs on staying on the job long after he’d been term-limited out, the tweets send a dangerous message to his loyalists.

Lithwick goes on to interview one of the most prominent voices warning of this danger: Georgetown law professor Josh Geltzer, formerly Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, deputy legal adviser to the NSC, and counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for National Security. Geltzer dates his concern to a July 24, 2018 tweet in which Trump claimed to be “very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election,” opining that the Kremlin “will be pushing very hard for the Democrats.” Geltzer suggests that Trump was auditioning a new lie—outrageous and absurd though it was—to see how it would fly, which is something he often seems to do.

I’ve heard some say that we have to beat Trump in a landslide to preclude him challenging the results. But does anyone really think that any margin of defeat will prevent him from doing that? He’s going to dig in his heels and cry “foul!” no matter what. Let’s get used to that fact and prepare for it now.

This is especially so with Trump incentivized to the absolute max because he needs to stay in office in order to stay out of prison…..for a second term, and a third, and even beyond, until the Big Macs and Diet Cokes finally kill him, or he can pass the presidency off to Ivanka who will pardon him and figure out a way to avoid state charges as well.

Lest we forget, in 2000 Gore won the nationwide popular vote, as did Hillary in 2016, and for that matter Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. In fact, of the last five presidential elections, the Republican candidate has won the popular vote in only one, 2004, when Bush was the incumbent in the midst of a war (that he had started). Yet the Republican candidate took office in three of those five elections, thanks to the antiquated anti-democratic chokehold of the Electoral College. The New York Times recently published a terrifying article explaining that, statistically, Trump may have an even easier path to an Electoral College victory in 2020 than in 2016, while losing the popular vote by an even greater margin.

In that way, Trump promises to make the popular vote even more irrelevant, and maybe the EC too.

Eyeroll all you want about Trump Derangement Syndrome, right wingers, but what evidence is there that Donald Trump is too principled for such behavior, or that it would cause McConnell, Graham, McCarthy, and the rest of the GOP leadership to rebel and rein him in? Go on: I dare you.

THE TALE OF THE GULLIBLE DONKEY

I am very concerned that the Democratic Party is not at all prepared for this fight.

Imagine we wake up on the morning of November 4, 2020 to find Trump declaring victory regardless of the vote. On that day, it will be a bitter pill to look back on how we bickered over debate stage theatrics, and whether Kamala was black enough, and which Democratic candidate was best positioned to peel away disaffected Republican voters in the Midwest. Remember when our main concern was the obstructionism President Hillary Clinton was going to face from a Republican Congress after she won in 2016, and how tough it was going to be to get her legislative agenda enacted, and to get the Senate to confirm her nominees to the Supreme Court?

Good times.

As I wrote in this blog two weeks ago, we cannot afford a repeat of the too-polite-by-half Democratic response to the toss-up election in Florida in 2000, in contrast to the bare knuckles tactics that the GOP deployed. The same inappropriately deferential dynamic was in play in our reaction to the disgraceful Republican obstruction of the nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016. Knowing what we know now, the Obama administration should have raised holy hell and found a way to ram him through regardless, even if it meant precipitating a constitutional crisis—which, in retrospect, McConnell had already initiated.

I do not mean to Monday morning quarterback. Back then, few people—myself very much included—understood the implications of what was going on. I certainly did not, and not just because we assumed Hillary would win and hardball was not necessary. But I damn sure do now, and we pretend otherwise at our own peril. A slow motion coup has been underway for some time now, and the old rules of decorum and even democracy itself are no longer be in effect.

In other words, if you thought 2016 was grim, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The sooner we come to terms with this reality and begin making serious preparations for it, the better the odds that we an survive it and prevail. As some dude once said, “Fool me once…..shame on….can’t get fooled again.”

Here’s an idea. Instead of hoping that Mitch McConnell will turn from a poisonous frog into a prince, let’s take the initiative ourselves and make it clear right now that we can see what’s coming and we will not stand for it. No more playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules when the other guys have gone full Gillooly.

If we do not take these possibilities seriously, we will live to regret it. I am certainly not reassured by Geltzer’s suggestion that the best defense against a Trumpian coup is the integrity of GOP leaders:

“We need political leaders—especially Republicans—to make clear, both publicly and privately, that for Trump to contest the valid results of an election would be a redline, and that he’d have zero support from them—indeed, impassioned opposition from them—should he cross it. We need it sooner rather than later, too.” 

Don’t hold your breath.

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Photo: L to R, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Martin Milner, and DeForest Kelley in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957)

Did I speak too soon?

I am rarely accused of being a pollyanna, but earlier this week I took some guff from nervous friends on the progressive side (NB: a redundancy; I don’t have any “conservative” friends left) for writing that we as a nation had avoided a coup, albeit narrowly. This despite the fact, ahem, that I said in the second sentence of that essay that “the danger is not completely past.”

Deep breath, everybody.

I do still think we have avoided a self-coup by Trump. We need to act like it. We should not signal even for a moment that we will stand for any attempt to subvert the will of the people as expressed in the election.

That does not mean Trump and the GOP are not trying, or that we should not pay close attention to their efforts, or not push back against them. There is a legitimate debate going on as to how serious those efforts are, and how dangerous even a “merely performative” questioning of the peaceful transfer of power is. But this much is clear:

We ought to serve notice to the Republican leadership and Trump’s other enablers (because there’s no point talking to Donald himself) that we will not stand for any of this bullshit. Their efforts should be laughed out of hand, treated as the farce they are, and given no serious consideration as genuinely capable of retaining Trump’s hold on power, even as they are rightly condemned as a long term danger to the health of the republic. The more we act like they might be able to get away with this, the more they will believe they can, and the more they will push it.

And here is our ace in the hole:

We all saw the fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall-style global outpouring of joy at the defeat of Donald J. Trump over the weekend. I submit to you that any attempt by Trump and his enablers to steal this election will be met by a similar outpouring in the streets…..but not one where people are dancing to Kool & the Gang (or Nipsey Hussle).

Imagine all those folks angry.

The question before us right now is:  how real is that danger?

MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST

Charlie Sykes writes in The Bulwark that “despite the lawsuits and cable bloviating, Trump has no chance of overturning the actual outcome of the election.” He means on legitimate grounds. There is no legal rustication for what he wants: no widespread fraud, no irregularities, nothing.

We all know why Trump is doing what he’s doing anyway. But why is the GOP abetting this lost cause? (I guess they do like those, though.)

The conventional wisdom is that there are three possibilities:

1. Humoring Trump, to avoid offending “the base” in the interest of their own electoral future, while waiting for the inevitable endgame
2. Keeping that base gyrated for the all-important January 5th Georgia runoff that will decide control of the Senate (perhaps in conjunction with #1 above)

And, finally, and most worryingly:

3. Actually trying to overturn the election.

(It is also very possible that the White House may have no strategy at all, and is simply flailing from one desperate ploy to another. Oh, also: the Family Trump is using this self generated crisis to squeeze more money out of its gullible base and put it straight into its grubby little pockets.)

But it’s all still scary and destructive no matter which option is operative.

The first possibility presumes that the current Republican obeisance to Trump’s claim of a stolen election is merely performative. That venal, self-serving cynicism is itself despicable, of course, even if it does not go so far as an actual coup d’état. But, worse, as Masha Gessen has written, is the fact that “performative” collusion with authoritarianism is the first step on the path to the real thing.

As to the second option, Senate Majority Whip John Thune R-SD, said the quiet part out loud:

We need his voters. And he has a tremendous following out there. Right now, he’s trying to get through the final stages of his election and determine the outcome there. But when that’s all said and done, however it comes out, we want him helping in Georgia.

Which brings us to Option #3.

Admittedly, there have been some worrying moves that smack of a putsch. Bill Barr authorized a specious investigation into alleged election fraud, causing his top election fraud investigator to resign. We also learned that it wasn’t just one rogue GSA administrator refusing to do her job in formally authorizing the transition process, but that the orders came directly from the top, as the Trump White House “instructed senior government leaders to block cooperation with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team.”

Then there was firing of SecDef Mark Esper, the movement of other Trump loyalists into key positions at the Pentagon and US Intelligence Community (the DNI is already a Trump stooge), and perhaps above all, the outrageous remarks of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when asked whether the State Department will cooperate with the Biden transition, who replied, “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

If were still an intelligence officer, which I used to be, and saw this happening in some Third World backwater, I’d put that country on our hotlist and prepare to respond to an imminent establishment of unchecked power by the ruling junta.

This is what we mean by “self-coup,” referring to duly elected heads of state who have illegally refused to cede power, or tried to…..and Wikipedia’s page for the term already includes Donald Trump (with a Roger Maris-style asterisk….for now).

The WaPo’s James Hohmann put it well:

Imagine being a diplomat in another country, sending a cable to Foggy Bottom about what’s happening….Unpopular leader won’t accept election defeat. Parliament not challenging him. Defense minister fired, replaced by loyalists. Justice minister weaponizing law. Etc. Foreign minister insisting that there will be no transition, even in the face of other countries congratulating the opposition leader. Etc, etc, etc.

It’s easy to see when it happens elsewhere, harder to fathom here at home.

DUTY HONOR COUNTRY?

Pompeo’s words were especially outrageous and alarming. Pressed later by Fox’s Brett Baier to clarify whether he was being serious, this walking disgrace to the West Point Class of ‘86 deployed his usual stream of smirking bullshit, saying “We’ll have a smooth transition and we’ll see what the people ultimately decided when all the votes have been cast,” adding, “We have a process, Bret. The Constitution lays out how electors vote, it’s a very detailed process.”

This allusion to “electors” speaks to one of the key fears: that having lost the vote, and soon the recounts, and with his legal strategies all being rebuffed, Trump’s last play will be to try to get Republican-controlled state legislatures to disregard the will of the people and send pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College in December. As I noted in my last post, right wing banshee Mark Levin, who commands a weekly audience of 7 million on the very mainstream Westwood One radio network, has called for that very thing. A Republican member of the Wisconsin state legislature recently did likewise.

As my very wise friend Tom Hall says, “I mean, they keep telling us what they are doing.”

Esper’s removal, in conjunction with other moves in the DOD and US IC, certainly could be the prelude to installing an even more compliant SecDef who would put the power of the Pentagon behind Trump in the event that he pulled something like that, given that it would almost certainly result in massive protest.

Then again, his firing might have been mere vindictiveness. Esper was such a toady that his nickname was “Yesper”; a low point was his role in the St. John’s Church debacle. Yet he did stand up to Trump on a few matters, like the renaming of bases currently honoring Confederate generals, and in his blunt (if belated) rejection of the idea of deploying the active duty military to suppress domestic dissent. Trump might have wanted him gone the same way he shitcanned the slobberingly loyal Jeff Sessions the day after the midterm losses.

David Ignatius has speculated about a third possibility, one that is far more laughable, but still ur-Trumpian: an effort to fill the national security apparatus with loyalists who, in the final weeks of his term, will declassify information about the 2016 election that will aid Donald’s ongoing obsession with proving that Putin did not intervene on his behalf….even if it means compromising highly sensitive US intelligence sources and methods. That would not surprise me a bit.

I don’t know which of these scenarios we’re dealing with. Trump may not even know. But to be honest, I’m a little more concerned than I was on Monday. And in all of them, once again, we are left shaking our collective head at the willingness of so-called conservatives to sell American national security down the river to appease the ego of a deranged game show host.

RISE OF THE INVERTEBRATES (AGAIN)

In that regard, I will cop to one big error last week: underestimating the craven willingness of Republicans to go along with Trump’s madness. (You’d think by now I would have learned my lesson in that realm.)

In my defense, this latest Vichyite phenomenon was slow in building……which is precisely my point is saying now that we should show no fear and not let these cretins think they can bully their way into an autogolpe. The more we signal that we’re worried, as opposed to ferociously warning their asses off, the more emboldened they will be.

Sykes again:

Let’s imagine that in the absence of Mark Esper, the president actually deploys active military troops into key cities to seize the ballots after unfounded accusations of fraud. Here’s the thought experiment: what would the Republican Party do?

Which Republicans would push back? Would Republicans resist the use of armed force to influence the results of an election?

Are you sure? Who? Mitch McConnell? Ted Cruz? Lindsey Graham? Ron Johnson? Kevin McCarthy? Nikki Haley?

Bonus question: If this happened, would Trump’s approval rating go up or down among Republicans?

Bill Kristol writes that while Trump is unlikely to succeed in such an endeavor, we’d be foolish to completely disregard the chance that he might: after all, he has surprised the hell out of us before.

Are we 100 percent certain this doesn’t soften the ground enough so that what seems almost unthinkable now becomes thinkable? Are we 100 percent certain the state legislature in, say, Georgia, won’t start considering things that now seem outside the realm of the possible? And if the unthinkable actually happens in Georgia, are we certain that it could not then happen in Wisconsin? And Pennsylvania?

(W)ith more compliant figures in charge of (the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community) “information” might be revealed or plots “discovered” that help legitimize not allowing the process to move forward to an Electoral College vote that would yield power to Joe Biden?

Keeping up with this almost-all-Bulwark edition of this blog, Jonathan V. Last writes:

The only reason we believe Biden will become president is because we believe that his advantage is too big for Trump to succeed in overturning the election. We think that the rule of law will hold not because it is inviolable, or because both sides are committed to it, but because the results create too tall a burden on the would-be autocrat.

Kristol again:

But we need not stand around speculating about alarms and alarm systems. We have agency. If prominent Republicans and influential conservatives take the threat seriously, and speak and act against it, they can harden our institutional and civic defenses against any such threat. A little alarmism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Complacency in the defense of democracy is no virtue.

I say we don’t wait for “prominent Republicans and influential conservatives” to take the lead, as their recent track record is pretty goddam shitty, Kristol’s own Lincoln Project excepted.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN, WESTERN ANNEX

In the spring of 2000, my wife Ferne and I went to Japan for six weeks to make a documentary about sumo wrestling. While we were there, we went to the offices of the newspaper the Tokyo/Chunichi Shimbun to visit the photographer Kenzo Sato, Ferne’s old boss from its New York bureau. When we arrived, Sato was with a dapper, elderly little Japanese gentleman in a coat and tie. He introduced us, we exchanged very formal but unremarkable pleasantries, and made plans to meet again later.

After we parted, our Japanese co-producer, Yoshi Muto, said to us excitedly, “Don’t you know who that was?” Ferne and I looked at him blankly. “That was Hiroo Onoda!” Yoshi said. Still we looked at him like we were doing impressions of Takeshi Kitano.

Onoda, we were soon informed, was the last Japanese soldier to come out of hiding after World War II, having spent 29 years on a small island in the Philippines, still waging a one-man guerrilla campaign, believing the war had not ended. As a young photographer, Sato had taken the famous picture of Onoda when he finally emerged from the jungle to surrender.

That was in 1974.

Onoda’s story is incredible. We later met him and Sato for dinner, and he agreed to let us make a documentary about him—Werner Herzog, naturally, already held the fiction film rights—but it didn’t come to fruition. Onoda is also a divisive figure in Japan (or was; he passed away in 2014). The right sees him as a paragon of all that was glorious about Japan, which she has lost, in the conservative view; the left sees him as an example of everything that was wrong with the country, and where that fanaticism tragically led her. But the man himself was remarkably serene, gentle, apolitical, and philosophical; I suppose you have to be, in order to do what he did for almost 30 years.

The Republicans who refuse to admit Trump’s defeat are reminiscent of Onoda and the handful of other Japanese dead-enders like him, except for two things:

First, despite fighting for a loathsome cause, Onoda himself had deep and abiding principles.

And second, Tokyo wasn’t still giving him orders.

Oh, and one more: there wasn’t any chance—however slim—that the Empire of Japan was going to suddenly come back and win the war by cheating the system.

SAVING FACE, AND THE SPRAY-TAN THAT’S ON IT

It gives me hope to know that the Biden team—reflecting why we voted for this guy in the first place—is made up of adults with deep governmental experience, and has prepared for all these scenarios, including this one. (The Transition Integrity Project also wargamed this precise turn of events.)

But at a certain point, if the obstructionism continues, it will begin to have severe practical consequences, along with the constitutional dangers it inherently poses, and the long term damage to a commonly accepted belief in the peaceful transfer of power. Among those problems are grave national security instability in the always fraught time of administrative handover, and the handicapping the federal government from carrying out mission critical tasks going forward—in the middle of a pandemic.

The smart money still says that the GOP is mostly posturing (though the smart money has been wrong before). Once the lawsuits fail and the election results are certified, Republicans will put on an Apache dance of grumbling, but ultimately use that as cover to accept the results without looking like they’re defying Trump or caving to the libs.

Writing in The Week, Bonnie Kristian suggests that Trump himself may do the same thing.

Kristian argues that Trump, with his eggshell-fragile ego, needs some sort of psychological cover to allow him to face the inevitable, and an excuse to leave office with his self-image as a “winner” intact, if only in his own mythology. Hard to do when you got beaten like one of Keith Moon’s tom toms, but MAGA Nation has shown an infinite capacity for believing 2+2=5.

Losing in court, by contrast—such as a judge’s order forcing the GSA to begin the transition process—could give Trump that psychological cover. “Pushing the Biden transition team to sue for access to the executive branch makes a lot of sense in this framework,” Kristian writes. “It lets Trump tell a story in which he goes down swinging: He leaves only because a very biased, horrible, Democrat judge makes him go.”

How incredibly pathetic is that, that our glorious 244-year old republic is teetering over the whims of this deranged, narcissistic manchild? Not exactly a new phenomenon over the past four years, but one that is reaching its apotheosis.

WASHINGTON 2020 IS THE NEW MANILA 1986

So we are walking a fine line here, folks. On the one hand, GOP refusal to acknowledge that it lost the presidential election is unconscionable, unacceptable, and gravely damaging to the republic. On the other hand, let’s treat it as the nothingburger it is and not give the claim any credence. Joe Biden is the President-Elect and Kamala Harris the VP-Elect: period dot, end of story. Starve their dishonest claims of oxygen and move forward with the transition.

But even if we do avoid a coup, the long term damage of this charade is likely to be severe, and mind-boggling.

Charlie Sykes writes that a new poll shows that “70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair, a stark rise from the 35 percent of GOP voters who held similar beliefs before the election.” That does not bode well for our future. In fact, it plays right into Putin’s strategic goal of “feeding the narrative that American democracy is no longer legitimate.”

This is not just about Joe Biden. The long-term implications will be a corrosive undermining of faith in the American system. This is the final, but perhaps the greatest of Trump’s violation of norms, shattering centuries of bipartisan understanding of the necessity of maintaining faith in democratic systems in the peaceful transfer of power.

In case you think this is an overstatement, the reality is that tens of millions of Americans now will believe that the next president is illegitimate because the election was stolen.

Along with the right to vote, the peaceful transfer of power is probably the most fundamental principle of representative democracy (making the Republicans two for two in their attacks on the bedrock of our republic). Even if Trump’s behavior—and that of the GOP that supports him—proves to be nothing more than a charade ahead of his inevitable departure, it is still appallingly destructive. In fact, it might be—along with the kidnapping and caging of children, and the obliteration of “truth” as a common metric—the worst and most damaging thing he has done. It’s a strong field.

Aaron L. Friedberg, an international affairs professor at Princeton, and Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, write:

The ability to transfer power peacefully is a singular achievement of our political order. Its success depends on the confidence that people have in the fairness of the electoral system. With millions of Trump’s followers believing his charges, that confidence has been placed in jeopardy, setting the stage for truly dangerous confrontations in the short term and potentially shattering much of the nation’s faith in our system of government over the longer term.

If, on December 14th when the Electoral College meets (or January 6th, when Congress certifies the results) this photo of Hiroo Onoda proves mistaken as a metaphor, if it turns out it should have been a snap of Ferdinand Marcos and his followers, it will be a dark day for this once-proud republic.

But I will remind you that Marcos, like most despots, eventually fell, thanks to the power of the people.

*******

Photo: Kenzo Sato, 1974

The first thing I want to say is, hallelujah.

The second thing I want to say is, the danger is not completely past.

It appears that we have, mercifully, avoided the worst case scenario that many (myself included) have been screeching like howler monkeys about for months and even years: a defeated Donald Trump using the power of his office, the slavish devotion of his followers, the complicity of the right wing media, and other levers both subtle and violent, legal and illegal, to cling to the presidency, even if it meant plunging this country into a constitutional crisis, to include fighting in the streets.

