Tag: elections

They Just Wanna Arrest Everybody

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Last week it was reported that, ahead of the 2026 midterms, the Republican Party is attempting to expand gerrymandering in Texas’s already heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts in an effort to secure an additional five seats in the US House of Representatives. With the Republican majority in that chamber as tight as it is, those five seats would make an enormous difference.

Gerrymandering is nothing new, of course, and I am legally bound by the Inviolable Rules of Democratic Party Self-Flagellation to acknowledge that both sides engage in it. What’s truly astonishing (though at this point, should it be?) is that Republicans are not even attempting to hide what they’re doing. On the contrary, they are baldly and boldly announcing the partisan motivations behind their actions, even in defiance of the will of the electorate, and offering utter nonsense by way of justification.

“We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats,” Trump told CNBC.“We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas. And I won Texas. I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled to five more seats.”

Who’s gonna tell him that’s not the way it works, that we actually have separate elections for members of Congress? Donald’s grasp of civics, such as it is, would embarrass a 7th grader. But we knew that.

But this is the world we live in now. Trump and his Republican myrmidons are so emboldened that they don’t just say the quiet part out loud: they shout it from the rooftops. (They may yet overreach and be brought down by their own hubris. We’ll see.)

“No party is entitled to any district,” Trump said, as he argued that the Republican Party was entitled to five more. The administration is now lobbying other red states like Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Missouri, and Florida to follow Texas’s lead. Trump has even gone so far as to call for an early, emergency census, one that would violate Constitutional rules for the conduct thereof, a plan that is both politically and practically impossible, which is no guarantee that Republicans won’t try it anyway.

But it gets much, much worse.

FIREFIGHT

In order to stymie this anti-democratic GOP maneuver, Democratic members of the Texas state legislature have exploited the parliamentary rules of order and temporarily fled the state to deny their Republican colleagues a quorum. (The Texas House of Representatives has 150 members; the presence of two-thirds is necessary to do business.) That’s the kind of toughness Dems are not known for, and is therefore very welcome in a battle like this one.

“Do you really think we would be willing to sit there and stay quiet while you stole the voice of our voters?” said Democratic state Rep. Ann Johnson. “This is not the Democratic Party of your grandfather, which would bring a pencil to a knife fight,” said National DNC Chair Ken Martin. “This is a new Democratic Party….We are going to fight fire with fire.”

Good on them.

So what was the Republican response? Just what you might imagine: good-natured, collegial admiration and compliments for the loyal opposition’s determination and cleverness.

No, I kid. Their reaction was spittle-flying, garment-rending, teeth-gnashing, hair-on-fire-setting apoplexy, of course.

Gov. Greg Abbott, one of the worst Republicans around, and that’s a high bar, filed a suit asking the Texas state Supreme Court to remove the House Democratic Caucus Chair from office and to authorize a special election to replace him. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, another ultra-MAGA shitbag, threatened to go to court to have the seats of what he called “any rogue lawmakers” declared vacant if they do not return to work forthwith. “The people of Texas elected lawmakers, not jet-setting runaways looking for headlines,” Kenny said in a statement. “If you don’t show up to work, you get fired.”

I’ll leave it to you to judge for yourself the irony that Cancun Ted Cruz’s compatriots have the gall to accuse anyone of dereliction of duty on the grounds of being out of state. (See also Ted’s recent AWOL status in Greece when Texas was hit with deadly floods. Not surprisingly, Cruz has been laying low in this particular brouhaha, leaving his comrade Sen. John Cornyn to be the public face of the effort, Senatorially speaking.)

Paxton’s own genuinely criminal history is the ironic icing on the putrid cake, from his indictment for securities fraud; to allegations of bribery and abuse of his office for which the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives (!) impeached him in 2023; to his role in the Stop-the-Steal scam, including speaking to the crowd on the Ellipsis on January 6, suing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin over the certification of their electoral votes, and being the only one of fifty secretaries of state to decline to condemn the violence that day. Not a coincidence as we watch his absurd grandstanding on the gerrymandering issue: Paxton is challenging Cornyn in the Republican Senate primary this year.

The furor of Texas Republicans—and Republicans across the country for that matter—is rich. The same people who routinely exploit every possible diabolical mechanism to get what they want (ask Supreme Court Justice Merrick Garland) are shocked—shocked!—that Democrats might resort to a maneuver not even half as outrageous as anything in the GOP playbook.

Just how outraged are they? So much so that they called for the FBI to arrest those Texas lawmakers and drag them back home.

Republican lawmakers in Texas voted to issue civil arrest warrants for their Democratic colleagues, warrants which authorize state law enforcement officials to find and forcibly return them to Austin. Abbott ordered the Texas Rangers to “immediately investigate fleeing Texas House Democrats for potential bribery and any other potential legal violations connected to their refusal to appear for a quorum.” (Not sure how that will affect the Rangers’ chances in the AL pennant race.) But those warrants are unenforceable outside the state. Therefore, the aforementioned Sen. Cornyn sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel—I just threw up in my mouth a little, writing that—asking the Bureau to arrest those Democratic lawmakers, claiming that “federal resources are necessary to locate the out-of-state Texas legislators who are potentially acting in violation of the law.” (Cornyn claims that Patel has agreed, though the FBI has not publicly commented.) Trump himself has also said that the FBI “may have to” get involved.

And what, you ask, are the laws of which Cornyn speaks that these Democrats are violating?

Cornyn claims that “legislators who solicited or accepted funds to aid in their efforts to avoid their legislative duties may be guilty of bribery or other public corruption offenses.” Emphasis on that word “may,” which is doing a lot of work here. Hang on to your hats: there is no evidence that any corruption is going on, and the good Senator certainly didn’t offer any. On the contrary, the maneuver is costing these renegade Democrats money, not earning it for them, as they face fines of $500 a day apiece while absent. The request also flies in the face of a Supreme Court ruling from just last year, and Cornyn—himself a former judge—knows that.

Not to go out on a limb here, but trying to enlist the FBI to advance their partisan gerrymandering crusade is a highly alarming escalation of the authoritarian project by the GOP.

In The Atlantic, Paul Rosenzweig, a deputy assistant secretary for policy of the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, states the patently obvious (albeit with great eloquence): that if the FBI “actively assists Texas police in locating and detaining the missing legislators, then it will be acting in an utterly lawless manner—and that will be of even graver concern than the underlying redistricting effort.”

Nothing about the Texas redistricting dispute would plausibly justify the FBI’s active engagement. For one thing, the Texas lawmakers’ flight from the state isn’t even criminal under Texas law. The warrants issued are merely common-law civil instruments to compel presence, much like a civil subpoena to testify.

Second, the Texas state matter is—well, a state matter. Even if it did involve some criminal allegations, those would relate to Texas’s criminal law—and thus be outside the bounds of the FBI’s federal jurisdiction. No one can credibly argue that the Democrats’ effort to defeat a quorum has anything in common with the mass killings or serial murders that may trigger FBI involvement in state crimes.

Rosenzweig writes: “Enlisting the FBI as the enforcement arm of a political party is a step toward a literal police state.”

Americans now face transgressions of settled legal norms every day, it seems. But the particular norm under threat in Texas—the need to prevent the party in power from using federal law-enforcement officers to implement its own political ends—is especially important because of the coercive authority that police carry with them.

We are about to find out, in real time, whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation remains a neutral law-enforcement agency or whether it has been transformed into an instrument of Republican power. Will the FBI help the Republican Party force through a partisan redistricting plan in Texas, or not? The answer to that question is of vital importance to sustaining American democracy.

THE POLICE STATE IMPULSE

Of course, the whole notion that these Texas Democrats are engaged in criminal activity at all is a farce. The Guardian’s Sam Levine quotes Texas state Rep. John Bucy, one of the lawmakers who made tracks: “Using federal law enforcement to track down political opposition is the tactic of a collapsing regime. It’s the kind of authoritarian overreach we condemn in other countries. Now it’s happening here.” (Or as Texas state Senator Boris Miles, another Democrat, memorably quipped, “They’re being ‘chased like runaway slaves.’”)

The fact that these calls for arrest have gone nowhere (for now), while welcome, is not the point. That they have been made at all is alarming.

This Republican impulse to criminalize, arrest, and incarcerate their foes goes back to the “lock her up” chants aimed at Hillary in 2016—gobsmacking at the time, though even then we didn’t take it literally or seriously as a genuine threat. (I can never remember which we’re supposed to do, when it comes to Trump threatening to burn America to the ground.) We see the same pattern in the mass deportation campaign. What was deceitfully pitched to voters as an effort focused on “criminals” and “terrorists” has revealed itself to be a willful blitzkrieg of indiscriminate arrests targeting all kinds of people who don’t remotely fit those designations.