He tried, but it didn’t happen. Joe Biden clearly won the election, beating him by almost four million votes and still counting, with a final Electoral College tally that figures to be 306-232…..exactly what Trump’s was four years ago (which he never tires of calling a “landslide.”) No serious institution, entity, or individual questions it, and all the mechanisms of power have shifted into action to begin the normal transition process. Even before the networks called it for Joe, Heather Cox Richardson informs us that “the Secret Service sent reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware, to surround Biden in a protective bubble, in anticipation of….a victory speech,” and a national defense airspace was established over Biden’s Delaware home. (Though what we really need is a no-fly zone over Pence’s hair.)

But that said, exactly as expected, Trump is stubbornly insisting that he won in defiance of reality, refusing to concede, and pouring fuel on the fire of domestic unrest, all with the effect of undermining the authority of the incoming administration and the integrity of our electoral system going forward. The transition promises to be rocky, to say the least, and when it is done, tens of millions of right wing Americans (don’t call them “conservatives”) will remain who view the Biden presidency as illegitimate. A low-level pro-Trump insurgency employing domestic terrorism, to a greater or lesser degree, is also likely.

So that happened.

But let us leave the future aside for now and drill down on how it was that we managed to avoid the worst case scenario of a full-on power grab, for therein lie lessons we are definitely going to need in this brave new post-Trump world that is dawning.

THE POOR MAN’S AUTOCRAT

While Trump did (and continues to do) many of the proto-authoritarian things we long expected in trying to hang onto the presidency, the question remains: why did he not do the others?

It damn sure wasn’t out of moral principle.

Why no seizure of ballot boxes or abuse of the Insurrection Act? Why no mobilization of the National Guard, deployment of ICE agents as a private army, false allegation of Chinese interference, or exploitation of the pandemic to stop the vote count?

My best guess is that Trump thought he could win this thing without going that far. He nearly did, which is fucking terrifying.

That proved a fatal miscalculation, born in part of his own egomaniacal overestimation of his popularity, and conversely, the depth, breadth, and commitment of the millions of American voters who opposed him.

By all accounts, Trump’s plan hinged on being able to claim victory early last Tuesday while ahead in the vote count in key swing states. So one of the sweetest ironies was Fox News calling Arizona for Biden relatively early on Tuesday night, putting a knife in Trump’s scheme. Reportedly, first Kushner and then Trump himself personally called Murdoch and screamed at him to retract the call. Rupert gave him two fingers up. As if out of spite, Fox never did take Arizona out of the Biden column, even after other outlets temporarily did. It was fitting penance for baby Fox—only four years old at the time—prematurely calling Florida for Bush in 2000 and setting that debacle in motion.

In the broader scheme, I suspect Trump also didn’t really have the huevos to go full Pinochet. But then again, he has always been an autocrat manqué, a pale shadow of his idols Putin, Erdogan, or Duterte. Sure, Trump’s a coward and a sadist and a bully who has no problem ordering children ripped away from their mothers and warehoused in cages. He’s tough enough when they enemy is a toddler. But in the end, he was too lazy, craven, and weak-kneed to face down Joe Biden, the Pentagon, and the whole of American democracy, proving the thesis of folks like Anthony Scaramucci and The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood (who memorably quipped, “A civil war sounds like a lot of work.”)

Don’t get me wrong: I ain’t complaining. But in the end, Trump has proven to be exactly what we always knew he was: a vain, narcissistic, cheeseburger-gobbling game show host and lifelong grifter with a spray-on tan, not made of the sterner stuff that real autocracy requires.

So slink off to Mar-a-Lago, Don—or maybe well-feathered exile in the UAE, brokered by Erik Prince, out of the reach of extradition and the long arm of Letitia James—and console yourself with your self-pity and your new job as Limbaugh’s replacement and the continuing adoration of Mouthbreather Nation.

Meanwhile, America will march on without you, and try to begin the process of repair.

LEGAL EAGLES AND LEGAL PIGEONS

Even the things Trump did try were pathetic, and largely confined to two fronts: informational warfare—which is to say, dervish-like spin—and legal maneuvering in the courts, Don’s preferred gladiatorial arena.

The latter has been surprisingly anemic, disorganized, and ineffective. I say “surprisingly,” but did we really expect more or better? The Florida recount of 2000 was the template we all imagined, but that effort was led by the GOP’s corps of wise old statesmen like James Baker and Warren Christopher (and included among its foot soldiers the young John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, now all on the Supreme Court). By contrast, Trump’s campaign to overturn the result is being handled by the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Eric Trump, and Richard Grenell, apparently taking their guidance directly from Trump himself (which explains a lot). If the GOP team in Florida in ’00 was the legal equivalent of Tiffany & Co., Trump’s team this time is like three guys selling fake Rolexes on a blanket on Canal Street.

In fact, we were told Jared Kushner was in search of precisely that sort of “James Baker figure” to take charge of the legal campaign and lend it gravitas. Um, how about the real James Baker, who recently disgraced himself by telling journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser that he would be holding his nose and voting for Trump, because, ya know, tax cuts? But in the wake of November 3^rd, JB III told The New York Times that Trump was wrong and that the votes should be counted. (Wow, that’s what passes for courage in the Republican Party these days—basic civics?)

To be fair, in 2000 the Bush team held several advantages Trump’s doesn’t. They were dealing with only one state, for a start, not four to six, and were leading in the count, rather than ahead in some places and behind in others, forcing Trump to argue that the count should continue in Arizona and Michigan but be halted in Pennsylvania and Georgia, a real-life re-enactment of an episode of “Veep.” (Moral bankruptcy is great for one’s versatility.) Most crucially, Bush’s folks were dealing with genuine questions of irregularity and confusion (the butterfly ballot; hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads, etc), not trying to gin up nonexistent fraud out of thin air.

In any event, the legal effort seems doomed to failure—virtually none of the many lawsuits the administration has filed have found purchase—notwithstanding Trump’s belief that he bought a third of the Supreme Court and can now call in those favors. Still, Trump’s forces are brazen, like legal advisor Harmeet Dhillon, whom Heather Cox Richardson reports told Lou Dobbs: ‘We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court—of which the president has nominated three justices—to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.’”

But speaking oféminence grises (oréminence grases) from the old GOP, Bill Barr has been mysteriously MIA throughout this whole process—AWOL might be a better metaphor—rumored to be quarantined at home fighting COVID, or at least pretending to be. That didn’t stop him from skirting the law in order to send armed federal agents to ballot-counting locations around the country, ostensibly to investigate “voter fraud.” But he has not taken the aggressive or prominent role in the theft of the presidency that many of us feared. Billy, it seems, is evil, but smart enough to know a losing effort when he sees one.

In Barr’s stead, Rudy Giuliani was left holding a stark raving mad press conference that prompted comedy writer Zack Bornstein to tweet: “I could write jokes for 800 years and I’d never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium.”

SHOOTING THE MESSENGER, AGAIN

Team Trump’s PR effort is not going any better than the legal one.

Risible though it is, the chief Republican talking point is to attack its usual whipping boy, the press, by sneering, “The media doesn’t decide elections.”

Nice try, guys.

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the media no more decided this election than a scoreboard wins the Super Bowl. The American people made its will known, and MSNBC, CNN, and—yes—even Fox merely reported it. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and the other lickspittles can cry and whinge all they want, but it won’t change the facts, and it won’t stop the inevitable.

One level up on the moral ladder (i.e., at Level One) the majority of Congressional Republicans are merely keeping silent, heads down, trying not to say anything one way or another….which is craven, but tactical. Clearly they are trying to walk a tightrope, positioning themselves for the post-Trump world without alienating the still rabid Republican base. It’s not a dumb move, but it’s a cynical and unprincipled one; I’m shocked, shocked. And if they for a moment we’re ever going to forget their support for Donald Trump, they best think again.

As of this writing, only a few prominent Republicans have come out and told Trump to man up, like Chris Christie. (Donny did give him COVID, after all.) Among Republican US Senators, only Romney and Murkowski have publicly reached out to congratulate Biden or even acknowledge his win, as was customary until now. (Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, did tell “ABC This Week” that Trump should concede.) So did George W. Bush, the only living Republican ex-President, which is meaningful: even if much of MAGA Nation hates him, the conservative establishment does not. It’s kind of the least he can do, after 2000, Iraq, and the rest. In fact, he might have spoke up against Trump sooner, and frustrated many by not doing so. But like Jim Mattis, for what it’s worth, his words now have more punch precisely because he kept his powder dry.

Only the diehards of MAGA Nation accept and promote the transparently dishonest claim that the election was rigged, and they represent only a subset of a minority that just got beat pretty bad in an election. Foremost among them was the odious and irrelevant Newt Gingrich, who pioneered the scorched earth politics that brought us to this pretty pass, who told Fox News, “I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election.”  As if anyone cares what Newt Gingrich thinks.

(Indeed, the only downside of the Biden win is that Newt will return to the US from his cushy perch in Rome, where his third wife—the one he cheated on his second wife with, while she was battling multiple sclerosis— is US Ambassador to the Vatican.)

But Gingrich’s dangerous, hypocritical, anti-democratic rhetoric—which is to say, Trump’s—is roiling the right wing mediasphere, as in this insane and chilling Trump-style all-caps tweet from radio host Mark Levin:

REMINDER TO THE REPUBLICAN STATE LEGISLATURES, YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY OVER THE CHOOSING OF ELECTORS, NOT ANY BOARD OF ELECTIONS, SECRETARY OF STATE, GOVERNOR, OR EVEN COURT. YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY — ARTICLE II OF THE FED CONSTITUTION. SO, GET READY TO DO YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY

And I’ll remind you that Levin has a weekly audience of about 7 million listeners, on the mainstream Westwood One network.

Is it any surprise then that angry Trump supporters—some of them heavily armed, and in body armor—are gathering on the steps of various state capitols over an election they believe was “stolen” from their hero? I’m worried about that, of course, and the trouble they will make going forward, but I don’t think they’re going to reverse the results of the vote.

NBC News reported that, no surprise, the White House itself has been fomenting these protests, using a barely concealed cutout:

A texting company run by one of President Donald Trump’s top campaign officials sent out thousands of targeted, anonymous text messages urging supporters to rally where votes were being counted in Philadelphia on Thursday, falsely claiming Democrats were trying to steal the presidential election. The messages directed Trump fans to converge at a downtown intersection where hundreds of protesters from the opposing candidates’ camps faced off Thursday afternoon.

‘This kind of message is playing with fire, and we are very lucky that it does not seem to have driven more conflict,’ said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s online watchdog Citizen Lab. Scott-Railton helped track down the source.

“ALERT: Radical Liberals & Dems are trying to steal this election from Trump! We need YOU!” the text said, directing recipients to ‘show your support’ on a street corner near the Philadelphia Convention Center where votes were being counted and tensions were running high.

It’s one thing to rally your supporters to protest; it’s quite another to feed them lies, undermine faith in a fair election, and foment unrest that could easily turn violent. But, oh yes, it’s the left that is full of anti-democratic radicals who are jeopardizing “law and order.”

Spare me.

THESE SWIFT COURIERS

But not even the ongoing skullduggery of Trump Nation could detract from the joy of watching it dealt a deathblow.

In my house, like many people, my wife and I had been mainlining the news for 96 straight hours when the moment finally came on a beautiful Saturday morning. Naturally, irony being what it is, we had just taken a brief break from the TV when our nine-year-old daughter came into the room saying, “Hey, I hear people banging pots and pans. Is there a parade or something?”

Once we realized what was going on, we went out into the streets along with what seemed like everyone else in New York City. I wasn’t in Berlin when the Wall fell, having left Germany only the month before, but three of my good friends were, and this reminded me of that. Even as steeped as I am in this issue (see the weekly output of this blog), I didn’t anticipate the level or scope of the emotion and the catharsis, either for myself or the broader world.  

It was sweet, and earned, and overdue, and a glorious global verdict on the piteous reign of Donald J. Trump. (As the writer Jason Philip Miller noted on Twitter, “Live your life in such a way that the entire planet doesn’t dance in the street when you lose your job.”)

At one point, a USPS truck crept through the giant spontaneous dance party on the corner of 2^nd Street and 5^th Avenue here in Brooklyn. The crowd went wild and the driver reciprocated with a pumping fist and a honking horn. You couldn’t have staged it any better. “We Deliver” read the logo on the side of the truck.

“You delivered for us, and we delivered for you,” as my wife said.

In Washington DC a huge crowd gathered outside St. John’s Church in Lafayette Park, with nary a Bill Barr-brand tear gas canister or horse-mounted policeman in sight. How fitting. All over the country celebrations continued into the night, and all the bells were ringing, and the people were singing on this night we drove old Dixie down—for now. (Yes, I know I am inverting the meaning of that beautiful but toxic song.)

NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel remarked that the reaction, both in the United States and abroad, was as if we had just overthrown a dictator.

Well, we did.

Yeah yeah, I know Trump wasn’t a true dictator, per above But by the standards of the world’s oldest and most stable representative democracy, he was shockingly, chillingly close—way too much so for comfort, and way more than almost anyone once thought possible.

That night—still pretty drunk—we tuned in to see what SNL would do. A lot of people remember when Kate McKinnon, in character as Hillary, played and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the show right after the shock of the 2016 election. For a wildly overplayed song, it was still very moving. So having Alec Baldwin as Trump play and sing a mournful version of “Macho Man” was a witty reprise.

But when I think back to 2016, I remember a different cover of that tune. A few nights before, my friend Michael DeNola and I had seen the great Tim Minchin play at the Beacon here in New York. It was a comedy show, but he closed it solemnly, by lowering the houselights and playing Cohen’s anthem in total darkness, with the whole audience singing along. And that was before Election Day, when we all still though Hillary would win. It was a remarkable and poignant moment—as if a premonition of the nightmare to come.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot in the four years since then. Because we all know what the best cold dish in the world is.

THE BAFFLED KING

As the Internet meme says, Trump has now had the full 2020 trifecta: he got corona, lost his job, and now he’s gonna be evicted from his house.

In terms of next steps, the Constitution does not call for a defeated president to offer a concession speech: Once the people have spoken, it matters not what the loser thinks of it. For all his bluster and tantrum-throwing, Trump will soon find himself marginalized as the machinery of American governmental bureaucracy grinds forward in establishing his successor.

For in the end, Trump’s ultimately feeble efforts to steal this election were thwarted by the sheer force of the millions of Americans who voted for Joe Biden over him…..by the media that faithfully reported those results without succumbing to any gaslighting, in a very ordinary way that resembled coverage of previous elections…..by the institutions—and the public servants who populate them—who acted as duty demanded.

The lesson, for aspiring future autocrats, is that they will have to push a lot harder next time. Don’t think they won’t.

The lesson for us is that we have the power to stop them, if we fight.

We still have to reckon with how many windows Trump will break on his way out of the White House, and just how hard he will try to sabotage things for his successor. As Julia Segal tweeted, “Anyone hoping for a peaceful transition has never had to pull a toddler out of a Chuck E. Cheese.”

Will he, for example, sell classified information to the highest bidder for his own profit? That’s a pretty pricey broken window, but I don’t put it past him. (Arguably he has already been holding auctions like that throughout the kleptocracy that passed his presidency.)

And while the major machinery of power is moving inexorably to support the incoming Biden administration, deadender Trump loyalists are already making trouble. Just this morning the Washington Post reports that a “Trump administration appointee”—the head of the GSA—“is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week.” Country first, right folks?

Given that, it seems to me that it’s those—on both right and left—scoffing in hindsight over alleged Chicken Little alarmism who are the ones being naïve, not those of us who warned that the sky might be falling. It very well could have, if things broke just a little bit differently. And next time they might.

Heather Cox Richardson one last time:

While this election saved democracy for now, the forces that gave rise to Donald Trump’s presidency have not been vanquished. America is still under siege by oligarchs who are trying to take control of the country. They win supporters by spinning a false narrative that feeds fear and fury to drive ordinary Americans apart. And, as we now know, 70 million voters are open to their narrative, even if it means children torn from their parents, half of the country demonized as anti-American, a lawless administration, a deep recession, and more than 230,000 Americans dead….

But whatever the future brings, there is no doubt that today is ours. After four years in which we have indulged the worst of our nation, we have voted to reclaim the best.

*********

Illustration: the great Edel Rodriguez, cover of Der Spiegel, November 7, 2020, a bookend to his cover of February 4, 2017, which also appeared in this blog, June 21, 2018.

Hmmm, a lot to take in over the past three days, and we will get to the heart of it shortly. But first, after four years, I think we owe it to ourselves to take just one moment to celebrate a singular, long-sought reality:

Donald Trump will be a one-term president, ejected from office by the American people.

This, as Joe Biden once told Barack Obama about the ACA, is “a big fucking deal.” Biden is on track to win the popular vote by an even larger margin than Hillary did in 2016—about 4 million votes. He will also receive more votes for president than any candidate in American history (though that is partially a simple function of growing population), about 73.6 million thus far to Trump’s 69.6. His final tally might approach 80 million. Kamala Harris will be the first woman Vice President, the first person of color in that office, as well as the first Black and South Asian one.

But numbers don’t really capture it. Consider this: Prior to this cycle, a challenger has unseated an incumbent president only four times in the past hundred years (FDR over Hoover in 1932, Carter over Ford in ‘76, Reagan over Carter in ‘80, and Clinton over Bush in ‘92).

So, yeah, a BFD.

On a practical level, Biden’s win is a major step forward in our efforts to stanch the bleeding of the last four years. To name just one consequence: given that we are still in the midst of a pandemic, it might be measured in hundreds of thousands of American lives saved in the coming months. Its repercussions are equally vast for economic equality, for racial justice, for a sane foreign policy, for the United States’ standing in the world.

Therefore, let us not underestimate for even a moment the impact of Joe Biden’s victory. This, we were told, has been the most important American election since 1864, and that was no hyperbole.

So why did this still feel like a loss for so many of us, at least initially?

That sense is abating a bit as the reality of Biden’s win sinks in, and the disappointment over the misplaced hope of a landslide fades. But the reason for that queasy feeling comes from the most profound takeaway of this election: The appalling number of our fellow Americans who, even at this late date, are still willing to stick by Donald J. Trump.

SICK AF

It should never have been this close, and it is deeply alarming that it was.

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichol, a professor at the US Naval War College, summed it up well with a piece concisely titled “A Large Portion of the Electorate Chose the Sociopath.”

I am certainly relieved. A Biden victory would be an infinitely better result than a Trump win. If Trump were to maintain power, our child-king would be unfettered by bothersome laws and institutions. The United States would begin its last days as a democracy, finally stepping over the ledge into authoritarianism.

A win for Biden would forestall that terrible possibility.

But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor—his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms—and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him.

That is it in a nutshell. Four years ago, one could forgive a Trump voter for a naïve willingness to give him a chance. This time around a vote for Trump is, at the very least, an admission of complicity, and in many cases, a proud and thunderous affirmation of approval. And there were almost enough of them to return him for a second term.

The New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer writes:

From the start of his 2020 campaign, Joseph R. Biden Jr. insisted that President Trump was an aberration, his norm-breaking, race-baiting tenure anathema to the national character. “It’s not who we are,” Mr. Biden often said, “not what America is.”

And at the end of the 2020 campaign, an anxious, quarrelsome country seemed to be turning a question back at him:

Are you sure?

The fact that we did not have a resounding nationwide repudiation of Trump ought to force an unmistakable reckoning: America, it seems, is a lot sicker than we wanted to believe.

There can be no more pretending Trump was an anomaly. Fully a third of our country continues to be totally onboard with the most vicious and vile racism, misogyny, and right wing authoritarianism, even to the point of negligent homicide on a mass scale, quisling subservience to a foreign power, and wanton corruption that doesn’t even bother to camouflage itself.

This isn’t who we are? I’m worried that it is.

The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser:

It never should have come to this. After nearly four years of Trump’s divisiveness and incompetence, the country has been beset by truly grave crises in 2020. With a deadly pandemic raging and an attendant economic catastrophe, more than seventy per cent of Americans said, in the latest Gallup poll, that they believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. In a previous era, Trump might have suffered a historic repudiation for what has happened to the nation on his watch.

(But) His base has followed him through impeachment and family separation, his “love” letters with North Korea’s brutal dictator and even his coronavirus denialism. If he leads them over the cliff of a constitutional confrontation between now and January 20th, we have to assume that they will follow him there, as well.

Nichol, a Never Trump conservative, writes that he did not expect a Biden landslide, or a real repudiation of Trumpism.

I know my former tribe.…..The party of national security, fiscal austerity, and personal responsibility supports a president who is in the pocket of the Russians, has exploded the national deficit, and refuses to take responsibility for anything. I had hoped, at the least, that people who once insisted on the importance of presidential character would vote for basic decency after living under the most indecent president in American history.