Show of hands: who’s surprised? (The good news: a significant majority of Americans oppose such state terrorism.)

And the pattern goes far and wide. See also: FBI Director/slash/children’s book author/slash/online merch pitchman Kash Patel suggesting that Habitat for Humanity might be criminally prosecuted for EPA grants it received under the Biden administration; the arrest of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) for protesting outside an ICE detention center in her state; Senator Alex Padilla (D.-Calif.) thrown to the ground and handcuffed for interrupting a press conference by Homeland Defense Secretary and dog killing enthusiast Kristi Noem; federal agents putting Democratic New York City Comptroller Brad Lander in a chokehold; White House SpokesBarbie Karoline Leavitt threatening Chief Justice John Roberts with arrest if he gets in the way of the Trump agenda (no worries there; he won’t); all the way up to Director of National Intelligence and Kremlin Employee-of-the-Month Tulsi Gabbard accusing Barack Obama of treason and suggesting he could be prosecuted by the DOJ for that capital crime. (Presidential immunity is only Republicans, right?) Trump’s own predilection for accusing people of treason and calling for their execution goes without saying.

(In the Texas case, as in many other public matters these days, the impulse for violence and brutality isn’t limited to the state-sponsored kind either, but extends to right wing vigilantism: a bomb threat was called in to the Illinois hotel where many of the Democratic legislators are staying.)

In short, what we’re witnessing is the dark id at the center of the MAGA movement and mindset—a completely amoral “might makes right” philosophy rooted in sadism and the urge for domination. In this worldview, those who disagree with the ruling powers are simply branded as criminals, arrested, and punished. It goes without saying (or ought to) that this approach is fundamentally anti-democratic…..and increasingly, as in Texas, the Republican Party doesn’t even try to hide that fact, but rather, trumpets it as a feature not a bug for those gleefully onboard with right wing authoritarianism, which apparently is a significant portion of the Republican electorate.

Just as hypocrisy no longer obtains with the right wing and shame has ceased to be operative within its ranks, Republicans—from the rank-and-file voter all the way to the very top of their leadership—simply believe they are entitled to whatever they want because they are the only “real Americans” while the rest of us are just criminals, terrorists, and traitors. I’ve even had longtime Republican friends sling that “treason” accusation at me, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Folks, this is the very definition of a police state, and Republicans can no longer control themselves or even put up the pretense that they don’t viscerally long for it.

GAMING COMMISSION

Even apart from the chilling lust for violence and oppression, there is a deeply worrying practical subtext to what’s going on in Texas on a more pedestrian and conventionally political—but no less dangerous—level.

Trump’s assertion that Republicans are “entitled” to five more seats is part of a broader, shameless, undisguised push by the GOP to seize control of every House seat they can—not through winning the votes that reflect the will of the people, but by gaming the system in defiance of that will. Shoring up their razor thin margin in the House is essential not only for Republicans to enact their legislative agenda—which is to say, Donald’s—but also to lay the groundwork for any necessary electoral shenanigans in the 2028 presidential race.

The Texas-based journalist Ana Marie Cox writes in The New Republic that “Texas Republicans’ lickspittle acquiescence to President Donald Trump’s demand that they come up with five more congressional seats is the most important story in the country.”

Such blatant tinkering with the electoral map is the final act in the GOP’s decades-long play for permanent national minority rule—or better yet, the ascendance of an unelected ruling class. Their dedication to this project explains their otherwise nonsensical embrace of objectively unpopular policies. They do not care about being reelected. They are planning for a future when they don’t have to worry about what voters may or may not think or want.

They’re not worried about losing power. They’re building a system where they’ll never have to ask for it again.

Cox is echoing my thoughts in these pages last May, in a piece called “They’re Not Worried About Anything,” which were that “the GOP has no need of pragmatism, nor the pragmatic concerns of a legitimate political party, because it’s not—not a legitimate political party, and not worried about the voters—and that is because it does not intend to contend with a free and fair election ever again.”

But the actions of Texas Democrats are a hopeful sign that our side is not just going to take this campaign lying down.

Of course, gerrymandering is a plague that we should eliminate entirely. But not when one only party is engaging in this kind of political warfare with this level of aggression. (In Texas, the new GOP plan creates districts so tortured that the capital city of Austin, home to the University of Texas and a famously blue island in a sea of Lone Star red, would become part of a district shared with rural Texans 300 miles away.) Fortunately, the governors of Democratic-controlled states including Gavin Newsom of California, J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Laura Kelly of Kansas, and even the infuriatingly moderate Kathy Hochul of my own state of New York have indicated that they’re willing to re-draw their congressional districts in retaliation.

California Democrats, for example, are considering a plan that would net them five more seats, including one currently held by longtime Republican asshole Darrell Issa, negating Texas’s potential Republican gain. (Democrats currently hold all but nine of California’s 52 House seats.) But some have suggested that an eye for an eye is insufficiently ambitious by way of deterrent effect, and that the Dems should shoot for flipping even more seats. As Salon’s Peter Birkenhead writes: “If you’re playing chess with someone who puts a grenade on the table, you don’t try to capture the grenade with your bishop. You recognize that you are no longer playing chess, that something else is occurring where there once was chess, and react accordingly.”

It’s a shame it’s come to this, but at least this time our side recognizes the fight we’re in and isn’t surrendering preemptively—what Kansas’s Gov. Kelly called “unilateral disarmament.” Of course, Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist on John Cornyn’s reelection campaign, used the same term to indict Democrats to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, citing Illinois, which is heavily gerrymandered in their favor. But as Godfrey notes, “in Texas, they’re redrawing the maps five years early, rather than waiting for the census,” a much more blatant and non-traditional escalation of the practice.

If there’s an area where Democrats are more hard-nosed and willing to bend and even break the rules than Republicans, please email me at pulltheotherone@YGBSM.com.

FILE UNDER: SHAMELESSNESS, LACK THEREOF

The impulse to criminalize and arrest political foes and the effort to ratfuck the electoral system go hand-in-hand as part of the right wing war on American democracy.

What’s the end game for the standoff in Texas? I don’t know. The Democratic lawmakers have indicated their willingness to staying out of state for two weeks, until the current 30-day special session ends, and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—a Democrat, and himself a billionaire, as he memorably noted in his appearance at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, by way of tweaking Trump’s nose—has stated that he would be willing to help bankroll the cost of the Democratic resistance. That will make John Cornyn’s head explode.

But that tactic won’t work forever, as Abbott can call special sessions ad infinitum. Even if Democratic lawmakers stay away for months, Texas courts can simply move the date of the midterm primary. (State Dems have tried this move twice before on other matters, in 2003 and 2021 and failed both times.) The Atlantic’s Godfrey suggests that the Democrats’ real objective is to cast a public spotlight onto the Republicans’ anti-democratic scheme and force them to abandon it. But as Ana Marie Cox writes: “These fuckers can’t be shamed.” The threat of retaliation by blue states—a kind of gerrymandering arms race—might be a factor, but the smart money, grimly, is on the GOP eventually getting exactly what it wants. Then it will be up to Newsom, Pritzker, et al to make good on their threat of tit-for-tat, and maybe some extra tit for good measure. I hope they do, as thwarting neo-fascist control of the House of Representatives is paramount, even though an unfortunate side effect will be an America even more sharply divided, geographically and in every other way, along red and blue lines.

What the FBI ultimately does is also fraught. As Rosenzweig writes, “One hopes that the FBI will step back from the brink of legal chaos. But if the FBI jumps off the cliff and does the Republican Party’s bidding on a manifestly political question, it will be a dark day for American democracy.”

There is no more debating when fascism will arrive in the United States, as we’ve been doing since 2017; it is inarguably upon us. But I’ve long maintained that the upcoming midterms will represent an enormous decision point. If there is some semblance of a free and fair election in November 2026 and we’re able to take back the House, the entire landscape of this struggle will change. But if we face a rigged election characterized by massive voter suppression and electoral subversion by the GOP, that will be an entirely different matter. (In between: a reasonably fair election in which we fuck up and fail win the House.) I honestly have no idea which scenario is most likely, though I am preparing for the worst….and the brazen attempt to turbocharge Republican gerrymandering in Texas—to include threats of arresting Democratic lawmakers—is not a good sign on that count. If Republicans are willing to do something like that so openly, imagine what else they’re prepared to do.

And if you get in their way, they’ll label you a criminal and come for you with cuffs.

*********

Photo: Trump with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on July 11, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.

A Man, a Plan, a Cabal

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

Donald Trump has a lot of trouble keeping secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SECRETS AND LIES (AND THEN MORE LIES)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scared shitless yet?

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

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

And they just might get away with it.