It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power…..Even the candidacy of a man who was both a political centrist and a decent human being could not overcome this sullen commitment to authoritarianism.

THE LANDSCAPE OF DORIAN GRAY

Yesterday, the day after the election, my filmmaking partner Justin Schein and I drove through rural Pennsylvania on our way to film a non-partisan “Count Every Vote” rally for the NGO Protect the Results. It was gorgeous country, in blazing autumnal colors, right out of a pastoral painting. But the scenery was thick with Trump signs. (A few Biden/Harris, but badly outnumbered.) I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was chilling: this beautiful scenery and these salt-of-the-earth folks, blithely flying the flag of hate, bigotry, and deceit.

But lest you misjudge, this was not a pair of boozhy Brooklynites leaving their bubble, at least not entirely. That part of Pennsylvania is where my family has lived for more than 30 years; I lived there myself for several years, and I know it like the back of my hand. The rally we went there to film was in the county seat next to my hometown (such as it is), just a few miles from where my father and brother still live, and vote.

(I used to live in Germany too; the scenery in Bavaria is gorgeous as well. What it is about storybook landscapes that go so well with fascism?)

Masha Gessen, who has firsthand experience of fake democracy and Potemkin elections, quoted the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, from his 1933 poem “Stalin’s Epigram”: “We live without sensing the country beneath us.” (As a result of having written that, Mandelstam was arrested the following year and died in the gulag four years later. That’s real, Grade-A autocracy.)

I would not trade Trumpian authoritarianism for the Stalinist variety. But what we are facing is in some ways more than insidious than the outright banana republic power grab that we feared (a danger we ought not assume is safely past). That would have been horrible, but at least it would have been an obvious crime that all parties could have seen as such—except the Kool-Aid brigade. Instead, what we are faced with is the realization that the Kool-Aid brigade remains bigger and stronger than we ever thought.

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale and author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, told Salon’s Chauncey Devega that “many Americans really like authoritarianism. Sure, the conventional wisdom says that Americans like freedom. Some of them do. Some of them do not. The Americans who do not like freedom are not going to be reached or otherwise have their minds changed. It is as simple as that.”

The election results make it hard to argue with that. Russian interference in our elections, real as it is, is not the true problem. We are doing this to ourselves.

George Packer writes, also in The Atlantic, “We are two countries, and neither of them is going to be conquered or disappear anytime soon.”

The outcome of the 2016 election was not a historical fluke or result of foreign subversion, but a pretty accurate reflection of the American electorate. The much-discussed Democratic majority that’s been emerging since the turn of the millennium is still in a state of emergence and probably will keep on emerging for years to come. The will of the majority is indeed blocked by undemocratic rules and unscrupulous politicians, but it’s a bare majority without enough numbers to govern.

Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere.

Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government.

It doesn’t take away from this acknowledgment to point out that the election was not exactly a fair fight. As the author and musician Mikel Jollett tweeted, apropos of the Republican Party:

They gutted the Voting Rights Act, slowed the mail, intimidated voters, invested billions in disinformation, closed countless polling stations in Dem precincts and everyone is running around saying, “How did Republicans get so many votes?!”

So, interpolating, we can presume that in a fair election without rampant Republican suppression of the vote, the Democratic share would have been a bit higher. This is not to engage in still more denialism, or fail to reckon with the deep divisiveness in our country, or with the millions of our fellow Americans who passionately support Trump and Trumpism. Irrespective of higher Democratic turnout, we still have to face the fact that some 70 million American voters are totally down with Trump, significant numbers more who didn’t vote and aren’t even included in that figure. For that matter, even the GOP’s voter suppression campaign has depended on the support of that large chunk of the populace.

TODAY IN PLACEKICKING

I will leave the postmortem about the polls to others, except to say it feels like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. We were told that the forecasting problems of 2016 had been fixed, or were merely a matter of misinterpretation. But it now seems that the margin of error was even worse than four years ago. With the massive turnout in the early vote, what we thought was a public uprising turned against Trump turned out to be a display of equal passion by both sides. (Remember that stat about Biden winning the most votes in US history? The sad part is, Trump won the second most.)

Notwithstanding fantasies of a blue wave, the election unfolded almost exactly as we thought it would for most of the campaign: razor thin margins state by state, Trump sowing chaos and illegitimately claiming victory, and legal challenges that we will have to fight off. If the press had not convinced us in the final weeks of the race that Biden was going to win Wisconsin by 12, blow out Michigan, flip Texas and Georgia, etc etc, we would have gone into Election Day properly expecting a nail-biter. We would have had weeks to come to terms with notion that fully a third of our country are cheerleaders for autocracy and willing members of a literal death cult, and would have been overjoyed to escape with this relatively close win. Instead, many of us had to grapple with that shocking realization and the rottenness of our country in one night.

I know that many have sneered at this apparent naiveté among progressive Americans. The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse wrote that “for the past two years, the demographics in my inbox who most fervently believed in a 2020 blue landslide were White liberal men and occasionally White liberal women.”

Surely, they insisted, what had happened in 2016 was a blip. Hillary Clinton had been uniquely flawed, the country uniquely complacent, Donald Trump uniquely novel. The results didn’t really reflect America. Black women would save the party; Black women would save us all.

The Black women who wrote to me, meanwhile, were exhausted and often worried. To them, 2016 didn’t feel like a blip. It felt like the America they’d already been living in for decades was finally made visible to the rest of the country. Yes, it had always been racist. Yes, it had always been sexist. Yes, yes, yes.

If you, like Biden, have had the recurring privilege of sadly shaking your head and saying, “This isn’t who we are,” what you really meant was, “This isn’t who I’ve ever had to see us be.” What you really meant was, “This isn’t my America. . . . Crap, is it yours?”

Fair enough. (Though I’ll argue that I heard no deluded talk of a landslide over two years, only the last month.)

But it is completely possible to understand how deeply racist, repressive, and retrograde and at the same time be startled at how so many of our countrymen continue to stand by a man who criminally oversaw the unnecessary deaths of more than 200,000 Americans, who is a demonstrable vassal of a foreign power, who has treated the presidency as license to rob the country blind, to name just a few of his sins which are too numerous to list in full here. (See the previous 174 entries in this blog.)

Now we have to face it. Like a person with mental illness, the problem for America is that one of our ills is the lack of the very introspection we need to address those ills.

And it might have been a lot worse. As the Never Trump conservative Tim Miller pointed out, the pandemic offered Trump a golden opportunity. He famously declared himself a “wartime president”; sadly, it was Johnson in Vietnam. Miller sagely notes that had Trump even pretended to care about the well-being of the American people—not even really cared, just pretended to care—he likely would have cruised to re-election. Hell, he came pretty close even with the blood of 240,000 Americans on his tiny little hands. But such are the depths of his psychopathology that he could not manage even that. (And I thought sociopaths were good at faking it.)

By contrast, as I noted in my recent interviews with the Democratic operative Mr. X, with the onset of the coronavirus and its attendant ills, we got very lucky that a comfort food moderate like Biden was our nominee. As Tom Nichol writes, Trump would surely have beaten anyone to Joe’s left. Much as I like them, can you imagine the vitriol he would have whipped up toward a Sanders or a Warren?

That ought to put a stake in the Bernie bro complaint that our problem as Democrats is that we are just not leftist enough. Ironically, Trump’s absurd but successful efforts to tar Biden as a “socialist” essentially sank Joe in south Florida (and likely elsewhere), even as our own side bemoaned that he was insufficiently so.

That is not to say that we should not boldly own our progressive policies, be proud of them, and make the case to the American people of the benefits of a left-leaning agenda. But at the same time, it ought to be proof positive that, if we are interested in winning elections, such politics need to be presented to the American public in a way that takes into account the deeply entrenched reactionary strain in this country—not to mollify or try to appease it, but to find a way to outsmart, outflank, and outmuscle it.

IN TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE, THE PART OF ROBERT MUGABE WILL BE PLAYED BY DONALD TRUMP

Luckily, even without a Biden landslide, Trump’s long-telegraphed and painfully transparent efforts to claim victory appear not to be gaining any traction. The press, the public, and even the Republican leadership are failing to go along and be shills for this con. I guess there are some limits to the power of the grift after all.

Of particular note, media and political figures (but notably, no Republican mandarins) publicly pushed back on the idea that the POTUS can just declare the vote over and himself the victor. (“Cincinnati Bengals Announce That They Have Won Super Bowl,” wrote satirist Andy Borowitz.) The subsequent speech he gave on Thursday night was an absolute nightmare, the ravings of a madman—a group not known for its abiding respect for the rule of law or the fundamentals of democracy.

Trump is also in court, of course, his usual go-to move, but here’s how ludicrous, desperate, and flailing that effort is. Trump and his supporters are howling for the counting to stop in some places (Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina), and for it to continue in others (Arizona, Nevada).

And here’s how sleazy they are. In Pennsylvania, Trump and the GOP are asking the courts to put an arbitrary end to the counting of mail-in votes three days after Election Day…..but most of those votes have been sitting there waiting to be tallied for weeks, because the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania legislature passed a bill blocking them from even being touched until 7 a.m. on the morning of Election Day.

Is that the behavior of a party that is interested in democracy?

Worse still are the acts of political violence that many feared. Already in Michigan we’ve seen an attempt to reprise the so-called Brooks Brothers riot of Florida 2000 as Republicans tried to storm a vote-counting location. (Fortunately, they were quickly and peaceably repelled by local law enforcement. Well done, fellas.) Even scarier, in Arizona—an open carry state—an angry MAGA mob has created a situation where poll workers require police escorts to leave the building at the end of their shifts. Most of these protestors were maskless, some were in body armor, and some were carrying long guns. (I lived there, and have a great fondness for Arizona, but even its residents will tell you it’s a crazy place.)

That mob, by the by, was chanting “Stop the count!” and “Fox News sucks!” When they turn on Fox, you know the end times are upon us. The Trump campaign, natch, expressed its support of the actions in both Michigan and Arizona, and Trump himself tweeted STOP THE COUNT!

(Elsewhere, of course, Trump supporters are chanting “Count every vote!” In some places, where Trump is behind, they are chanting the former when they should be chanting the latter.)

These spectacles, of course, were to be expected after the armed “Liberate!” mobs in Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota; White vigilantism from the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse; the plot to kidnap and execute MI Governor Gretchen Whitmer; and the Trump caravans last weekend that menaced the Biden/Harris bus in Texas and blocked highways in New York and New Jersey. And it may yet get worse before it’s over.

At a minimum, as The New York Times Editorial Board wrote, “Mr. Trump’s ugly rhetoric is a direct attack on American democracy. It could leave a poisonous legacy of bitterness among his supporters and erode the legitimacy of the US political system. But, by late Wednesday, his antics had yet to prevent an orderly, peaceful and lawful conclusion of the presidential election.”

Let us hope that remains true over the next 76 days until Joe Biden faces John Roberts and raises his right hand.

TWO CHEERS

One of the things that contributed to the phantom sense of defeat on Tuesday was the Democratic failure to take the Senate, a prize that was widely presumed by political professionals, even Republicans. It’s gutting—there’s no way to candycoat that. Incredibly, the GOP even netted a gain of five seats in the House, where they were expected to cede up to 20, losing not a single one race.

(There remains an outside chance that the Senate might flip, but it hinges on winning the race in Alaska—a longshot—and two runoffs in Georgia, including one where Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler will have an overwhelming advantage over Democrat Raphael Warnock if she can absorb most or all of those who voted for her now-eliminated Republican rival Doug Collins.)

Needless to say, for the new Biden administration, the fact that it will face an obstructionist Senate (and a far right federal judiciary is going make it hard to pursue its agenda—which is to say, to repair the damage of the past four years. Discussions of court packing, statehood for Puerto Rico and DC, and other agenda items are off the table for now, to say nothing of the Green New Deal, shoring up the ACA, or revoking the Robin Hood-in-reverse 2017 tax cuts. With Mitch McConnell’s creepy purple hands still around the throat of American democracy, we can expect a turbocharged sequel to the obstruction of the last six years of the Obama era (now with even better CGI!). We all remember how much fun that was, right?

But let us cross that Golden Gate-sized bridge when we get to it. It’s a scenario far preferable to the alternative. 

As of this writing, Joe Biden is on track to be the 46th President of the United States. But he may be the 47th, if Trump tactically resigns in the interregnum between now and Inauguration Day, so President-for-a-Day Pence can pardon him. Even then, of course, Donald will still have to contend with Letitia James and Cy Vance.

(I doubt he will resign. Trump doesn’t want to be known as only the second president to quit, and I suspect he is arrogant enough to roll the dice on a self-pardon. But watch this space.)

However it goes down, Trump’s departure will be a true walk of shame. The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes:

Trump will be leaving the White House as a one-term president, rejected by the voters, stripped of power, and facing a world of legal and financial hurt.

He will also be trailing clouds of failure. It’s worth remembering this: Donald Trump began the year with his impeachment and trial for abusing his power; he badly bungled a pandemic that has infected more than 9.5 million Americans and killed 234,000 so far. His failures and corruption will have a long tail, lingering for years over our culture, economy, and lives.

None of it will look better in retrospect.

And yet, he will go still holding sway over a disturbing number of our fellow Americans.

In closing, let me go to Professor Nichol one last time:

American voters, including those who didn’t show up or who voted third-party in 2016, are now like drunks who have been bailed out of jail in the morning, full of relief as their lawyers explain that the police aren’t pressing charges. If Biden wins, we will have a second chance to keep our democracy intact. Some of us will have a moment of clarity. Most of us will just want to go home, throw up, change our clothes, and hope for the best. But many millions, eyes dimming and livers failing, are still reaching for the bottle.

Welcome to Al-Anon, your home for the next four years.

********

Photo: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), starring Jack Nicholson, directed by Milos Forman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Trump was pissed his part got cut. “He was just way too Method,” recalled Nicholson.)

On Sunday, Jonathan Swan of Axios—who conducted that brutal interview of Trump back in August—reported from White House sources what every savvy observer has long predicted:

On Election Night, regardless of the results, Trump will publicly declare victory as early as he can plausibly get away with. (And as we know, Trump’s assessment of what he can plausibly get away with is a lot more broad than anyone else’s. And he is usually right.) He will then declare that any subsequent votes, via mail-in ballot or presumably even in-person tallies from late breaking counties, are fraudulent, a lie he has been trying to hammer into the American consciousness for months in preparation for just such a ploy.

(Trump denied the report, which is a sure confirmation that it’s true.)

Swan’s sources suggest that Trump will pull the trigger if he has strong leads in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Georgia and Arizona. I’m betting he’s more aggressive than that, and doesn’t wait for the polls to close in Mountain Standard Time out in AZ.

But “declaring” himself the winner is meaningless. Trump could also declare himself a penguin. Wouldn’t make it so.

It will fall to the much-maligned mainstream media, influential public authority figures,  reasonable politicians on both the Democratic and Republican sides (let me know if you find any of the latter), and the general public itself to rise up and say, “Oh no, you don’t.”

Are we ready to do that?

Working in our favor, Trump has telegraphed this move for months, and there has been an avalanche of reportage about it, so his autogolpe should not come as a surprise to anyone. Working against us is that fact that he holds the presidency and all its leverage, and commands a cult that accepts his every lie and cheers his every move, even in defiance of every principle of American democracy. 

Clearcut Biden victories any of those states—all of which are in play to a greater or lesser degree—will help undercut Trump’s efforts, but not even a clean sweep by the blue team will prevent Donald from trying to claim victory. In fact, the worse his apparent defeat the more desperate he will become, and the less he will have to lose in trying to most shameless and dangerous gambits. (He also informed us that he intends to send his army of lawyers into swing states to challenge the results.)

So despite Trump’s best (worst) efforts, we have it within our power to put down this self-coup before it even begins by producing a margin of victory for Biden/Harris that renders all these maneuvers impotent. For four years we have been waiting for the chance to oust this cretinous pretender. Now it is upon us. We may see this election stolen, despite out best efforts—and let us gird ourselves to do everything we can to fight against that possibility—but the first step, and the one that has the most potential to neuter Trump’s malicious plans, and that will make any subsequent efforts of our own more viable, is to go to the polls in numbers like this country has never seen before. Early voting turnout—94 million so far, a record pace—looks encouraging, and that’s a good thing….

Because if we don’t turn out in this election, and then fight for the integrity of the results, there may never be another one.

ALEXA, CHANGE THE PRESIDENT

I know we all know this, but it bears repeating:

In any rational democratic system, with the American public preferring the Democratic candidate by close to nine points, Joe Biden should be the next President of the United States.

Here’s Slate’s Politics editor Tom Scocca:

No one thinks that Donald Trump will win a majority of the votes in the 2020 election. In the country that considers itself the world’s leading democracy, the political coverage and predictions start from this: The current president lost the popular vote by a margin of more than 3 million in 2016, and all the polling says that the 2016 margin is the absolute floor from which Joe Biden will build an even greater popular advantage. Whether Trump serves one term or two terms, there will never be more people who voted for him than voted against him.

Please don’t tell me about the Framers’ intent, states’ rights, and all the rest. The country the Founding Fathers forged in the years from 1776 to 1789 was an agrarian nation with a population of 2.5 million (less than Brooklyn today), spread over an area about a tenth the size of the contemporary USA, with only a marginal difference in population density among the states as regards proportional representation in  Congress and the Electoral College.

What we have now bears no resemblance to that.

Notwithstanding the irrational, partisan-front charade of “originalism,” even if the Framers did intend to form an anti-democratic, countermajoritarian society (P.S. they didn’t), we ought to conclude that—gasp!—they were wrong and we should change that…..the same way we decided they were wrong to limit the franchise to just adult white men who owned property.

So we are starting with a system that is ridiculously unjust, and would not pass muster under the eye of UN observers in any nascent democracy writing its first constitution. From there, it doesn’t help that the government currently controlling the levers of power is openly dedicated to subverting the democratic process. But here we are. Fixing up our creaky and unseaworthy ship will have to wait for another day; our urgent priority right now is to put out the raging fire that is currently consuming it, and relieving the mad captain who is pouring fuel on the deck.

Chauncey Devega, by way of review:

Donald Trump continues to make it clear that he does not intend to leave office peacefully if he is defeated by Joe Biden and the Democrats on Election Day. Moreover, Donald Trump considers any election in which he is not the “winner” to be null and void. Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court is an obvious quid pro quo to secure his “reelection” if his attorneys and other agents can sufficiently sabotage the vote on Election Day and beyond.

On Thursday, Trump again followed the authoritarian’s playbook when he bragged to his supporters at a rally in North Carolina that U.S. Marshalls essentially executed Michael Reinoehl, an anti-fascist activist accused of killing a right wing paramilitary member during protests in Oregon last August. Celebrating the extra-judicial killings of one’s political “enemies” is a common feature of fascist authoritarian regimes and the types of leaders admired and imitated by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s commitment to and use of political violence is a matter of public record. Two of the most recent examples include how Trump’s followers in Michigan allegedly planned to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. During his debate with Joe Biden, Trump also commanded white supremacist paramilitaries to be prepared to attack his and their “enemies” if he loses on Election Day or is otherwise removed from office.

Trump also wants Joe Biden and other leading Democrats imprisoned and perhaps even executed because he deems them to be “guilty” of “treason” and a “coup” attempt against him. Donald Trump and his Attorney General William Barr have also threatened to use the United States military against the American people if they dare to protest the outcome of the 2020 Election if Trump somehow finds some extra-legal (if not outright illegal) way to stay in office.

This is an unprecedented moment in American history, one we should have foreseen when we unaccountably allowed this two-bit grifter to become our head of state….one which many people did foresee. Yet it’s still been infinitely worse than all but the most dire predictions.

Now we stand on the precipice of losing our entire representative democracy full stop, 244 years of flawed but noble dedication to government of the people, by the people, and for the people, brought to the verge of permanent neo-fascist kleptocracy in just a few years by one monstrous game show host, and—and this is the important part—his enablers.

But her emails, amirite?

INSIDE JONESTOWN NORTH

After four years, the case against Donald Trump has been made, in spades. But at this moment, it’s worth a brief summary, if only for the sake of closure.

In a landmark, multipart editorial, the (failing) New York Times  recently laid it out very clearly, as summarized here by Heather Cox Richardson:

“Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.” What follows is a blistering litany of the actions of the man who is “without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” the editors say. He is conducting “an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.” The editorial concludes: “Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States….Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people—even those who would prefer a Republican president—to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.”