PLANS A, B, AND C

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WE MUST GET MOOSE AND SQUIRREL

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

OK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMING SOON

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

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

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

Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

The Last Two Weeks of Democracy?

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It is no exaggeration to say that two weeks from now, if Donald Trump defies the odds—yet again—and wins the presidency for a second time, we may be looking at the end of participatory democracy in the United States. (Note to hairsplitters: yes, I know Donny would not take office until noon on January 20, 2025. But “The Last Eleven Weeks of Democracy” does not really sing.) I have been part of the large chorus sounding this alarm for the past several years, as have many of you, dear readers, I am sure. It is hardly news. But now that the moment of truth is nearly upon us, it is especially nerve-wracking.

I am not writing to say that I believe that is sure to happen. Far from it. We have it within our power to beat him like a whipped dog. But even if we do, it’s going to be a nailbiter, and that in itself is telling and alarming.

I wrote recently about how astonishing (and depressing) it is that this election is as close as it is, after nine years of seeing Trump in action, and in particular, after a year or more of hearing his angry, vengeful plans should we return him to power. In any rational world, Kamala would be leading in a blowout. For that matter, in any rational world, Joe Biden would be leading in a blowout, despite his age and declining cognitive capacity, and Kamala would not have been called upon to step into the race in the first place.

But news flash: We ain’t in a rational world. Obviously.

I don’t feel the need to explain why Trump’s re-election would signal the end of democracy. Feel free to peruse the news on any random day over the past two years. He has openly announced his disdain for the rule of law (including a call to “terminate” the Constitution), his desire to be a tyrant, and his eagerness to put an end to free elections in this country. Debates over whether to apply the “F word” to him and his political project have long since been rendered moot. As many sage observers have noted, Trump—unlike many would-be autocrats—is not trying to hide his authoritarian impulses or policy prescriptions: he is trumpeting them.

Yet an alarmingly large segment of the American population is totally cool with Trump, and therein lies the problem. They are a minority, yes, we should never forget that, but a minority large enough and radical enough to make significant trouble. Frankly, it has ever been thus, from the very founding of the country by our forefathers in contentious compromise over the matter of human bondage. That authoritarian strain—one that favors privileged classes oppressing the rest, sometimes quite brutally—has been at the core of the American dilemma for our entire existence as a nation. We famously fought a bloody civil war over it, a war whose repercussions continue to be felt powerfully to this day. And Trump represents that dilemma’s latest flashpoint.

The United States therefore is about to undergo an acid test of the highest order. We are a country that ostentatiously fancies itself a beacon of democracy, “the shining city on a hill,” the leader of the Free World as we used to say during the Cold War, the “indispensable nation,” and lots of other highfalutin, self-flattering folderol. Now we stand on the verge of electing an openly fascist candidate who makes a mockery of every value we claim to hold dear. And tens of millions of Americans love it.

The question before us now is whether the rest of us can summon the will to stop them at the ballot box.

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

In the immediate wake of the 2020 election, I wrote a piece for this blog called “The Ghost of Grover Cleveland,” named for the last president to make a successful return to the Oval Office after being ousted from it. In it, I optimistically floated the hope that a twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president who had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans during a pandemic that he managed (“managed” in bigass quotes) with depraved indifference would find it hard to win the White House again. And that was before he tried to overturn a free and fair election by force, before we knew about the stolen classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, before he was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in a pair of civil trials and ordered to pay $82 million in restitution, before he was convicted of 34 felonies related to tax fraud and electoral interference stemming from hush money payments to a porn star.

I didn’t rule it out, but I posited that it would be hard.

Oh, naivete, thy name is Bob.

In that piece, I wrote that it was very likely that Trump would continue “to control the Republican Party like a high-priced dominatrix, tormenting the Biden administration from exile, maintaining an only slightly diminished profile in the media (with its obvious addiction to covering this trainwreck), and preparing himself for his revenge in 2024…..Trump will be able to keep a chokehold on his party, freeze the field of other potential Republican contenders, dictate GOP policy as the de facto leader of the opposition, remain in the spotlight he craves, and most importantly for him, raise money hand over fist from his cult of reliable suckers until they are bled dry.”

That part was pretty much a bullseye, even if I do say so myself.

I also quoted a Republican consultant named Patrick Griffin who told the right wing Washington Times: “Donald Trump is not exactly going to follow Jimmy Carter, who is out building homes with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House. This is going to be the worst leader in exile the world has ever seen.”