It is lot to say that Trump is “the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.” Worse than the USSR, worse than Nixon, worse than Al Qaeda. But I don’t disagree—because, as they say in the horror movies, “The call is coming from inside the house….”

Here’s The Atlantic with its view:

The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.

So what of the counter-argument?

A recent piece in The Guardian surveyed some harcdore Trump defenders who have stuck with him and even doubled down on their loyalty over the past four years. Well-done as it was, the piece was nevertheless the kind for which the acronym SMDH was invented, as it shed no new light on this cult-like mass hysteria beyond what we have already witnessed. Which is to say, there remains no rational reason to support Donald Trump.

A lot of these Trump supporters say that they think he really cares about them. With all due respect, that is the art of the con man. It would be a scam even in normal times, but in the age of COVID it requires a thirst for Kool-Aid that borders on the unquenchable. The Guardian:

Revelations that Trump failed to act on warnings about the dangers of coronavirus, or his years of paying almost no taxes, may outrage his critics, but are dismissed by much of his base as part of the establishment conspiracy to wreck his presidency. Even where Trump’s supporters acknowledge he is wrong, he is often excused.

In general, as we will know, Trump’s fans buy his bullshit on all matters (Biden wants to defund the police, BLM are Marxists, COVID is a hoax, etc.). There is also a lot of “China’s taking our jobs!”, which reflects a certain amount of economic pain and uncertainty, but also an undeniable strain of xenophobia. Anti-immigrant fervor animates a good deal of Trump’s support nationwide, even in places were immigration is essentially non-existent, which bespeaks other motivations—largely, ahem, identity-based.

The things these Trump fans give him credit for are often bad things, like gifting North Korea a presidential summit in exchange for not even some magic beans. Quoth a Trump supporter in West Virginia named Bo Copley:

“Yes, he did make fun of Kim, calling him Rocket Man, and I thought it was so stupid. But at least he was willing to say, ‘I’m going to meet with him.’ Look how historic it was, that we had a United States president visit North Korea. That’s huge.”

But it isn’t about policy—not really. For all the MAGA hatters who applaud the family separation policy, or the Wall That Ain’t, or the tax cuts—all appalling in their own right—there are many who can’t cite a single concrete policy they endorse. Their attachment to Donald isn’t ideological at all, it’s personal: in other words, pure id.

This past weekend I was out in Long Island, which might as well be Alabama when it comes to Trump support. We saw several cars and trucks on the (aptly named) LIE flying massive Trump flags, and Blue Lives Matter flags, and a vehicular Trump parade to match the Trump flotillas that were staged last summer. The conventional wisdom is that these displays show the passion of Trump supporters for their man (whereas, allegedly, many Biden voters are less pro-Joe than simply anti-Don). But I think there is another reason why you don’t see a lot of ostentatious oversized Biden flags flying from the back of SUVs cutting you off in the fast lane.

Because for much of Trump Nation, the whole point is to be assholes. There is nothing else.

This is what Trump supporters mean when they say that he “speaks” to them, in a way that conventional politicians do not. For many Trump fans, the entire appeal of the man is as an expression of their grievance. This was the lesson it took us months to learn during the 2016 campaign—that Trump’s outrages, from trashing McCain to grab ‘em-by-the-pussy, are a feature not a bug. He is a human middle finger to the world, and his followers love that. He gives them permission to say the things they’re thinking, the things that they used to whisper only among their own kind; to vent their anger that they are now being forced to acknowledge that other people in this country have rights, and have been shit upon too. Maybe even worse than you.

It is not a class divide. Yeah, there are lots of blue collar Trump devotees, but there are lots of country club ones too, and they share a toxic martyr complex. At least the former have some legitimate claim to having been exploited by the system (though why they feel a stinking rich con man is their champion is beyond me, as is their refusal to find common cause with other downtrodden groups, and their constant pattern of voting against their own self-interest). By the same token, at least the latter actually benefit from Trump’s reign, venal and unjust as that is.

So which group is worse? It’s a pick ’em. But Trump has weaponized them all as part of his cult of personality.

I GOT BAD NEWS FOR YOU, CHARLIE DANIELS

Earlier last week I went with my friend Justin, who has been working for the re-election campaign of Congressman Max Rose, a first-term Democrat who miraculously won a seat in ruby red South Brooklyn and Staten Island’s 11^th District in 2018. As we stood in the pouring rain pamphleteering near a polling place in the heart of Bensonhurst (a Catholic Church no less), we had various angry locals tell us that Max is a “fraud,” a “socialist,” and even a “traitor.” (Rose was an Army infantry officer in Afghanistan, where he won the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat.) A sweet little old lady approached Justin and asked him to convey to Max her wish that he should “go to hell.”

To be fair, we had a fair number of supportive passersby too. But the level of irrational hostility was as intense as the verbiage was ponderous.

A fraud? How? (Please show your work, dude shouting at us from passenger side of passing Camaro.)

A traitor? Max’s military record makes renders the charge especially absurd. The only explanation for the specificity of that insult—and it’s a chilling one—is that anyone who opposes Donald Trump is by definition treasonous…..which is precisely how Donald sees it too. (Ironically, to compete in such a heavily Republican district, Max is forced to highlight the fact that he, unlike many Congressional Democrats, has been willing to work with and support Trump on some issues, like the airstrike that killed Qasem Soleimani, as well as his own law-and-order bonafides on matters like police reform.)

The question remains of what these folks will do if Trump loses and we succeed in forcing him out of the White House. (In the old days, that second part of that sentence would be unnecessary.)

Two weeks ago, in my two-part interview with the Democratic consultant I call Mr. X, this blog spent a fair amount of time discussing the possibility of Trump using the power of the presidency to enforce his hold on power. It’s a genuine concern. But the opposite scenario is also worrying: that should Joe Biden win, Trump’s followers—many of them firearms fetishists—might rise up in violent rebellion on behalf of their defeated hero. After all, he has largely succeeded in convincing a third of the country that a Biden presidency would be illegitimate by definition, and even called on his violent white nationalist supporters to “stand by.”

Such violence might indeed come to pass, in the form of anything from the mindboggling notion of outright civil war to a slow-burning campaign of domestic terrorism against the new Biden administration. Ask Gretchen Whitmer about that.

Then again, the last time a bunch of racist insurrectionists tried to do battle with the legitimate United States government, it didn’t end well for them. They’ve been pissed off and making trouble ever since.

This past weekend the threat of violence by Trump supporters, both public and private, intensified. On Saturday, police used pepper spray on children at a totally non-violent Black Lives Matter protest in North Carolina. Yesterday there was the caravan of the Trump supporters who shut down the Garden State Parkway, and on Friday the ones who dangerously forced a Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas, followed by a Trump tweet cheering them on.

But please, Fox News, keep telling me about all the “radical leftists” who have no respect for the rule of law and would institute mob rule in America.

LAWYERS, GUNS, AND MONEY

Such is the state of insurrectionism in the USA as of Election Eve 2020.

But I’ll give the GOP this: it has diversified its battle plan, committing resources to both the legal and illegal fronts. While keeping an eye on the latter, let’s now look at the former.

Slate’s Tom Scocca, whom we heard from above, describes the shameful hypocrisy of the GOP and the Supreme Court—now including three count ‘em three Trump appointees, fully a third of that once-august body—in code switching between sanctimonious rage that the will of the electorate is paramount on the one hand (when blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination), and abetting Republican efforts to disenfranchise huge and inconvenient swaths of the American people on the other (as it did in Florida in 2000, and seems poised to do again in that state, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and perhaps more).

Here we have what Scocca calls the “Republican wing of the Supreme Court, with three justices who were Bush lawyers in Bush v. Gore, flipping the court’s principle of nonintervention in active elections back and forth, depending on whether a particular intervention would give Democrats less or more opportunity to vote.”

This is the entire Republican strategy in 2020: not to win the election but to make the winner unknowable, so that Trump can claim victory. FiveThirtyEight currently gives Trump a 12 percent chance of winning, if random events and polling errors somehow overwhelmingly bounce his way. This is too small a chance to gamble on. So, instead, there are signature invalidations, deadline rollbacks, drop box removals, poll watchers.

And above it all is the president, denouncing the basic operations of voting as a grand scheme to overthrow him, and declaring that soliciting, collecting, and counting absentee ballots is inherently fraudulent. Trump’s current position, bizarrely echoed by Kavanaugh in a formal opinion, is that the states should call a winner as soon as the polls close on Nov. 3, and all the counting and certification that normally comes afterward should be viewed as a suspicious attempt to steal the election.

Trump has nothing else left. He got lucky last time, and rather than trying to build a majority on that luck, he decided to try to make his luck into election law.

So it will be ironic if, after spending months railing against mail-in voting, and the past week frothing at the mouth that we must name a winner on Election Day and curtail counting of votes afterward, Trump winds up looking down the barrel of a Joe Biden victory that he can only try to overturn by counting every absentee ballot he can, on the hope that they will include pro-Trump military personnel deployed away from their homes of record, overseas and otherwise. (That of course ignores the reality that a rising plurality of active duty US military personnel dislike Trump, but set that aside for now.)

If Trump suddenly does this kind of 180, which would not at all be out of character, you can be sure the GOP and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will suddenly decide that they MUST intervene to count every last mail-in vote, no matter how long it takes.

A harbinger is the ongoing case in federal court asking that 127,000 votes cast at drive-thru polling places in Harris County, Texas are invalid on the grounds that—and as Dave Barry likes to say, I swear I am not making this up—drive-in polls make voting easier. Uh, isn’t that the point and why the Texas secretary of state authorized such polls in the first place, in the interest of public safety during the pandemic?

No matter, to the chutzpah-rich GOP. (So weak was the plea that even the Republican-controlled Texas Supreme Court already laughed it out of court—I repeat, Republican-controlled—but how the federal bench rules remains to be seen.) From there it is but a short hop to a lawsuit alleging that a vote for the Democratic Party is invalid because it is a vote for the Democratic Party.

Stay tuned for that, should Trump win tomorrow.

Of Trump’s strategy, the intrepid Mr. Scocca writes, “It may be a plan to hold onto the presidency, but it can’t any longer be called a plan to win an election.”

In this, (Trump) is, once again, the perfect standard-bearer for his party. The Republican apparatus, caught up in the belief that whatever gets them a victory must be legitimate, has moved beyond simple partisanship to leave electoral politics behind altogether. The party has become a nation unto itself, seceding from the political system of the broader republic; the implicit message of its long-running 21^st-century program of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and rule-changing is now explicit: People voting is good for the Democrats, so Republicans are against people voting.

NIGHTMARE’S END?

In his first speech as President of the Untied States, Gerald Ford famously described Watergate as “our long national nightmare,” one ending with Tricky Dick’s departure. Whether that departure was really the nightmare’s end is debatable, but this much is not: Watergate now looks like a lumpy pillow compared to this night terror.

But when it comes to Trump, “nightmare” is the wrong metaphor altogether. A nightmare suggests a bad dream, something that pointedly isn’t real. The destruction that Donald Trump has wreaked over the past four years has been very real indeed. Moreover, it is not something from which we can merely awaken to find that all is well. We brought this calamity on ourselves, and only we can get ourselves out, and that is going to require severe self-reflection and hard work. Let’s hope we even get the opportunity.

One way or another, tomorrow will be a historic day for these United States. I’ll see you on the other side.

*************

Illustration: TKN via Alarmy

I’d like to start by saying that it would almost be professional malpractice by the Russian intelligence services if they were NOT using Rudy Giuliani as a means to feed disinformation to Donald Trump.

Of course, the fact that Trump, the President of the United States, is a reliable spreader of disinformation on behalf of the Kremlin is itself appalling, but never mind. That The Spy Service Formerly Known as the KGB has entrée to him through a creepy, cousin-marrying, generally batshit former New York City mayor is a gift to them from the gods, who are clearly just as cruel as mythology taught us. But it is fitting that, in the final days before the election, Team Trump and its patrons in Moscow are trying to gin up another October surprise to smear and malign his opponent, given the role that Vladimir Putin had in installing Mad King Donald in the Oval Office in the first place.

I am mildly encouraged that, four years after the twenty-car pileup that was the 2016 election, Americans now seem savvy enough to recognize blatant GRU propaganda when they see it…..like this latest non-story so obviously false that even the guy who wrote it for the New York Post (!) refused to put his byline on it, seeing as its only two sources were Steve Bannon and Rudy.

Hey America, is it possible we actually learned something? Next week will tell the tale. For while MAGA Nation wallows in a fantasy world increasingly unhinged from the reality in which the rest of the world dwells, the US presidential campaign lurches toward its conclusion, one way or another, and not a moment too soon.

ELECTILE DYSFUNCTION

For four years, sentient Americans and other anguished believers in Western democracy have been longing for this moment, our chance to use the mechanisms of our representative democracy to peaceably and legally remove this malicious, utterly unfit cretin from the highest office in the land. Now that moment is at hand.

Reliable numbers show that the American public is sick and tired of this pox on the presidency—literally sick, in fact—putting Trump in serious electoral trouble on the order of a Mondale or McGovern style beatdown. Undeterred by the pandemic, and by GOP efforts at voter suppression, Americans are voting in record numbers and with unprecedented urgency, even ahead of Election Day itself. So our chances of winning this thing are good, and would be very, very good indeed were this a fair fight.

But as I (and many others) have written ad nauseam, it pointedly is not a fair fight.

It is one in which the Republicans and their foreign allies are using every trick in the book, legal and illegal, to suppress the vote, spread lies, intimidate and terrify the electorate, sow chaos, undermine confidence in the vote count, and generally try to delegitimize the integrity of the whole affair—this last an unprecedented extreme to which even the reliably ruthless GOP has never before gone. (Not for nothing, but it’s no coincidence that GOP efforts at voter suppression, longstanding though they were, really ramped up after Obama’s landmark coalition of non-white voters carried him to victory in 2008. Just saying.)

In a normal election I’d be very confident right now….but with the specter of 2016 still haunting me, like many progressives, and with knowledge of the GOP’s brazen attempts to ratfuck this thing twelve ways to Sunday, I’m concerned. The antiquated US system of electing a head of state already creates the conditions for anti-democratic, countermajorItarian rule that helped put Trump in office. Even if operating fairly, that system may now benefit him again and provide him a second term—and since, per above, it is not operating fairly, that makes the danger greater than ever.

Awaiting at the end of this already fraught process is the very real prospect of Trump refusing to abide by the results of the election (he has openly told us as much) precipitating a constitutional crisis, or even political violence to the point of civil war. He will do so under the veneer of legality, of course, by questioning the validity of the vote should it go against him, and angling to create enough havoc to get the race thrown into the courts, the state legislatures, and eventually Congress, where arcane rules favor his party and the suppliant GOP-controlled Senate is his lickspittle. Somewhere along the way, either before or after its day in Congress, the matter may also come before the Supreme Court, where—ICYMI—we just saw the shamelessly hypocritical installation of the key vote only days before the election.

So the next seven days promise to be intense, and very possibly so do the 78 that follow, before we see who raises his right hand on Inauguration Day 2021 to be sworn in as President of the United States.

Happy Halloween, everybody. Scared shitless yet?

THE BALLOTS OF OCTOBER

Donald Trump is a world class crybaby: a poster child for white privilege, entitlement, and a living, breathing one-man indictment of the cancer of inherited wealth. In late October 2016 he got the greatest lucky break in the history of contemporary American politics with the Comey letter announcing the re-opening of an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Now Trump is whining that he didn’t get another gift of that magnitude.

He has even threatened to fire Bill Barr—the most obsequious, partisan, and criminally dishonest Attorney General since John Mitchell—for not providing him such a Halloween present, in the form of a fairy tale report condemning his enemies for the Russiagate investigation, or an indictment of Joe Biden for unspecified crimes, or something else that will help him secure re-election. (The lack of any such cudgel with which to batter Joe Biden is part of why Team Trump was forced to resort to the fever dreams of Rudy and Steve-o.)

So what does it say about Donald Trump that even Bill Barr isn’t corrupt enough for him?

Trump’s desire for Barr to find a way to indict and arrest Biden (or at least announce an investigation) is the sort of thing that happens in a banana republic, or an incipient dictatorship. Treason seems to be the accusation Donald wants, loosely related to the idea that the outgoing administration and its Deep State allies tried to undermine the his regime—the standard despot’s cry, and part of his whole l’etat c’est moi shtick. Notwithstanding Barr’s disappearance into his rabbit hole, even now Trump continues to attack Biden as a “criminal” who should be jailed; last week he also slapped a journalist (Reuters’ Jeff Mason) with the same label for failing to report on Biden’s alleged transgressions, suggesting that criminality is catching. (Maybe wearing a mask would help.)

Of course, it’s rich for Donald Trump to accuse Bidens of being “an organized crime family.” This is a strategy known as DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and oppressor. It’s a form of jujitsu—or simple projection—that is on page one of the fascism playbook: accuse your enemies of your own crimes. But that does not make it any less alarming.

In 2016 Trump’s infamous calls to lock Hillary Clinton up, as horrifying as they were, sounded mostly metaphorical, or at least vaguely tethered to the FBI investigation into her emails. Or maybe in that more innocent time we simply couldn’t conceive that an American presidential candidate could possibly be serious about having his opponent jailed simply by virtue of that opposition. (Were we supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally or literally but not seriously? I can never remember.)

But now, after four years of this shitshow, Trump’s calls for Joe Biden to be indicted are very real indeed….to the point where it’s reported that, should he be re-elected, Trump is considering firing FBI director Christopher Wray (along with Barr) for not doing that. (Also, SecDef Mark Esper and CIA Director Gina Haspel.) If so, that will likely be only the beginning of the purge as Second term Trump embraces his inner Putin and consolidates his neo-autocracy.

But if Trump can’t get one part of the US justice system to do his electoral bidding, he’s hard at work on another.

FULL COURT PRESS

Remember when the idea of putting Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court was outrageous? Good times.

On that front, the past two weeks brought a classic good news / bad news scenario. And then more bad news.

The good news was that the Court denied a Republican attempt to suppress the vote in the key(stone) state of Pennsylvania, involving the counting of mail-in ballots. (The GOP is already back in the Court trying again.) The bad news was that it did so only on a 4-4 fielder’s choice. Just days later, that same Court disallowed an effort to let Wisconsin count mail-in votes that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to six days afterward.

So the short term victory in Pennsylvania case (a draw really) is actually a harbinger of something much scarier.

In the Pennsylvania case John Roberts sided with the progressives; in the Wisconsin one, with his fellow conservatives. But now that Amy Coney Barrett is on the Court as of last night, its solid right wing majority, with a vote to spare, will likely do the bidding of Donald Trump and the GOP on crucial challenges to the validity of the upcoming vote, with or without the support of Roberts.

Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh foreshadowed as much in his concurring opinion in the Wisconsin case with logic so specious that makes you wonder how this guy ever made it through Yale Law. (Maybe PJ and Squi helped him.) Indeed, Brett sounded positively Trumpian when he wrote of “the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

The verbiage was telling, as was the notion that a call made by a TV network is somehow constitutionally binding, even though that’s pretty much what happened in 2000 thanks to George Bush’s cousin John Ellis, running the decision desk at Fox . (Also telling: three of the six conservative justices now on the Court—Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett—worked on the Bush challenge to the Florida recount.)

Elena Kagan schooled her colleague in her scathing dissent, writing: “There are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted. And nothing could be more suspicious or improper than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night.”

So is Brett really that dumb? (Or just drunk?) A more sinister interpretation is that he does know better, but is simply a shameless hack. Either way, it makes you realize he will absolutely rationalize any power grab Trump tries to make. Kavanaugh’s remarks make this much very clear:

It is no longer a question of whether the conservative-controlled Supreme Court will intervene to help Donald Trump stay in power. That process is already under way: they are doing it now, even as we speak. 

Apropos of the Republican efforts already underway to revisit the Pennsylvania decision, Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate.com:

The presidential race may well turn on Pennsylvania, and the outcome in Pennsylvania could come down to those ballots received just after Election Day. If those ballots swing the state to Joe Biden, Barrett could vote with the four radical conservatives to reverse the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and throw them away. They could rule that the legislature—not the state judiciary, or even the voters themselves—gets to regulate elections and appoint electors. If the legislature says Trump is the true winner, the Supreme Court could once again overrule the will of the voters.

In other words, if Trump’s inevitable contesting of the presidential race does wind up in the Supreme Court, RBG’s death and the hypocritical, brute force installation of this one justice might prove to be one of the most fateful moments in American history.