Bullseye again.

I also predicted—and it wasn’t hard—that the Republican Party would continue bend to Trump’s every whim. “To grasp the depths of the GOP leadership’s servility, one has but to witness their craven obsequiousness even in this lame duck period, when they know he will soon be out of power, to the point of sitting on their collective hands while he tries to mount a coup.” And the coup of which I spoke was of the Brad Raffensperger-pressuring kind; January 6th hadn’t even happened yet. And even that did not ultimately crack the GOP’s pathetic subservience to this grifter.   

Lastly, I suggested that Trump’s legal troubles, which were then only looming, would hamper his run in ’24: 

(O)nce he leaves office he is going to be hit with a tsunami of legal problems and criminal prosecution, almost surely including felony charges for everything from bank fraud to money laundering to tax evasion. Come 2024 he may well be in prison, or at least under indictment. (Not that that would stop him from running, or his supporters from voting for him.)

Of course, Trump being Trump, he will only use such legal and financial woes as fuel for his candidacy, given that his political career has always been built upon personal grievance, in a feedback loop with the grievance of his supporters. But there is a limited appeal to that model, and the last four years have largely exhausted it.

You can see that my batting average was beginning to dip there. (Everyone OK if I switch metaphors from archery to baseball?) I did not anticipate just how successfully Trump would be able to manipulate the legal system with his patented strategy of delay delay delay, even though he had done so his whole adult life, or how far his handpicked Supreme Court would go in shamelessly assisting him.

Because on the whole, back in December 2020, I largely shared the prediction of smart observers like Steve Coll of The New Yorker and Yascha Mounk and David Graham of The Atlantic that Donald Trump was likely to fade into irrelevance as even his diehard followers got bored with what Mounk called “the ever more histrionic antics of the sore loser they just kicked out of office.” Or as I put it:

Trump may soon be a marginal figure in American culture: a pathetic, unhinged old man rambling around his Florida mansion in the grip of increasing cognitive decline, in between trips to the courthouse, beset with financial woes, ranting at an ever-diminishing following and leaving the rest of the country scratching its collective head at how this guy was ever president in the first place. 

Correct on every count, except the crucial last one.

PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE

So here we are.

It would be one thing if Trump had made a convincing case for his return to power, even if it was a dishonest, demagogic one. (Does anyone think he could make any other kind?) But his campaign, if it can be called that, is a dumpster fire on the deck of the Titanic as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Not only has Trump made an open embrace of fascism the centerpiece of his campaign, he has also displayed over and over again his patently obvious cognitive decline with his rambling and incoherent public statements, even if the mainstream media repeatedly gives him a pass while scrutinizing Kamala within an inch of her life. He careens from one outrageous episode to the next, holding rallies in states he can never win, insulting everyone in sight, and making outrageous promises he could never keep but for which he is never sufficiently held to account by the media or the Democratic Party. In the past couple weeks alone he has blamed Zelenskyy for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, held a 39 minute dance party in lieu of a stump speech, reiterated the violence-inciting lie about Haitian immigrants barbecuing stole housepets, told a crowd about the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick (do pro golfers really shower together, ever?), spewed vulgarities about his opponents like an eighth grader, bragged about taking away the right to an abortion to right wing audiences while lying out the other side of his mouth that he did no such thing, doubled down on Nazi-like rhetoric about fellow Americans as “the enemy within,” called January 6th “a day of love,” and of course repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And that is but a small sampling.

In the past—and even now, with any other politician—any one of those things would have been immediately and automatically disqualifying. The mind reels.

By now we ought to understand that for his true believers, all that stuff falls under “feature not a bug.” They LIKE that he is that way. But what of ostensibly rational Republicans, independents, and others who don’t love “Trump being Trump,” but are somehow gonna vote for him anyway? (We can leave out of the discussion the cynical opportunists like Vance, Rubio, Graham, Hawley, et al who know how bad he is, but long ago rationalized their obeisance to him.) Their reasons—tribal, financial, self-deluding, or what have you—matter not at all in the end, only the fact of their ultimate complicity.