Here’s Dana Milbank writing in the Washington Post:

The Barrett spectacle could not have been uglier. It began with a superspreader event at the White House after which a dozen people, including President Trump, contracted COVID-19. Trump insisted on naming a replacement even before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in her grave, and he belittled the late justice’s granddaughter for conveying the women’s rights icon’s dying wish that Trump not replace her.

Barrett, in her confirmation hearing, made a mockery of the supposed “originalism” and “textualism” she professes to practice. She conspicuously refused to say whether a president could unilaterally postpone an election and whether voter intimidation is illegal—matters unarguable under the clear words of the Constitution and statutes.

Senate Republicans rammed through Barrett eight days before an election Trump seems likely to lose, and even though Trump has made clear he’s counting on the Supreme Court to overturn the result. They did this in an extraordinary public display of hypocrisy, four years after refusing to seat an Obama nominee to the high court because, they said then, that doing so more than eight months before an election was too soon. And they did this after abolishing the minority’s right to filibuster.

So now we have a Supreme Court with an archconservative majority, led by three Trump appointees, including one shamelessly forced in at the eleventh hour in defiance of Republicans’ own risible claims to principle. If that Court makes a ruling, even a narrow technical one, that effectively awards the election to Donald Trump, the American people should rightly get out in the streets……not to defy the law, but to make it clear that the law has been hijacked and turned into an instrument of authoritarian oppression.

THE MASTER’S TOOLS AND THE MASTER’S HOUSE

So how do we approach the next six days….and the 78 after that?

Step one is to make our voices heard. As of this writing, some 67 millions Americans have already voted early, either in person or by mail. That is a little more than the number of total votes either candidate got in 2016. We are on track to have the highest turnout of registered voters since 1908, even amid a pandemic, as high as 156 million, by some estimates. (About 139 million Americans voted four years ago.) That is a healthy sign for our democracy, though if we’re not careful it may be the last one.

A self-evident Biden landslide on Election Night will go along way toward undercutting Trump’s efforts to steal this thing. Definitive wins in Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, or even—dare I dream Georgia or Ohio—will be a knife in Donald’s black heart. Let’s do everything we can to make that happen. The unexpected tsunami of the early vote has altered expectations, which typically foretold a Trump advantage on election Night—the so-called “Red Mirage—whittled down bit by bit by the subsequent “Blue Shift.” Now Biden may go into November 3^rd with a decent headstart thanks to those states that begin counting in advance. But heavily Republican in-person voting on Election Day figures to push back on that advantage. Then there will be the matter of mail-in votes still to be counted, including crucial states like Pennsylvania that in contrast to others, don’t even start that process until November 3^rd. And all of it conducted in an atmosphere that Trump will make as toxic as humanly possible.

So we can’t count on anything, least of all an insurmountable landslide….and if the race is close, we have to gird ourselves for battle. Hell, Trump is almost sure to provoke chaos even if it ain’t close.

And what do we do if, as expected, Trump tries an autogolpe, or self-coup? (Defined by Wikipedia, font of all knowledge, as a form of coup d’état “in which a nation’s leader, despite having come to power through legal means, dissolves or renders powerless the national legislature and unlawfully assumes extraordinary powers not granted under normal circumstances.”)

In a New Yorker piece titled “What Can You Do If Trump Stages a Coup?,” Lizzie Widdicombe describes a non-violent strategy for fighting back, advocated by the Quaker activist and sociologist George Lakey, author of the influential 1964 book A Manual for Direct Action, and drawing on the work of political scientist Stephen Zunes.

Firstly, we have to move fast—within the first days after a GOP power grab—and not allow Trump gain the initiative. This, writ large, was the lesson of the Florida recount in 2000—and it will be even harder this time because we are dealing with an incumbent who already holds the reins of power, and who has demonstrated his willingness to abuse that power wantonly.

Secondly, there can be no cutting a deal with Trump. We have to be resolute in rejecting any illegitimate claim to power and insisting on full deference to the will of the people as reflected in an accurate and honest vote count. That means fighting to make sure those mail-in votes are all properly counted. (See again, Florida 2000.)

Thirdly, skeptical of the lasting power of marches, Lakey argues that a more important act is a mass refusal to cooperate with any attempted usurpation of power. Authority figures and influencers from the center of the political spectrum must be recruited to lend their credibility to our side and to participate in the shutting down of institutions—banks, universities, businesses—in opposition to the illegitimate regime. In other words, a general strike—something we probably should have already employed over the past four years—practically the national pastime in France, but not something to which Americans are accustomed.

Widdicombe quotes Lakey:

“Obviously, the Trump family is not going to be able to run the government by itself. They’ll need institutional support. The question is how do we, as activists, go after these pillars in such a way as to encourage them to buckle, and allow the Trump regime, or his attempted regime, to fall?”  

Americans are not used to this kind of thinking. But we better get used to it, fast.

We have waited four years to exercise our most fundamental right as citizens of a democracy, and our most powerful tool for expressing our collective will. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done everything they can to undermine that right and neutralize that tool.

This fight is only beginning.

*********

Illustration: Shonagh Rae/Financial Times

This week, the second half of my interview with “Mister X,” a veteran Democratic operative currently consulting for the Biden campaign.

In Part 1, we discussed the state of the presidential race, the Teflon nature of Joe Biden, and who can stop Trump’s power grab. (Hint: it won’t be Moscow Mitch or the Supreme Court). In Part 2, Mr. X takes on what the GOP will look like if Trump loses, what America will look like if he wins, the odds of South Carolina having two black senators, what Trumpism and smallpox have in common, and the chances that—gulp—Trump will run again in 2024.

THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Last time we talked about the very real possibility that Trump will try to defy the results of the election, and who will stop him, and how. I didn’t sleep for a week after that.

So in the interest of me getting some rest, let’s turn to a more pleasant scenario. Let’s say Trump does go, one way or another. What do you think is the future of the Republican Party?

MR. X: Well, after 2012, they had lost the popular vote in five of the last six elections (Ed.: 2016 made it six out of seven), and they were really questioning things, and they talked about what to do, but they didn’t follow it up. As soon as Trump came in, he blew it all to shit.

They know they have a problem. They are demographically dinosaurs and this election will be proof positive that even someone who is down on his hands and knees begging old poor white people to vote for him can’t win a general election. That will scream that they’re in the wrong place and they’re going to have to rethink it. If not, they’ll be like the Federalists who hung around until 1812, like three of them left in the Senate. They’ll be like the Know Nothings, basically. But this is just not very future-looking.

People have been talking about the demise of Republican Party since 2012, but the angry demographic that is the Republican Party now will live for a while, and there will still be states where they will win—which stuns me still—places where the majority of people believe that stuff: Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, the Southern states. But this is a country that’s becoming more and more of a mosaic of different cultures—if you go to Queens you see it in a perfect amalgam. Opposing that is just a terrible strategy.

So the GOP is going to have to find a way to open their hearts to polycultural America. That means that they’re going to have to figure out ways to appeal to an audience beyond just angry white people. They’ve got to figure out something that’s not just hate.

The other thing about those angry white people is that they’re actually some of the Americans who are most reliant on government. So it’s incredibly ironic. At some point that just can’t hold, but I don’t know what point that is.

TKN: Is there room for that reinvention to happen within the Republican Party? Or—and I’ll show my bias here—is the Republican brand so damaged by its association with Trump that a new conservative party needs to emerge that can occupy what used to be that center-right space?

MR. X: Well, because of the way the system is set up, it’s hard to make it out of the primaries without appealing to the hardened, right-wing white nutcases who want a marriage of George Wallace and Jerry Falwell.

TKN: That’s why I’m skeptical that a genuine, reasonable conservative faction can arise within the current Republican Party. They have to break away.

MR. X: So if anti-Trump conservatives were to build something like that, what does it look like and who would do it? Would it be the Lincoln Project people?

TKN: I think it’s the Lincoln Project / Bulwark folks, and their argument would be, “We represent real conservatism.” It would be an alternative: a third party. I think that would be healthy for the country, though I don’t know if it would work.

MR. X: The thing about that is for the last 170 years we’ve really calcified the two party system such that getting on the ballot for those people would be hard. They’d have to run more of a Working Families style thing, where they find a way to build a cadre within the Republican Party and retake the party, as opposed to being a third party just because the systems are set up in so many states to preclude that. Because basically the two parties colluded to create that situation.

Look, America elected Ronald Reagan just six years after Nixon resigned. Watergate was America’s national nightmare and the GOP brand was absolutely sullied. But we—meaning the Democratic Party—managed to screw it up, and when we did, the public turned right back to the Republicans, because the system is so binary. It works vice versa too. Barack Obama was elected because George W. Bush fucked it up so bad that John McCain didn’t stand a chance.

TKN: I’m sure you’re right, but it infuriates me that any Republicans who have stood by Trump think they can make us forget that….even though cowards like Ben Sasse are already trying.

I don’t ever want any of these Republicans to be allowed to forget for a minute that they supported Trump. I want that albatross hung around their neck for the rest of time. I want their heads shaved.

MR. X: I hear you. And the exciting part is that we may see some big ones drop. I don’t know that South Carolina is going to have two African-American senators, one from each party, but we’re certainly giving a scare to these Republicans. If there are no Republican senators in Arizona, none in Colorado, Alaska loses one, Susan Collins goes down, Gary Peters survives…..even if we end up with Tommy Tuberville in Alabama, people like Cruz who are slimy and smart will tack to the middle in order not to lose next time. I don’t think MJ Hegar is within spitting distance, but if she loses by five points and she’s not even a strong candidate, if I were Cruz I’d be scared to death. He already almost got taken down by Beto, which was not a small thing.

On the other hand, if a guy like Lindsey Graham does make it through and win re-election, he’s going to be so emboldened. He’s got a candidate against him (Jaime Harrison) who’s raised more money than any Senate candidate has ever raised in a given quarter, or something like that. If Graham survives, he’ll be like, “I can do anything!”

TKN: I don’t know if the Republican Party could ever convince me that it’s reformed—and I realize they don’t really care about me (laughs)—but if they wanted to convince me of that, they would have to go a long way. They would have to really transform that party, on the level of how the Democratic Party transformed from its Reconstruction-era self. It would have to be that different.

MR. X: And even if they succeeded in doing that, then the question is, where’s the space for that racist/fascist/white nationalist one-third of the country? Where are they going to go? They will never be stamped out entirely; there will always need to be a home for those people.

TKN: Especially when you’ve got 50% of Trump supporters buying into QAnon, and another third open to it.

But I take your point about how the ownership of the Republican name is valuable because of the way the two-party system is set up. So in that case, rather than the moderates splitting to form a new Conservative Party and leaving the Republican brand to the crazies, the moderates would get the GOP and the crazies would have to form their own new party. Call it the Nationalist Party maybe, or maybe just drop the charade and go ahead and call it the Trump Party.

WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION

MR. X: I’m going to turn the question around to you. Do you think we prosecute Trump after he’s out of office? Assuming he’s removed from office in the first place

TKN: Do I think we will, or do I think we should?

MR. X: Should.

TKN: Absolutely we should, and I think—unlike with Nixon—the pressure to do so will be insurmountable. I think the trick is to do it not only without appearing to engage in banana republic style reflexive prosecution of the opposing party, but genuinely without doing that.

In other words, the man ought to be prosecuted under the law, because if you don’t, that’s a precedent that’s just as destructive. What I’ve heard suggested as the best method, and Biden himself said this in his recent town hall, is that he as president take a hands-off approach and let the pros at the DOJ handle it. It won’t be like Trump saying “Lock her up.” He’ll still get grief, of course, but that’s inevitable. It’s the right thing to do.

MR. X: I agree with you. My hope is that it’s Letitia James (the New York state attorney general) who does it, and Cy Vance (the Manhattan DA). That would be the best way. It could also be death by a thousand cuts, with his financial crimes as well.

But in terms of the election, the fact that Trump is corrupt and crooked is not going to change any minds. That’s not news.

TKN: True. But I do think it’s great that Sue Craig and her colleagues at the Times on almost a weekly basis drop a new what-would-have-been-bombshell in the old days, keeping the pressure on, keeping those stories in the news.

MR. X: I only hope that it goes back to that. Because Trump was genius in figuring out that every other administration walks a tightrope, and one slip and everyone is pointing at the mistake, but he’s literally flopping off the thing and getting back up and falling again….and because he’s fallen so often, nobody’s even noticing. It’s the inverse of the Big Lie.

TKN: The Big Truth.

MR. X: Right. In this case, you don’t even need to deny it because there will be another story to overshadow it tomorrow. So why even follow it?

TKN: But these are the exact things—or among the things—that he’s done to destroy our country. So let me ask you the opposite question, which is much more pessimistic than where we started talking today. Let’s say he manages to hang on to power, legitimately or otherwise. What do you think four more years look like?

MR. X: Well, I will call you from Portugal and you can let me know.

(Laughter. Bleak, jet black laughter.)

What will they look like? Let’s look at recent history. After the impeachment, he was unbound. In fact, after the Mueller report he was unbound….

TKN: Right. He made the Zelinskyy call the day after Mueller testified on television, which was effectively the end of the Russia probe, and the day his escape was complete. He didn’t waste a second.

MR. X: So he was unbound after Mueller. Then Ukraine happens, and he gets away with that, and he’s even more unbound. Now he’s got this third rate private army he’s built at DHS, he’s talking about dispensing with Barr and looking for even more of a lackey as AG, and in a second term he’d be able do whatever he wanted because he’d have a compliant Congress, or at least one that can’t contain him. Congress actually has very little ability to check an administration. One way that they can is by having people show up and testify and embarrassing them, or having them turn over documents. He has flouted both those things.

TKN: Attention Ross Douhat.

MR. X: If he were able to rule that way, he wouldn’t be a president anymore, he’d be a monarch, and we’d be done. And we couldn’t expect that he would only rule like that for another four years: it would go on for however long he wants, or however long he can maintain it.

TKN: Because there would be no more elections.

MR. X: Trump’s re-election would in fact, I believe, be the end of American democracy.

HILLARY’S UMBRELLA

TKN: The saddest part to me is that if Trump succeeds in doing that, it will have been done to us by the most inconsequential figure you can imagine. Putin is a murderous, amoral scumbag, but he is a proper, formidable villain. So are most of these guys—even Duterte. But to have two hundred some odd years of democracy destroyed by a D-list game show host would be a uniquely American thing. And really, really pathetic.

MR. X: I will say this: people are not voting against him because of his craven, horrible policies and absolute backward-looking view of women, the environment, racial issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They’re voting against him because he’s incompetent. And it’s come back to bite him.

To be fair, you could argue that nobody could have done much about this pandemic, and you play the hand you’re dealt. But it also showed all of his incompetence and ineptitude, his stupidity, his willingness to change the story in midstream, his lack of interest in science at a time when technology and the environment are two huge issues. Ultimately, his lack of interest in trying to grow into the job is what’s killing him. And that’s on him.

TKN: No doubt. And as much as I would have liked to have won in 2016, I shudder to think what would have happened to Hillary if the pandemic had happened on her watch. Yes, we would have not had nearly the death toll, but we would have had some deaths. And even if there were only four, like in Benghazi, the right would have crucified her. And to your point about a binary system, God knows what kind of right wing landslide we’d have had in 2020, and the monsters it would have brought in. Perhaps even worse than Trump.

MR. X: If she had shut down the economy and avoided mass death, they would have said, “God, this was a non-issue! Nothing happened! Why did she destroy the economy over nothing!” It’s the old thing about standing under an umbrella in a rainstorm and saying, ”Why do I need this stupid umbrella? I’m dry!”

To still be without a mask in July and August and September is a crime against public health. For him to get the disease and then be helicoptered to Walter Reed just screamed, “Hey, nobody else gets this service. And even it can even hit me!” So it undercut the last shred of his argument about the most important issue in on the ballot.

It’s really stunning that this person at this moment could be president.

TKN: I think everybody’s tired. I don’t even remember what it was like when I didn’t come home and watch three hours of news every night on the edge of my seat. But I would like to go back and find out.

MR. X: I think the American people are sick of this. The 2016 election happened when the economic recovery had been going on slowly but surely for something like six and a half years, and things were generally quiet on the terrorism front, and we were in this scenario kind of like we were in 2000, at the end of the last eight-year Democratic run in the White House. People were spoiled, and like, “What do we have to lose trying this guy?” Now you can smell what you have to lose and it’s the dead fucking corpse next to you, rotting.

TANNED, RESTED, AND READY

TKN: If Trump does lose in November—or January—what do you think are the odds he might run again in 2024? Assuming he’s not in prison, or maybe even if he is. He’ll be 78, but Biden’s 77, and presumably Trump will still have the fanatical support of a third of the American people, plus whatever fake news media empire he builds after his presidency, and the benefit of four years of doing what he does best—screeching and flinging feces like a monkey in the zoo—without the bother of actually having to govern.

MR. X: Here’s something nobody on a competitive campaign would ever say within earshot of anybody with a tape recorder: “If we don’t win this time…”   

First of all, it’s Steve Bannon talking this up—the guy on the hook for a felony for a phony build-the-wall scheme. Since he was ousted as Trump’s Karl Rove, he’s been in the wilderness and all he wants is to get back in. I think it’s a bit like rowing toward the Titanic, but it takes all kinds. The point is, all he wants is a little love from his patron, so he floats this garbage.

Second, should Trump lose this time, I have to think the respite the American people will have from this day-to-day craziness over the course of four years—the chance to have emotional moderation emanating from the White House for a change—will be something they realize they want to hold onto.  

Anyway, politics is all perception, and Trump, you may recall, promised America we’d be winning so much that we’d be tired of winning.  I’m tired all right, but it’s not of winning. “Winning” is the entirety of his brand.  Winning, bullying, macho power trips, the whole nine yards. He loses—on the world’s biggest stage—and he becomes what he can’t stand, and the voters he attracts can’t stomach a loser. It wouldn’t tarnish the brand. It would shatter it.  

Worse for Trump, if he can’t win with all the aces of federal power in his hand, how does he do it without them? I recognize that he had to win initially to grab that power, but ’16 was a different time with different atmospherics. I don’t dare say what 2024 will look like—I don’t dare say what November 4 will look like—but it’s really hard to make the souffle rise twice.  

What worries me more is that the tricks that make up the Trump persona are already being adopted by his followers: Kemp in Georgia with the voter suppression, DeSantis with the anti-mask idiocy, Pompeo with his shameless abuse of the Hatch Act. If you liked Exorcist II:  The Heretic, you’re gonna love how this next batch of neanderthals pumps new life into the old GOP storylines. Trump was the flawed prototype. Watch what happens when a pro or a true believer tries this stuff.  

TKN: For sure. In fact, one of the earliest entries in this blog, almost four years ago, was called “Beware a Better Demagogue (Parts 1 and 2).” When Trump was running in 2016, and I was sure he would lose, my main fear was that he would create the playbook for a smarter wannabe despot—and he did. I just didn’t realize we’d also have to live through his administration first.

What about the Trump kids? Not that I think they fit the bill of a slicker demagogue—as far as Don Jr goes, it’s probably the opposite. I know he’s got fans, but so does Nickelback. I just don’t think he has his father’s skills as a carnival barker.

MR. X: Did you see Caroline Giuliani’s article in Vanity Fair? It was a little self-referential, but it was interesting to see her deep need to publicly distance herself from her pathological dad. Whoops. You didn’t ask me about that.  

Hmm. The next gen Trumps in politics.  

I just don’t see it. They may try. The father-son competition/repudiation thing is evidently super-strong in that family—beyond Bush-level strong, and that says a lot—but am not sure they get traction. They kind of have a reverse Buttigieg here in New York. The state’s really blue, so there’s no path. And while NYC has occasionally flipped for the right Republican in the past, a gun-toting, spittle-spewing Republican like Don Jr. is just not the right Republican.

Nationally, they don’t have the chops or the narratives to jump in at the presidential level. I heard that Don Jr. is thinking of running for Senate in PA, but carpetbaggers start with problems, and Bob Casey’s quietly kind of locked the place up. It’s always suggested that Ivanka’s the smart one, but I think her political appeal is limited by her Marie Antoinette attitude. And if Jared advises her as well as he has her father….. 

The screenwriter in me sees some other desperate, down-in-the-polls Republican nominee in 2024 putting at Trump on the bottom of the ticket to try to capture that old Trump magic, then dying weeks into office (thanks, Vlad!), which would put the family back in the White House. It’s so clunky, circumstantial, and contrived that it’s probably exactly how this shit goes down.  

POLL DANCE

TKN: Everybody that I know on our side has PTSD from last time and being overconfident about the polls. Although I read a great piece somewhere recently about how the opposite can be true too, that we were overconfident last time. and this time, this panic and refusal to believe in the numbers is equally misguided. So my question is: how much faith do you put in the polls?

MR. X: A month before the election in 2016 I was looking at the national numbers and they were like three or four in Hillary’s favor, but the state numbers looked like shit. So the blue wall, Wisconsin most pointedly—I didn’t think Pennsylvania is going to turn, or Michigan for that matter—but Wisconsin was like, “Jesus Christ, how can it be 0.5 points?”

But I’ve looked at these numbers this time around, only public numbers, and they generally aren’t showing what it looked like in ’16. The national numbers look a lot like the state numbers and vice versa. So that’s interesting. Florida is never going to be a layup for Democrats, but if we force the other side to have to spend money there, and he’s got to go to Ohio, and we talked already about him not having enough money……it’s almost like a magic trick. “You’re over here? Now we’re over here.”

In 2016 Trump drew an inside straight against a terrible candidate. Biden doesn’t have those vulnerabilities, and the same history of being battered by Republicans, and he’s not a woman.

TKN: So if I hear you correctly, you’re saying the numbers last time were never as good as the public thought they were, and this time they are. Which is actually comforting, in terms of this time around, and of faith in polls in general.

MR. X: Right. Nobody looked at the cross tabs; they just looked at FiveThirtyEight saying it’s 99% likely that Hillary wins the popular vote—and FiveThirtyEight was right about that, she did win the popular vote. But this is not a pure democracy where we directly elect our head of state; this is a set of states, and you gotta win enough of them.

It’s hard to run as a protest candidate if you’re incumbent. The Republican Party, going back to your earlier point, is not built to govern. It’s built to protest and throw bombs. Jim Jordan can do that for his whole life, but that doesn’t mean that when it comes time to pass legislation the Freedom Caucus is going to get anything done. They deposed three speakers or something like that, and drove another one out. These people are never going to be satisfied. And politics is about compromise.

That’s why I feel more confident this time. I don’t think that 2016 was the story of the polls not showing things correctly. 2016 was the story of people thinking this guy was a buffoon, nobody’s gonna vote for him, Hillary had better surrogates, better policies, more money, but Trump tapped into something. “Make America Great Again” is one of the best slogans of all time. If you look at what he’s running on now, it’s like, “America’s in flames. Don’t re-elect the president—vote for me instead!” Except, wait: you are the president.

TKN: That’s what I’m worried about if we win—and I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, and I’ll be happy to have this problem—but they do thrive on being bombthrowers from the outside, and I’m going to be infuriated when they do that and pretend they’re not responsible for putting us in this mess in the first place. And I’ll be even more infuriated if we let them get away with it. 

But like I said, I’ll be happy to be in that position. Bring that on and we’ll deal with it.

MR. X: Yes. If we can have the executive branch and the Senate, we’ll have a much easier path.

We’re 13 days out, right? The next few days are the homestretch, because you can’t really release anything super damaging the Friday before the election; it just isn’t going to stick. So we’re just days from when the cake is baked—knock on wood— unless it comes out that Biden is actually from Venus or something. If they haven’t hit him with it yet, they’re not waiting with something.

TKN: Not counting this non-story about Hunter’s laptop, the Durham report I think was the last bullet in their chamber, and not only isn’t it coming out before the election, I don’t think it’s coming out at all, because it turned out there was nothing in it, despite all the pressure Trump and Barr put on John Durham.

I did suggest a few weeks ago that Trump might go so far as to try to have Joe Biden arrested. He hasn’t yet ordered Bill Barr to do that, although he clearly wants to, and he continues to tell the crowds at his rallies that Biden is the head of a crime family and ought to be in jail. Which is pretty damned close.

MR. X: Every day is crazier than the last. Your campaign manager embezzles $195 million and then is drunk and carrying a gun and crying to the cops that his wife wouldn’t have sex with him and he ends up in a mental institution….I don’t care how bad a script you write, it’s not as bad as this.

TKN: Nobody could make this up; it beggars fiction. We just had the Superman t-shirt thing….

MR. X: At least he didn’t do that. I guess somebody talked him out of it.

TKN: They couldn’t get it in his size.

TRUMPISM AS SMALLPOX

TKN: To me, the most valuable thing that’s come out of these past four years—maybe the only valuable thing—is an awareness, which I hope is permanent, that there is a sick fucking strain in this country that will never go away, as you pointed out earlier: a segment of the populace that are just plain racists and fascists. They will probably always be with us, though for a long time we thought they weren’t, and that turned out to be wrong and dangerous not to recognize.

Right now it’s running at about 40%. Hopefully it’s not always gonna be 40. If we can get it down to 25, then it’s like smallpox and we can control it.

MR. X: I may have told you this trip before, but in 2004 I flew out to the Plains side of Colorado, eastern Colorado, to do a Kerry thing. And I’m driving around gathering materials and getting my shit together and all the advance work I had to do, and I’m listening to the talk radio out there, and I’m like, “God, America has a crazy aunt. I can’t wait to remove the stairs and nail the door to the attic shut.” And then the election results came in and I realized, “Oh, wait: they’re not the crazy aunt—we are.”

I don’t think we’re a center-right country. I think that this is a progressive country. I hope so—that’s why I stay here and do the work that I do. But it’s very easy for people to get selfish, especially when times are good, and be like, “Fuck it. I want mine.” And those are times when we see the worst of America. The John Birchers came out of the most fulsome time in American history, the post-war years. There is a third of America that are just bonafide haters. Some of them were Democrats before (Lyndon) Johnson, and now they’re Republicans, but they have always been there and they just switched parties depending on who wants to hate others the most. But they’re tribalistic.

Look, for the first time in decades, the life expectancy of the American male has gone down. Opioid addiction, suicide—those aren’t diseases of hope, you know? It’s not like cancer or heart disease that that we’re dying of. We’re dying of stuff that’s self-inflicted because there’s some kind of misery going on. So a portion of these people are killing themselves with drugs and suicide, and then a portion of them are like, “Fuck it. I just hate women and blacks, goddam it!”

But the thing that’s interesting is that Biden is peeling off Catholics, peeling off people with college degrees both men and women, demographically he’s peeling this onion sort of brilliantly. Picking Kamala Harris was just done perfectly. She’s speaking to audiences that he can’t, or at least isn’t the best person to speak to. And the way they rolled her out, it’s was like magic as well, I gotta say. And I personally adore her, not for policies, but just because if that means more Maya Rudolph, then bring her into the White House.

TKN: She knows how to get off an airplane, I know that.

MR. X: Kamala Harris will have the best training any person could ever have to be president, and definitely be three lengths ahead for the next time there’s a contest. To be a party that’s pushing an African-American woman will be terrific, it will speak to a demographic that is both the baseline of the Democratic Party, and a great way to say, hey, America really is willing to be its best self. She’ll be the kind of vice president Joe Biden was, which was a helpmate, but have her own personality, and also be the person in the room who’s willing to tell him, “No, man, that’s fucking wrong.” Because Trump’s gotten rid of all the adults and nobody’s telling him when he’s wrong.

TKN: Clearly.

MR. X: And it’s one reason that this presidency is so off the fucking rails.

TKN: Well, let’s hope that we’re in that position, regarding Kamala. I’m guardedly optimistic—even though I’ve been pessimistic in this interview just to be the devil’s advocate—in truth I’m guardedly optimistic. I think we have a good chance, and we’ll see. If not, I’ll be one of those people with the opioid problem.

*********

Photo: Getty Images

Early last spring, I spoke with a veteran Democratic operative I called “Mister X,” an individual with more than twenty years’ experience on national political campaigns, then consulting for one of the remaining presidential hopefuls. (See “Inside the Democratic Race, Part 1 and Part 2.”)

That interview from March 2020 now reads like it could have been conducted in 1820.

At the time, with Super Tuesday looming, the big question was whether it would be Bernie or Biden, with great anxiety among the center-left that it would be the former (indeed, a significant part of that interview was devoted to how the Democratic Party could go about winning if Bernie were the nominee), and great anxiety on the left-left that Mike Bloomberg was going to step in and buy the nomination.

That’s right (not a typo): that interview was from an epoch when Mike Bloomberg figured in the national conversation.

Obviously, neither of us knew at the time that the entire world was about to be turned upside down. So I thought now—15 days out from Election Day, with more than 20 million early votes already cast—would be a good time to circle back. I spoke with Mister X, who is currently consulting on the Biden campaign, by Zoom from my own quarantine location (a former Minuteman missile silo, deep beneath the Rocky Mountains).

UNCLE JOE VS. THE CHARLATAN

MR. X: I can see that we both need haircuts.

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Yeah—I haven’t been this shaggy since 1979, when I had a Doobie Brothers LP on my turntable. I’ve been saying that I’m going to let it grow until the election, and then If Biden wins, I’ll shave my head, and if he loses I’ll slit my throat.

MR. X: Either way, you use the same tools.

TKN: The last time we talked was one of my last blog posts before COVID hit. I went back and re-read it yesterday. It feels like it was from a completely different planet.

MR. X: Yeah. First of all, Joe Biden was penniless and ran a campaign which frustrated me to no end in that he won states going away where other people spent months in the field, and with no media, and he would just show up at the end, like, “Hi, I’m here today,” and win by 60%.

TKN: All true. But at the time no one knew that circumstances would conspire such that he could not be a more perfect candidate for us to have at this moment.

MR. X: Especially since he is this historical moderate. You want to attack him for wanting to defund the police, which he pointedly doesn’t even want to do? But wait, you also want to attack him for the (1994) crime bill and the term “super predators”?  Which is it?

He just doesn’t fall into the traps that Republicans would like to set for him. Saying he’s AOC’s stooge is just not gonna do it, and “Sleepy Joe” is just not as interesting an insult as Crazy Bernie or Crooked Hillary. The reason you want to define your opponent early is so it sticks and the race is not about you, it’s about them. But in this case, Trump just never could do that.

TKN: For once it’s nice to have a candidate of our own who’s made of Teflon.

So how are you feeling?

MR. X: This is looking like a Mondale-level wipeout for the Republicans. Of course, we’re almost exactly where we were in the race four years ago, with grab ‘em by the pussy, and back then I was like, “Oh my God, he’s done.” So we can’t relax. But there’s no Comey letter and there’s no email server thing that they’ve been beating on for eight months. They really tried to hit Biden hard—I mean, they got impeached for it. But they never could pin him. And the idea that they’re now gonna come at Kamala Harris, so they can have a liberal African-American woman to attack, means they’re down to wooing the 17 white guys that are in the Michigan Militia. If you don’t have them already, why are you even in this race?

TKN: To what extent do you think, Joe was insulated by his 47 years in politics? I know the GOP keeps attacking him for those 47 years, saying he got nothing done, he’s part of the swamp, etc. etc., which is a canard anyway and the height of hypocrisy. But even so, you just can’t re-define a guy that America’s already so comfortable with.

MR. X: The fun that people have made of Biden—the aviator glasses or driving a Camaro—is all stuff that’s sort of avuncular and sweet. He’s Uncle Joe. He’s certainly cast a lot of bad votes over the course of 47 years, and been on the wrong sense of a lot of issues, which is almost impossible to avoid in five decades of public service. But we just know him. People knew Hillary, too, or thought they did, but what they knew they didn’t like. I’m not saying that because I hate Hillary Clinton—I worked for her—but because the Republican Party and its media allies spent 25 years assassinating her character, and very successfully too.

Biden, on the other hand, the public generally likes enough, for a politician. Trump’s personal numbers are at like minus 17 or something, if that. It was easier for Trump when he and Hillary were vying for who is the most-disliked person in America. This time it’s a choice between Uncle Joe and the charlatan. It’s a very different thing.

FLOAT LIKE A BUTTERFLY

TKN: That’s what I mean about how he’s the perfect candidate for this moment. Lucky for us. Because let’s say Bernie had prevailed, or Elizabeth Warren, even though I liked her very much. If that had happened, I don’t think we’d be in such a strong position. The Republicans would have been able to demonize either of them in a way they just haven’t been able to do with Joe. Right now the idea of a comfortable, grandfatherly, very calm guy who looks and sounds like the presidents we’re used to—even with all the white male privilege that entails—is like comfort food that we are desperately craving.

MR. X: Absolutely. People will only change horses if they’re given a real option and Biden is absolutely all the things you’re describing. Also, people are just sick of this fucking weird game show that we’ve been watching for four years.

Biden is the exact contrapositive to Trump. In the debate, when Trump attacked Hunter, and Biden got pissed and said, “My son has a problem, but he’s trying to solve it,” he was talking to 150,000 people in the Ohio River Valley who also have a kid who’s got an opiod disorder, whose aunt may have died from addiction, and so on. So even that was ground in Americana, without being too flag-waving.

TKN: I don’t know if that response regarding Hunter was calculated, or if they prepped for it or not, but it felt totally genuine. And it played like you just described: like a dad defending his kid. And that was great.

MR. X: Yes. And I will say this: one thing that Biden has done by being in the basement in Delaware for so long—which Trump has been attacking him for—is that he has spent that time training, like he’s Muhammad Ali in Pennsylvania before going to Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle. He was focusing, doing his homework, and being grilled and testing stuff, so that when it comes to the high points of the campaign—the convention speech, and the first debate, and to a lesser degree subsequent debates—he’s ready. That’s exactly the kind of preparation that you want from people who take this seriously.

TKN: Speaking of the debate, I hesitate to ask, but what was your take?

MR. X: It was like the 2000 debate on steroids—literally. If you remember that debate, Gore had more makeup on than a drag queen, and every time Bush would say something, he’d be rolling his eyes and sighing. That was nothing compared to Trump, of course, because I buy the notion that he was absolutely filled with steroids to keep him erect, and pump up his testosterone, given that we now know he already knew that he’d been exposed to COVID.

TKN: This from the guy who had been insisting Biden was the one on Lance Armstrong-brand PEDs. Projection, as always, is the classic Trump tell.

MR. X: He was like this caged animal that was always on the attack in ways that just didn’t help him. Even Republicans were like, “You set a trap and you wait for them to fall into it.” You don’t set a trap and then yell, “Look: there it is! Jump into it!” Just like, shut up, man.

TKN: Speaking of, clearly one of the better lines Biden got off in the debate was when he said, wearily, “Will you shut up, man?” Because that’s what a lot of people feel.

MR. X: Yes. And then there’s Rick Santorum on CNN, saying, “Oh, they were both throwing brickbats.” Please.

It was just a absolute disaster for Trump, and the numbers afterwards have shown it. Even with four years of practice, he didn’t look like someone you’d want to lead the country….. he looked more like a petulant second grader. And getting COVID right after just undercut his entire argument of the last six months. It was like a trap door that opened up underneath him, and I just don’t see how you can get back up from that. Maybe you can close the gap a little bit, but you only get a few of these chances, and that was his time to reintroduce himself to the public, and he blew it. Of course, that’s my point of view from this side of the aisle.

Because he watches only Fox News, Trump I think has this notion that he can mention the first three words of any crisis, and everyone will know what he’s talking about, and that’s just not true. You really need to tell a story. But he just goes, “Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!” It was like he only read the topline of each of his talking points, and not the second and third beats, which is what happens when you’re amped up on steroids. It only made sense to people who are inside QAnon and follow this stuff every day.

TKN: Well, that raises the question of strategy. I always hesitate to give Trump credit for twelve dimensional chess, because I don’t think he operates with that kind of foresight. But it did seem like he was not trying to win over any new voters so much as just energize his existing supporters so that if he loses, they’ll get behind him when he makes his power grab.

MR. X: Yeah. But that’s not the game. You can’t just build your base. You can turn out and turn out and turn out, but when you do everything you can to offend women….Maybe I’ll be surprised later, but this is a zero sum game where there’s just two people on the ballot.

TKN: But what I’m saying is that he’s not thinking about winning the election at all. He’s thinking about how he can steal the election, how he can claim victory regardless, or get it thrown in the courts, and have an angry third of the country ready to accept that.

MR. X: That’s true when you lose by two and a half points. But if you lose by nine points, that’s a bridge too far.

TKN: So do you think Trump is going to lose? In the Electoral College, that is?

MR. X: Yes. As I said, I think we’re on the verge of landslide numbers, and I say that because he’s having to go shore up his support in states that should already be locked down for him: Ohio, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him in Missouri next. It’s like in ‘84, when you had Walter Mondale doing a rally in Times Square.

The places that are on a razor’s edge always going to the challenger. And we’ll see, but if they’re only leading by a point in Georgia right now, then North Carolina is probably a Democratic state. Virginia and Colorado are no longer swing states; those are blue states. The states that Hillary lost by 80,000 votes—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan—those are back to blue too. The question is, what other states does Biden add that make this really ugly for Republicans? He probably won’t win all of these states that are on the edge, but he could win Arizona, North Carolina, Florida. I wouldn’t put Georgia or Texas there, although I think a lot of people wish they could. Old people walking away from Trump will hurt him hugely in a place like Florida, or Arizona for that matter.

TKN: And what about the impact of mail-in ballots? The other thing that people are super worried about.

MR. X: They should be. Who knows? But this is how I see election night going, for what it’s worth.

Some states count the mail-ins early, so when you walk in, everyone will be like, “Oh, Biden won.” But we still have tonight’s votes to come in. So those votes come in and the balance changes, but then we still have the mail-in votes from states that weren’t pre-counting. And that’s the phase, the one they call the Red Mirage, which is going to be the ugliest possible time.

That’s why the hope is that Biden’s close enough to 270 that we don’t have this huge crisis……that Trump is at 140 and Biden’s at 255, let’s say. And hopefully the press has done a good enough job of prepping people beforehand that we won’t know the answer tonight.

COUP COUP COUP JOOB

TKN: So let me pose this scenario to you that’s in line with what you just described. Let’s say that the vote on November 3^rd is close, which it might be, or maybe it isn’t. But either way Trump declares victory, which I think he’s going to do no matter what the numbers are….

MR. X: Absolutely.

TKN: ….and the mail-in ballots are coming in and being counted, and everybody knows that it’s not over till it’s over, because we’ve been prepared for that. But regardless of a Blue Shift or a Red Mirage, Trump continues to claim victory. How does that stop? Who is the person, or the group of people, who says at last, “Okay, fun’s over, it’s clear you’ve lost. You’ve got to go.” Who does that?

MR. X: Well, you know, the Transition Integrity Project did these tabletop exercises back in June, and basically got to the point of opposing militias in the streets. And when the question was asked, who won?, they were like, “We didn’t get there.” This is from The Atlantic article by David Frum (“Where the System May Break,” July 31, 2020). So it’s incredibly hard to know who’s the one who says, “Enough—you’re out.”

There may be insurrection style stuff going on in this time, but the military seems to have said we are staying the fuck out of this, and that’s good. And there are important signifiers like retired flag officers—the Michael Haydens of the world, the Michael Chertoffs of the world, even the Ben Ginsburgs of the world, the Republican election lawyer—saying “Hold your horses.” It’ll be the Trumpers versus the rest of the country.

TKN: That’s what I’m worried about. It could be a fucking blowout for Joe, but if Trump—who’s got the nuclear football—says, “No, I won,” or “The election doesn’t count, because like I told you, the mail-in votes are all fraudulent. It was rigged; don’t believe the numbers—I won.”

Do you doubt he’ll do that?

MR. X:  No, I don’t doubt he’ll do that. The question is how strident will he be.

If you look at how this has worked in other countries, we may have to be in the streets for days. Would days be enough, or would it have to be longer? It may take a general strike or something like that to stop him. Then you’d have this sort of breakdown where very quickly Charlie Baker (the governor of Massachusetts) and some of the other reasonable Republicans like Mitt Romney start to put pressure on him and chip away at his position.

He doesn’t have the news behind him. Yeah, he’ll have Fox News, but the preponderance of Americans don’t believe his coronavirus statements, they don’t believe him about race, they don’t believe him on the economy or what he’s saying about a V-shaped recovery. He’s lost the public trust. So the hope is that the numbers are such that the American people sort of turn away from him. If all the media except Sinclair and OANN declare this thing for Biden, it’s really hard in America, I think, for Trump to do what we’re talking about him doing.

TKN: Can you believe we’re even talking about this?

What I’m worried about is that if it comes down to the so-called grownups in the Republican Party having to be the ones to break ranks and push him out, then we are really in trouble. Because even if it’s very clear to all sane observers that he’s lost, I think he’ll continue to cling to power until he’s forced out. And like you say, I think it’s gonna take people in the streets and a general strike to do that, and all the media turning against him except Fox and OANN and Breitbart, and even that may not be enough.

MR. X: So the American people I’m talking about, the suburban moms who marched like hell on the 21st of January, 2017, and all the people who marched for Black Lives Matter, and everyone else who cares about this country: there could be 15 million people in the streets. And that would be a moment for the Republicans to say, “Uh, sir, what are you gonna do—gun them all down? Put them all in jail?”

TKN: I want to believe you. But I have trouble picturing Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham or Jim Jordan or any of these other bozos ever having a moment of clarity where they do the right thing and stand up and say to Trump, “For the good of the country, you’ve got to go.” I just can’t see them doing it.

MR. X: No, no, I agree with you completely. Our hope is that we’re not leaving it in their hands, that the American people are seeing this shitstorm of hate and poor governance and saying, and, and truly voting with their feet…..

TKN: I’m not disputing that the American people are going to vote like crazy. I’m saying, what happens when Trump gets beaten 420 electoral votes to whatever’s left, and he still won’t go? Then what?

MR. X: That is a question the Framers left out. And so….

(Long pause.)

This is the end of the American experiment in democracy.

If Trump were to do that, and you were Senator Ted Cruz, and you don’t like him in the first place, and then he malinged your wife, and your dad, and you were given the chance to put the stake in him? God, I hope you’d do it.

TKN: I would hope so too. But I would’ve thought they would have done it long ago.

MR. X: I hear you, but here’s the thing. In politics, when you’re riding high, no one touches you. Once you’re wounded, they never knew you. So if he loses by landside numbers, what is the Republican Party at that point? This will be an interesting moment. I thought this would take place in 2016, after Trump went down, but he didn’t.

If it’s close and questionable, that’s one thing. You can fudge it, but some things are just unfeasible and a big win would be that, I think. I hope.

As we talked about in the spring, if I were a Republican, it’d be such a sigh of relief to get rid of this guy, to not have my feet held to the fire every day in every way. If you’re a Republican Senator, you gotta wake up each morning checking Twitter to see what piece of shit do I have to scrape off the wall today? I mean, can’t be fun.

Of course they can’t say that out loud. So while I’m not expecting Republicans to come out of the woodwork like, “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” I think that the wisdom would be maybe we can live longer if we aren’t under the yoke of a dictatorship.

The thing is that the more dissension and uprising there is, the more Trump locks into this law-and-order / “I need to stay here” thing. So it’s like we’re trapped in a way.

CIVIL WAR FOR THE WEAK AND LAZY

TKN: We did talk about this exact issue back in March—I went back and checked. In fact, we’ve been talking about it since 2017. But then it was still sort of a longshot concern; now it’s front and center.

Graeme Wood just had a great piece in The Atlantic called “He Won’t Concede, but He’ll Pack His Bags,” where he argued that Trump is too lazy to really preside over a violent constitutional crisis. The money quote was:

“A civil war sounds like a lot of work. The easiest path is also the most lucrative. Get on Marine One, protesting all the way, and spend the rest of your days fleecing the 40 percent of Americans who still think you are the Messiah, and who will watch you on cable news, spend their money on whatever hypoallergenic pillow you endorse, and come to see you whenever you visit their town.”

MR. X: And then there’s Ross Douhat. I don’t like Douhat, and I think that in this recent column in the Times (“There Will Be No Trump Coup,” October 10, 2020) he missed hugely the stuff that Trump has really done to undercut democracy, but I do agree that Trump is an incredibly weak figure. Probably too weak to pull something like this off.

TKN: Yeah, I read that column. I agree with Douhat in terms of Trump’s weakness, compared to a true autocrat—a Putin, or an Orban, or even a Duterte. But like you, I thought he grossly understated the things Trump has done. For instance, he said the most egregious thing he’s done in terms of defying Congress is  to reallocate some funds for the border wall…..totally ignoring his wanton obstruction of Congress during an impeachment, for example, which is about as abusive and imperial a thing a president can do. 

I want to believe he’s right about what will happen after the election, but I’m not quite so sanguine.

MR. X: Trump has spent a lot of time searching for support for this de facto coup. But he didn’t get it from the military, and he didn’t get it from other places, so he’s built in DHS a third tier personal army, with militarized law enforcement like Customs and Border Patrol et cetera, and this acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf to do his bidding. You look at what they did in Portland in the name of defending federal buildings, when they were nowhere near any federal buildings, except in the way like in tag, when you’ve got like one finger on base and you’re like stretching all the way out.

I mean, the DHS: we built that thing in 2002 and everybody knew it was a time bomb. The feds said, “Oh no, we’ll be careful with it,” but then along came Trump who decided to use it like a private army loyal only to him. And that’s incredibly scary. And while the idea that the US military won’t step in and interfere in an election is great in some ways, the idea that it won’t step in to stop this private army and resolve a consitutional crisis is also worrying in its own right, and actually ends up fueling the danger.

COURTING DISASTER

TKN: The other wild card is the Supreme Court. If we’re in this kind of constitutional crisis, and he gets a Supreme Court ruling on his side, that’ll bolster him—

MR. X: That would finish it. If he were to get a Supreme Court ruling on his side, it wouldn’t just bolster him—it would finish it.

TKN: And that’s why he’s so desperate to get ACB on the Court. It might be 5 to 4 against us. I don’t see Thomas or Alito surprising us; they’re in the tank. But I think Roberts would do the right thing….

MR. X: So do I…

TKN: I don’t know what Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would do, and I don’t know what an Amy Coney Barrett would do either, but I’m not optimistic. I’m worried about it.

MR. X: It would be such an egregious power grab. I’m sure the conservatives on the Court don’t like Biden, but does that mean that you throw the entire board game up in the air because you lost one election? Maybe they do. I hope not.

If the Supreme Court does end up ruling on anything, it will probably be on a set of very specific technical issues—I hope—that might turn a state or two, or three perhaps. I don’t know; I’m not an expert about this. But the states determine their electors, and in places where there’s a mix, like Wisconsin, it’s possible that the Republican-controlled state legislature could decide to send their electors and Tony Evers could send his own electors. Biden should win handily there; it should not be a question. But it’s still not a scenario you want.

TKN: People forget that in 2000, as much of a shitshow as it was, the Supreme Court didn’t say Bush was the winner: all it did was stop the recount in Florida. Gore could have continued to fight, but instead he did what you’re hoping the Republicans will do this time, which is concede out of respect for the peaceful transfer of power.

Many people at the time thought he should have kept fighting, especially in hindisght when you look at what happened under the Bush administration.

MR. X: Well, after all, we are the party that brings a petition to a gunfight.

TKN: I do think that this time, in a ruling like that, the Democrats would continue to fight, and they should. And I will also say that, if it comes down to a decision by the Court that effectively awards the election to Trump, if that decision feels unjust, I don’t think the American people will stand for that the way they did in 2000, regardless of what the DNC does. I think there will be a popular uprising.

MR. X: But the Supreme Court really does respond to the will of the people. That’s why you get Dred Scott in one era and Plessy vs. Ferguson in another, and then Brown vs. Board of Education. Trump is trimming along at like 40% support, and if he gets beaten soundly, and the GOP wants to set the country on fire basically, then the better part of valor for the Court is to make the right choice and split the difference in a way which will favor the person who got the most votes in the most States.

TKN: This is a topic for another day, but we have some systemic problems if the only way we can avoid a coup d’etat is by a landslide.

MR. X: You’re right. Except that Carter walked away, George H.W. Bush walked away….

TKN: Even Nixon walked away! But Trump makes Nixon look like Cincinnatus. That’s what I’m saying: the system depends on the goodwill of the players. There’s no mechanism to force compliance. 

MR. X: And like the famous line says, and I actually buy it, if there had been Fox News in 1974, Nixon never would have had to leave.

TKN: That’s what I’m worried about.

*********

In Part 2 of this interview, coming soon, Mr. X discusses what the GOP will look like if Trump loses, what America will look like if he wins, how much to trust (or distrust) the polls, the odds of South Carolina having two black senators, and what Trumpism and smallpox have in common.

Illustration: Edel Rodriguez

You think I’m joking? Trump has already suggested it.

Zonked out of his mind on steroids and other COVID-fighting drugs whose side effects include impaired judgment, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur (we’ve all heard the joke: who can tell the difference, ha ha, cough cough), Trump called into to Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business Network last week and said that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden all ought to be arrested for unspecified crimes against the state….which is to say, against Trump himself.

Let’s quote him verbatim:

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes, the greatest political crime in the history of our country, then we’re gonna get little satisfaction unless I win. Because I won’t forget it. But these people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama, and that includes Biden; these are people that spied on my campaign, and we have everything. Now they say they have much more, and I say Bill, you got plenty. You don’t need any more.”

Trump made similar comments last week in a marathon conversation on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and in a series of tweets, like this one, in his trademark stuck-caps-lock style:

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!”

(For you right wingers who might have stumbled on this headline and pumped your fist in agreement, you’ve probably realized by now that you’ve come to the wrong blog.)

Trump’s remarks were duly reported in the mainstream media, where they were treated with the same snickering condescension as many of his other batshit affronts to democracy over the past five years. Yet time and time again Trump has floated ideas that no one thought he would carry out for real, like trying to build a wall on our southern border, or refusing to turn over his tax returns, or suggesting that he might not leave office even if he loses in 2020 and that he deserves instead to be president-for-life.

You know. Small stuff.

So I suggest we take this latest threat/promise both seriously and literally.

Yes, the idea of ginning up some transparently excuse to arrest and jail a political rival is the sort of thing that characterizes an autocracy, and was until recently unthinkable in the US. Even now it is hard to imagine, and would be an order of magnitude worse than almost any of the other atrocities Trump has perpetrated. (Except, perhaps, stealing children from their mothers and caging them in concentration camps. Oh yeah—we’ve done that too.) But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

It is not much of a leap from 2016’s chants of “Lock her up!”, aimed at his last electoral rival, to actual attempts to do so with his current one.

Donald Trump is desperate to stay in office for many reasons, including sheer ego, but above all because the presidency is the only thing protecting him from criminal and civil prosecution by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the New York State Attorney General, and the Manhattan District Attorney. The power of the presidency is also his best hedge against imminent foreclosure on some $421 million in debt he owes to unnamed—presumably foreign— creditors, some of whom very likely come from the land of Alexander Ovechkin (and Alexander Litvinenko).

In the interest of keeping his mailing address at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump has already shown that he will do everything humanly possible, legal and illegal, no matter how underhanded or despicable, or how much it violates the most basic tenets of American democracy, or how much damage it does to the republic. He’s spent untold hours trying to undermine public confidence in the vote, especially mail-in balloting (even as he uses it himself); starved the USPS; encouraged his supporters to engage in voter intimidation; fomented domestic terrorism; courted foreign interference; dispatched an army of lawyers to try to hobble turnout in places where opposition is strong; and suggested that any Biden victory would be by definition fraudulent.

If you don’t think that will include trying to gin up charges against his presidential rival less than four weeks away from Election Day, and pressure his today Mr. Barr to act on them and find a way to indict and arrest that rival, you’re kidding yourself.

PAGING JEFF GILLOLY

Would it work?

Who knows? It would be an absolutely shameless maneuver that any sane person would see for the hamhanded charade that it is. It is the kind of thing that happens in Belarus, in Zimbabwe, in Peronist Argentina. But since when has that ever deterred Donald Trump?

It would also kick off a shitstorm of protest, even from some on the right, I suspect. But again: how many divisions does the Pope have?

I don’t doubt for a second that he might try it. Such is his level of desperation.

Trump, if nothing else, has a visceral instinct for the political zeitgeist. Well before the Democratic primaries began in earnest he knew that Joe Biden was his greatest threat….enough that he was willing to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with Kyiv to try to stop him. Now down badly in the polls with just over three weeks to Election Day (and some seven million mail-in ballots already cast), Trump is a cornered rat now, and we should put nothing past him.

Keen observers have long been awaiting some sort of October surprise designed to undercut Biden the way Jim Comey’s pre-Halloween announcement put a knife a Hillary’s heart in 2016. A lot of the speculation centered on Bill Barr’s bespoke “investigation of the investigators” regarding Russiagate, an inquiry headed by Republican US Attorney John Durham. Now we are told that the much-anticipated Durham report won’t be released before Election Day…..but not out of respect for our electoral integrity, more likely—it appears—because Durham acted on principle and turned up none of the dirt the administration craved, despite intense political pressure from the White House and main Justice to do so.

So if John Durham won’t wield the pipe Nancy Kerrigan-style, is a blunt arrest of Biden such an outrageous thing to imagine that the Trump White House would do?

Consider Trump’s other recent actions.

Last week he yet again opined that he deserves more than two terms in office, as in this recent tweet:

NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT COUGHT [sic] COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

At this point, in the heat of a historically ugly election battle and in the context of the actions listed above, no one can still plausibly claim that these are mere “jokes.”

Last week the FBI also arrested a baker’s dozen of domestic terrorists in Michigan who were planning to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer and put her on “trial,” inspired by Trump’s tweets of last spring to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.” (Note that it was a woman they went after, not the male Democratic governors of Virginia or Minnesota whom Trump also tweeted about.)

The arrests elicited not a word from Bill Barr, while Trump himself took to the airwaves……to further attack Gov. Whitmer.

THE COLUMNISTS WEIGH IN

In his New York Times column this past Sunday, titled “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” conservative Ross Douhat pooh poohs the idea that Trump will be able to steal the election, deriding him as a faux autocrat at best with none of the actual muscle that the real McCoys like Putin, Erdogan, Orban, and Duterte have. Maybe so. But since Douhat has been a consistent apologist for this administration cloaked in the clothing of “moderate conservatism,” I’m gonna pass on such sunniness.

(For example, Douhat also claims that Trump’s “biggest defiance of Congress involved some money for a still-unfinished border wall.” Uh, I seem to remember some wanton obstruction of Congress during impeachment that was considerably more serious than that.)

For five years now we have been told over and over again by conservatives like Douhat that Trump would never do such-and-such outrageous thing, only to turn around and watch him do precisely that. I hope that three weeks from now Ross’s column proves correct, and not bitterly ironic.

The Atlantic’s George Packer takes a more gimlet-eyed view, noting that “The Trump administration is using the last weeks of the campaign to soften up the country for a repudiation of democracy itself.”

Every time (Trump) talks about “massive fraud” and sending the election to a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, he’s preparing you to have your vote taken away—to make that shocking prospect a little more normal, even inevitable. Each new controversy, each norm broken, each authoritarian pose makes Trump’s intention to nullify the election results clear.

The Washington Post’sPaul Waldman notes that with his angry, incendiary tone (but only since, oh, 1986, let’s say), Trump is not pursuing a conventional strategy for a candidate who is so far behind so late in the game, that of trying to court new voters over to his side. Waldman is 100% correct of course—which only lends credence to the theory that Trump is not trying to win the election at all, knowing that that’s a lost cause, but merely trying to gin up his fans for when he eventually claims that the vote was fraudulent.

And they seem to be totally down with that.

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, writes:

By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is giving them to understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process.

VICE

Lest we think such appalling behavior is unique to the sui generis cretin that is Donald Trump, consider also the recent actions of his running mate, a man who—like Barr—embodies the lie of grandfatherly “old school” Republicanism (Reagan-era evangelical division) almost to the point of parody.

During last week’s vice presidential debate, when directly asked by moderator Susan Page, Mike Pence pointedly refused to say that the Trump ticket would respect the results of the election. In fact, he took the opportunity to spread even more fear and disinformation about the integrity of mail-in voting.

That’s a softball question almost as easy as the one Trump deliberately whiffed on the week before, “Do you condemn white supremacy?” But that’s the country we now live in: one where the ruling party openly cozies up to white nationalists and brazenly rejects free elections.

I have to believe that Pence had been explicitly told by the White House not to commit to respecting the results of the vote. Before Trump, no American politician, not even Richard Nixon—not even a toady like Mike Pence—would think to violate such a fundamental norm of American politics. But thanks to Trump, it’s a norm no more.

It felt very much like Trump had also instructed Pence to interrupt and hector the infinitely patient and restrained Kamala Harris, and Page as well: Mike’s own low-energy, Midwestern, faux “reasonable” version of the bullying approach Trump took in his own debate. (Like the Whitmer incident, the misogynistic subtext was also apparent, and surely did Team Trump little good with the female voters it desperately needs…..if it is depending on a fair vote, that is.) The lies and lowblow attacks came fast and furious from the Republican side of the stage as we saw just how loathsome and hypocritical Mike Pence truly is, playing primarily to an audience of one. Afterward, Trump himself called Kamala Harris a “monster,” a “communist,” and “totally unlikeable,” not necessarily in order of disdain.

The fly stole the show, but Pence’s rejection of the sanctity of the ballot box was the evening’s most consequential moment, and one we would do well to heed.

WHY TRUMP NEEDS THE BIG LIE TO BE EVEN BIGGER

With all these maneuvers Trump is of course frantically trying to distract the American people from his own horrific incompetence, malevolence, and criminality over the past four years, with his unconscionable non-response to the pandemic as the crown jewel.

Per Bob Woodward, Trump has understood how lethal the novel coronavirus is since at least last January, yet vigorously told the public that it was a hoax. His inexplicable refusal to take the actions necessary to combat the threat have led to an American death toll that is racing toward a quarter of a million—far and away the most of any country on Earth, and one of the worst per capita, with no end in sight.

Yet even contracting the virus himself was not enough to shake Trump out of this dereliction of duty. Practically speaking, It was probably also his last chance to stanch the political fallout and turn it around, with a Damascene eleventh hour announcement that he has seen the light. But that would require an admission that he had erred in the first place, which is completely beyond him: in his sociopathological toolkit, his ego and lack of empathy are far stronger than even his skill at deceit and manipulation.

Anyone who expected Donald Trump to emerge from this ordeal chastened—any more than he was chastened by surviving the special counsel investigation, or impeachment—has simply not been paying attention. (Looking at you, Susan Collins.)

Instead, Trump now needs the Big Lie to be even bigger. He needs to use his own survival from the virus as “proof” that COVID-19 really is no big deal (and simultaneously, a lethal plague that he conquered through sheer force of will).

That sort of prevarication he is adept at.

As part of that performance, since his premature release from the hospital last Monday, he has engaged in his Evita moment on the White House balcony, recklessly exposed his own staff to infection, held a new superspreader event on the White House lawn (Hatch Act, are you keeping count?), suggested he caught COVID from a bunch of Gold Star families (those losers and suckers!), and gone on a batshit crazy media tour with Bartiromo, Limbaugh, et al in which he doubled down on his denialism, insulting those who have suffered and died from the pandemic on his watch, including claims that he could have beaten the virus without any medical intervention at all. All that was missing was a literal Superman impression, and we’re now told he considered that.

This after he was the undeserving beneficiary of more experimental and aggressive blue chip medical treatment than any other COVID patient on the planet, treatment that is estimated to have cost about $100,000, if he had to pay out of pocket, as many of his countrymen do for their health care. Trump got it for the low low price of $750 in federal income tax last year.

Oh, and among the treatments he received: stem cell therapy using fetal tissue, a practice his own party and its adamantly anti-choice fan base ferociously opposes…..for other people. But IOKIYAR, right “pro-lifers”?

DEATH CULT 2020

It is very fitting that the White House is now a hot zone itself, responsible for more COVID cases last week than the entire country of Taiwan (pop. 23 million). Until recently, comparisons of Trump to Jim Jones have been mostly metaphorical. Now they are becoming literal.

How homicidal has Team Trump been? Tim Miller of The Bulwark writes:

(I)f you told me in December 2016 that in the waning months of the first term, 210,000 people would be dead from a contagious virus and that President Trump would pretend it wasn’t happening, contract the virus himself, personally transmit it to thousands of others while he covered up his sickness, and that while he was still possibly contagious thousands of people would pack into the White House lawn while he held a tinpot-dictator-style balcony rally on breaks from his in-home care . . . that would have turned my head a bit.

Vice President Pence held an event at The Villages in Florida yesterday, the site of the infamous golf cart “White Power” video that the president tweeted earlier this year. What we have here is 3000 high risk seniors packing into a tight space to see the vice president TEN DAYS AFTER the president held a superspreader event at the White House and on the same day that Chris Christie checked out of a week long hospital stay after attending a similar event. The president’s spokespeople bragged about the high number of attendees.

Do these people realize that this is becoming a death cult? Did it not faze the staffers when their colleagues became vectors for this virus just last week? 

Are the attendees risking contracting COVID of sound mind? Have they convinced themselves it’s not real? Or do they think that listening to Mike Pence do a community theater Ronald Reagan impersonation is just worth the risk? 

Trump’s estranged niece Mary, a clinical psychologist, informs us that in their family, illness was seen as weakness. For Donald, a lifelong germophobe to boot, being laid up with the ‘rona—and unable to campaign—was his nightmare. Therefore, it comes naturally to him to frame his survival as triumph, and engage in behavior that supports that charade, even as it puts his own supporters, staff, and even family members at personal risk of disease and death.

Could there be a more perfect of the monstrousness of this man?

But the fact is, try as he might to avoid it, Trump’s illness is forcing his criminal mishandling of the coronavirus into centerstage for the final phase of the presidential campaign, which is the last place he wants it to be. Short of the aforementioned 180, his only hope is this massive misdirection in which he portrays his own survival as vindication of his “nothing to see here, folks” approach. But the relentlessly rising death count says otherwise, and the American people  seem not to be fooled.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

If Trump can’t pull off this misdirection when it comes to the pandemic—and the polls say he’s not—he will become more and more desperate about Joe Biden in the next three weeks.

To be clear, I don’t seriously expect Joe Biden to be arrested, much as Donald Trump wishes he would be….but not because it’s beneath Trump to try. It remains an absurd and extreme possibility. But neither would I be entirely surprised. The mere fact that we’re even contemplating it is a shocking measure of how far our country has fallen in four short (long?) years.

Mirror image wise, I do fully expect Trump to use the powers of his office to try to protect himself from the long arm of the law.

Andrew Weissman, one of the lead prosecutors on the Mueller time, recently opined that, should he be forced out of office this winter, Trump will almost certainly try to self-pardon, given the raft of criminal and civil cases hanging over him. It’s an outrageous idea, totally unprecedented and legally untested, and one that would surely wind up in the Supreme Court. But as Weissman notes, what’s Trump got to lose by trying? Worst case, the SCOTUS slaps him down and he’s back where he started, none the worse for wear. In the best case, a 6-3 right wing majority, including three justices he put on that Court, blesses his claim on that get-out-of-jail-free card.

(The alternative, equally odious, is that Trump lays up and goes the safer route, by resigning 24 hours before Biden’s inauguration and having Pence pardon him, Gerry Ford-style.) 

So we have that to look forward to.

It’s madness that we are in a stage when such banana republic maneuvers consume us. 

As for the immediate crisis, here’s George Packer again, expressing guarded, almost Douhatian optimism that Trump and the GOP will fail in their attempts to steal the election and keep Trump in power:

Having chained their party to Trump, Republicans will follow him in his frantic effort to delegitimize the coming election. But I don’t think it will work. The vote remains too powerful an idea in the minds of Americans. They are already standing in long lines to cast the ballots that Trump claims are fraudulent. The word democracy might not be found in the Constitution, but Senator (Mike) Lee (R-Utah) is right to be frightened by it.

I hope he’s right. But I ain’t holding my breath.

Vice President Biden: please have a bail bondsman on speed dial.

********

Photo illustration: TKN

Source photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is how fast the news cycle moves these days.

Remember when RBG died, a year ago? Since then we’ve had the beginning of the Amy Coney Barrett drama, the New York Times’ bombshell revelation of Trump’s decades of tax fraud, the pro wrestling spectacle that was the debate debacle (or Debatcle^TM), the Proud Boys gearing up for civil war, and most recently, the revelation of Trump’s COVID diagnosis quickly followed by the Nixonian spectacle of Marine One lifting off the White House lawn to medevac him to Walter Reed (and sadly not San Clemente). All that in less than two weeks.

Conspiracy theories about whether Trump really has COVID immediately began swirling, a measure of how little credibility this administration has, how thoroughly its dishonesty has poisoned our culture, and how cynical and suspicious it has left us as a nation.

I don’t buy it…..not because I think he’s above such deceit (ha!), but merely because I don’t see how it benefits him politically. At best his illness is a mixed bag for his already wobbly electoral prospects, and more likely hurts him. Right off the bat he had to cancel three of his favorite things—big Leni Riefenstahl brand rallies, one in Florida and two in Wisconsin—a harbinger of how his sickness is likely to hamper him in the final thirty days of the race. (There is also the pragmatic question of how one would fake all this, given the infrastructure involved, as well as all the other Republicans infected in the same superspreader event, which taken together would be a charade at the moon landing hoax level.)

Trump’s desperate attempts to project wellness and vitality from within the confines of Walter Reed also suggest that this not the twelve-dimensional chess some so often want to ascribe to him. It’s more like exactly what it appears to be: a science-denying fat old man who recklessly ignored the best public health advice and wound up catching a potentially lethal illness, at the worst possible time.

While no one can accurately predict how all this will play out, a few things do seem already clear in terms of the impact on the election:

At a minimum, Trump’s COVID will take him off the in-person campaign trail for at least ten days, depriving the GOP of its best weapon. (The alternative take is that the pause will benefit Trump, as he is also his own worst enemy. Discuss.) It will also keep the coronavirus front and center in the public conversation, at a time when the GOP would dearly like it to be pushed aside. And lastly, should Trump still be debilitated come November 3rd, it will make it harder for him to carry out his well-telegraphed (and already underway) plan to contest the results of the election and claim the right to stay in power regardless of the results of the vote.

One can only hope.

ABUNDANCE

Events moved especially fast last Friday, when most of America awoke to the news that Donald and Melania had tested positive. Initially we were told his symptoms were mild, which was a sure sign that they were severe. By that afternoon, he was being flown by Marine One—not normally a dustoff bird—to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Characteristically trying to play down the severity of the situation, the White House announced that Trump was being hospitalized out of “abundance of caution.” If so, former Minnesota Senator Al Franken acidly noted, it was the first time since the emergence of the coronavirus that this administration had ever acted out of an “abundance of caution.”

The New Yorker editor David Remnick writes:

Any ailing individual ought to be able to depend on the best wishes of others—and on affordable, decent health care. Trump can depend on both, even if millions of Americans cannot. We can only hope that he and his wife get through the virus in a couple of weeks with minimal suffering, and, with prime medical attention and a modicum of luck, there’s reason to think that they will.

But, as President and as a candidate for reëlection, Trump should not count on the silencing of American citizens—on a deference that he has never shown to the people whom he swore to protect and has not. Because of his ineptitude and his deceit, because he has encouraged a culture of heedlessness about the wearing of masks and a lethal disrespect for scientific fact, he bears a grave responsibility for what has happened in this country.

As far back as last February, Donald Trump knew the novel coronavirus pandemic was deadly; he told Bob Woodward so, privately. At the same time, he was telling the American people it was a hoax, that it would miraculously disappear, that we didn’t need to wear masks or social distance or reevaluate our faith in him as an all-mighty god-emperor and steward of the national welfare. He and his team subsequently made conscious choices to deny assistance to various states and municipalities for partisan reasons, some of those choices driven by racially motivated reasons. He attacked his own scientists, disseminated misinformation to include stumping for snake oil cures, and mocked preventive measures, among other atrocities. History will hold him and his minions murderously culpable for a national response that wasn’t just botched but criminal.

So to see him catch that very disease now?

Remnick again:

From the start of his Presidency, Donald Trump has threatened the health and the security of the United States. It has now been made clear that Trump’s incompetence, cynicism, and recklessness have threatened his own welfare. Even the best security system and the most solicitous medical officers in the world could not protect him from a danger that he insisted on belittling and ignoring.

Joe Biden, like all other decent Americans, immediately wished the president a speedy recovery. Can we imagine Trump doing the same if the roles were reversed? Of course not. He would be onstage cackling that Biden was “weak” for getting sick. (“I like presidents who don’t catch COVID,” as the meme illustrated with a laughing John McCain goes. Check your Internet for dates and times in your area.) Indeed, in one of his video tweets from Walter Reed, Trump framed his hospitalization as an act of bravery and sacrifice on his part. Just in case anyone feels even an iota of sympathy for him, he is there to quickly remind us who he really is.

Fox News laughably called for Biden to suspend his campaign while Trump recovers…..as if Trump would ever do likewise. (In fact, Biden immediately pulled his negative ads as soon as word broke of the president’s illness; the Trump campaign pointedly said it would not do the same.)

So no matter how humane and magnanimous we wish to be, it is all but impossible to gaze upon Trump’s infection with COVID without noting the irony, and if I’m honest, a certain amount of grim schadenfreude.

For I genuinely do wish Trump a full recovery, as the premature embrace of the Grim Reaper would, in a way, be yet another way in which he has dodged justice and accountability his whole life. Like a great many of his critics and foes, I don’t want Donald Trump to die of COVID. I want him to recover, get beaten like Ginger Baker’s drum kit on November 3rd, then slink off to Mar-a-Lago in humiliation and disgrace to await his fitting for an orange jumpsuit and his place in history as the worst US President ever and one of the most wretched human beings of this or any other century. 

Death by COVID is not the closure justice demands. So we do wish Donald well, both because he is a fellow human being—notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, or the way he has treated others in the same position—but also because the fate he deserves is something quite different.

JAGGED LITTLE PILL

The specifics of how Trump caught the virus, and then recklessly exposed others offers a microcosm of how he has endangered the entire country over the past nine ten months.

Heather Cox Richardson writes:

The Trump entourage has refused to wear masks, social distance, or follow the advice of public health experts for reducing the spread of the virus. Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. The Washington Post reported that Secret Service agents, who risk their lives to protect the president, are angry and frustrated: “He’s never cared about us.” The 30-50 Republican donors who met with Trump Thursday night at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, are “freaking out,” one report noted. Tickets had cost up to $250,000, and Trump met privately with about 19 people for 45 minutes. Trump knew his adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive when he left for the club, but he went anyway. He did not wear a mask.

Reporter Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who moderated Tuesday’s debate and so was one of those the Trumps’ entourage endangered, revealed today that Trump arrived too late on Tuesday for a COVID-19 test, as the venue required. Instead, there was an “honor system.” Organizers assumed the people associated with the campaigns would not come unless they had tested negative. Trump’s people arrived wearing masks, which they had to have to enter the auditorium, but then removed them shortly after sitting down, and refused to put them back on. During the debate, Trump mocked Biden for his habit of wearing a mask.

The campaign did not tell the Biden camp that Hicks, who attended the debate, had tested positive for coronavirus the day after the event. The Biden organization learned it from the newspapers. The White House did not even tell former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who spent four days in close quarters with Hicks and Trump, helping the president prepare for the debate. He, too, learned the news from the media.

Trump announced his diagnosis—via tweet, natch—in the early hours of Friday morning, but there is evidence that he may have known as eagerly as Wednesday. On that day, he nonetheless got on Air Force One with a largely maskless entourage including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; national security advisor Robert O’Brien; Rudy Giuliani; press secretary Kayleigh McEnany; Ivanka; Jared; Donald Jr.; Kimberly Guilfoyle; Eric and Lara; Tiffany; campaign manager Bill Stepien; a shirtsleeved Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, and others. Stephen Miller was also onboard, despite Air Force regulations against bringing live reptiles on government aircraft.

You may be reassured to know that Trump clearly does not care about of these people—his own family and closest supporters—any more than he does the rest of the country. Or perhaps they have all bought into the myth of their own science-denying invincibility. Or maybe they’re just part of the Trump death cult. Or all of the above.

Since then, Stepien, McEnany, and Republican Senators Mike Lee, Thom Tillis, and Ron Johnson have all tested positive, as has Chris Christie (couldn’t he just retreat to his private beach?). Tillis and Lee happen to on the Senate Judiciary Committee which is in a mad rush to confirm archconservative Amy Coney Barrett before Election Day. Chairman Lindsey Graham has indicated that the committee will continue to push forward like a Wuhan bat out of hell nonetheless, even if it has to do so virtually. (Chuck Schumer and others have, reasonably, called for a postponement while health concerns for committee members can be addressed.)

There is yet another irony in the fact that this particular COVID outbreak is being traced to a White House Rose Garden event on Saturday September 26^th to announce that nomination. The GOP’s mindbendingly hypocritical rush to jam through the Notorious ACB (as she is already being called) is putting its already endangered Senate majority at further risk in the upcoming election; it might wind up costing it the presidency too, if not the very lives of various high-ranking Republican officials, going all the way to the very top.

In the words of Alanis Morissette, isn’t it ironic? 

ANOTHER MOFO IN A MOTORCADE

Trump’s appalling disregard for others has continued since his hospitalization. (It’s a lifelong habit, actually.) On Sunday evening Trump decided to take a joy ride, leaving his hospital suite to cruise around in a motocade and wave at his supporters who had gathered outside the gates.

AYFKM?

He is supposed to be quarantining. He is not. As a morbidly obese 74 year old man with a shitty diet and some apparently alarming symptoms of the virus, he is supposed to be doing everything he can to maximize his chances for a full recovery. He is not. He is not supposed to be exposing other people—like the Secret Service agents driving him around—to the virus. He is.

It ought to go without saying that that ride was an incredibly reckless and indefensible act, one that no legitimate doctor should have allowed, suggesting that either he is acting “against medical advice,” as the term of art goes (meaning, more precisely, in defiance of), or that his doctors are in violation of their oath by subsuming their professional obligations to political allegiance.

There is no denying that the optimistic, carefully worded public statements they have made thus far—particularly those of Dr. (CDR) Sean Conley—have proven to be misleading, perhaps deliberately so, in obscuring the truth about the severity of Trump’s condition, his use of supplemental oxygen, his prognosis, and other issues. In that sense, Dr. Conley appears to be in the grand tradition of White House predecessors like Dr. Ronny Jackson, another Navy doc, who famously stood before the cameras and pretty much claimed that Trump was a superman. (Dr. J is now retired from the Navy and running for Congress in Texas as a rabid right wing Trump acolyte.)

But, as the New York Times reports, “the few medical details disclosed—including his fluctuating oxygen levels and a decision to begin treatment with a steroid drug—suggested to many infectious disease experts that he is suffering a more severe case of COVID-19 than the physicians acknowledged.” Indeed, the treatments he is receiving are indicative of a patient with an advanced and even life-threatening case of the novel coronavirus. The use of dexamethasone in particular is significant, as it “is reserved for those with severe illness, because it has not been shown to benefit those with milder forms of the disease and may even be risky.”

Yet these same White House doctors tell us that Trump could be released as early as today, another thing that mystifies most informed medical observers. The WaPo reports that “Robert Wachter, chairman of the University of California at San Francisco’s department of medicine, said any patient of his with Trump’s symptoms and treatment who wanted to be discharged from the hospital three days after their admission would need to sign out against doctors’ orders because it would be so ill-advised.”

The point is not the severity or mildness of Trump’s illness, although that is a concern of course. It’s the lack of transparency—not unusual when it comes to presidential health issues in any administration, but in this case emblematic of this one’s egregious history of lies and general unwillingness to be honest with the American people.

Lest we forget, this is not merely a matter of Trump’s own well-being, but of national security as well. The dangers of a helmless ship should be self-evident, as they surely are to our enemies, even if it Captain Queeg who has been at the helm.

Almost a decade ago, I worked on a script for Sony Pictures that envisioned a biowarfare “decapitation” attack that took out the president and all the senior leaders of the United States. It’s a scenario that goes back decades—usually in the form of a nuclear strike by the old USSR—and one that motivated the shadowy Continuity of Government program that dates to the Truman era. But with the superspreader event at the Rose Garden that is thought to be the source of Trump’s infection (unless it was long-rumored hanky panky with Hope Hicks), we have seen something approaching that for real.

Then again, like Queeg, Trump doing nothing is in many ways better than Trump hard at work.

CREDIBILITY GAP

Many of Dr. Conley’s comments an answers to questions have been meticulously constructed to give the rosiest possible picture without outright lying. As Dr. Leana S. Wen writes in the Washington Post:

On Saturday, Conley repeatedly evaded questions about whether the president required supplemental oxygen. On Sunday, he stated that Trump was not on oxygen at that time but did have two episodes, one on Friday and one on Saturday, where his oxygen level dropped. When asked whether it fell below 90 percent, Conley answered that it wasn’t “into the low 80s or anything.” So we are left to surmise that perhaps the oxygen levels were, at some point, in the mid or high 80s — a concerning finding that points to substantial lung involvement.

Even more concerning is Conley’s admission that the drop in numbers on Friday was what prompted the president’s transfer to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. This was in line with (White House Chief of Staff Mark) Meadows saying in an interview that he was worried about the president’s “plummeting oxygen levels.”

I’m worried, too. A COVID-19 patient who experiences a substantial drop in oxygen saturation is unstable. It was correct to transfer him to the hospital to watch for signs of deterioration in case he needs further respiratory support. Here’s my question: What’s changed for Americans to be assured that the president is now stable to return to his residence, as doctors suggested could happen as early as Monday?

On Sunday, we learned that Trump has been started on dexamethasone, a steroid medication that has been shown to reduce mortality in critically ill patients. Importantly, this medication is not recommended for patients with non-severe disease. Given the use of steroids and oxygen saturation drops, it seems likely that the president has at least moderate pneumonia.

This is something else that Conley won’t confirm; when asked about Trump’s chest X-ray or CT findings, he would only say they are as “expected.” Notably, he did not say that they were “normal.”

Another possibility Dr. Wen suggests is that Trump may be further along than we have been told, in which case we have been lied to about when he first contracted and was diagnosed with COVID—not good either, especially for those whom he came in contact with but who were not told of that potential exposure.

Trump may well have already been released by the time this piece goes online; I have no doubt that he will insist on doing so as soon as possible, irrespective of the best medical advice. Laughably, Trump tried to show he was hard at work even in the hospital by releasing staged photos of himself signing blank pieces of paper. But that’s OK: again, it’s preferable to the actual orders he has signed as president.

GET WELL SOON

The amount of undeserved good luck from which Donald Trump has benefited in his long, obscenely privileged life is enough to turn the Pope into Bill Maher. To name just a few lowlights, he has been able to avoid the consequences of bankruptcy, tax fraud, sexual assault, campaign finance felonies, the popular vote, a special counsel, impeachment, and even objective reality itself. But the novel coronavirus has zero fucks to give, and on that count at least, Trump’s luck—and his ability to defy science—has run out.

Trump may yet get off easy once again. Per above, he has the absolute best medical care in the world, and we are already seeing him receive aggressive, cutting edge, experimental treatments that are unavailable to the vast majority of his fellow Americans. So the least deserving person in America is getting the most top-notch care.

But just the fact that he has gotten COVID at all is a stark reminder that not even the most arrogant blowhard can poke his finger in the Lord’s eye forever and get away with it.

With all that help, and even with his comorbidities, he may yet beat COVID, which he will brag about, and his slobbering disciples will lap up as proof that it ain’t that bad, and/or that he’s indeed the übermensch that Dr. Ronny Jackson claimed. But even so, it will keep the pandemic on the front pages, and deny the Trump campaign its desire to make Americans forget his wretched handling of it. In case anyone has already forgotten, let me remind you:

As I write this, some 215,000 Americans are dead from the pandemic—about half as many as we lost in World War II—a significant number of whom would be alive if Donald Trump were not president. 

Even Trump’s illness may not be enough to put an end to that. Even as he enjoys blue chip medical care at taxpayers’ expense, the continuing Republican attempt to openly steal this election and keep him on office went into high gear. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered the closure of all but one ballot dropoff location per county. (Some Texas counties are bigger than the state of Rhode Island.) In Pennsylvania, state Republican leaders tried to form a so-called “Select Committee on Election Integrity” to investigate the presidential election even as it is still going on. This five-member committee would be comprised of a 3-2 Republican majority with the power to subpoena election officials, the Postal Service officers, and “examine aspects of the election, even while voting and counting are in process.” 

In other words. the GOP continues to make it very very clear that it does not want the American people to vote and express their will this November. What does that tell you?

To repeat, no one knows for sure how this latest turn will ultimately affect that race. There have already been so many unforeseen twists and turns that only a fool would venture to do so. Still, I have to believe that Trump’s infection and hospitalization, however mild or severe it turns out to be, will hurt him to a greater or lesser degree. But—full disclosure—I have been wrong before.

As the culture writer Jordan Zakarin tweeted, “To help Donald Trump get the full COVID-19 experience, let’s make sure he loses his job and is evicted from his home next month.”

I’ll join the chorus wishing Donald Trump well and a speedy recovery, along with the others in his circle who were recently infected….and the other roughly 43,000 Americans who were diagnosed with COVID on an average day last week. I hope the United States as a whole gets well soon, too……and I know just the cure I would prescribe.

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Photo: The King’s Necktie, off my TV (MSNBC)