If the race were being decided purely on policy—which is to say, on the facts—Kamala would be running away with it. (The Washington Post recently reported that, when presented with Harris’s agenda and Trump’s side by side in a blind taste test, Americans resoundingly prefer her positions to his, even in areas like crime and immigration where—inexplicably—a slim majority says it trusts him more.) On character, too, Trump’s deranged behavior and brazen, undisguised promise that he will dismantle the very foundations of American governance and turn it into nothing more than a mechanism for score-settling and punishing his political enemies ought to be dealbreakers, even for so-called conservatives, doncha think? But tribalism and demagoguery, it turns out, are remarkably powerful….much more so than we foolishly believed not so long ago.

Then there is the segment of Americans who have tuned it at all out, including folks on the far left, exhausted by the barrage of disinformation, misinformation, fake news, pro wrestling-style antics, and deliberately provoked divisiveness. But that is yet another trick of the authoritarian right, well documented by everyone from Hannah “Banality of Evil” to Steve “Flood the Zone with Shit” Bannon: hammering the populace with propaganda that aims not to convince but merely to destroy the willingness (or ability) to think critically, or care, until those subjected to it are numb, jaded, and resigned to the false belief that “both sides are equally bad” and what’s the point of voting, or caring about politics at all?

Of course, the most magic trick of all was taking the shame of January 6, when even contemptible Republicans like McConnell and Graham—briefly—could not deny the ghastliness of Donald Trump, and inverting it over the course of four years into a perverse badge of honor and litmus test for the nationwide Jonestown that is the contemporary GOP. Observing that process alone ought to tell us all we need to know about how and why Donald Trump is within a frog hair of regaining the presidency.

But again: As maddening as it is that Trump is even in this contest, we must not give in to fatalism. Generating a sense of despair among Democrats and independents—an illusion that Trump’s victory is a fait accompli—is another part of the Republican playbook, extending even to right wing polls trying to create a false sense of momentum on Trump’s behalf in hopes of being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This just in: It ain’t. Not by a longshot. We must remember that if the race is that close and Trump has potential triumph in his grasp, SO DOES KAMALA. Of course we would all prefer a saner world where she’s assured of any easy win. But the operative word is “win,” not the adjective modifying it. We can push her to victory, and render all this angst and dread irrelevant.

In that case, fake right wing polls showing Trump cruising to victory serve another purpose: laying the groundwork for claims they wuz robbed if and when they do lose.

ALL YOU FASCISTS BOUND TO LOSE

Even ahead of the outcome of the election, this much we know already: America is not well, and in two very distinct ways.

The first is systemic. In the Electoral College—like so many of America’s ills, a result of our slaveholding history—we have a patently un-democratic, antiquated, countermajoritarian method of choosing our head of state. Our indefensible allegiance to this institution means that unique among advanced democracies using the presidential system, we do not choose our leader by popular vote, but instead allow a conniving minority to take power. (For a deep dive on that, see Elie Mystal’s recent piece in The Nation, “A Lesson in Basic Civics for People Who Stubbornly Defend the Electoral College.” I’ll have more on that in an upcoming post.)

Twice in the past six presidential elections the loser of the popular vote has won the election regardless, thanks to the Electoral College—both times benefiting the Republican candidate, with help from the Supreme Court the first time and from the Kremlin the second. Prior to that, it had happened only three times in the preceding 211 years, all in the 19th century. But now, thanks to shifting demographics, it is pretty much a 50/50 coin flip every time. And it might happen again in just two weeks, as Kamala is all but certain to win the national popular vote by several million (as did Hillary and Joe), while the result in the Electoral College is far less clear.

So that is awful.

But the second diagnosis is even more damning.

We have a radical minority of tens of millions of Americans who are totally fine with fascism. If that were not so, the tyranny of the Electoral College would be far less damaging. But enough Americans fall on the fascist continuum—from the casual and apathetic who aren’t sufficiently bothered by it, to the firebreathing fanatics who actively thrill to it—to allow them to exploit our fucked up system and potentially seize power. Even if we avoid that fate come the first week of November, it promises to be a photo finish, and that is far too close for comfort.

And that is the best case scenario.

How to reckon with those twin ills is a question for another day. If we’re lucky that day will come in early November, if we manage to stave off the anti-democratic threat in the short term. If not, we will have a far more pressing and urgent set of concerns to contend with.

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Photo: Doug Mills The New York Times

Blueprint for Chaos

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

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

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

We better be ready.

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

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

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

And it gets even worse:

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

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

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

But we don’t have to.

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

THE SOREST LOSER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWIN PIQUES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guatemalan Model

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Last week in these pages, I published an excerpt from my new book RESISTING THE RIGHT, which describes how to stop the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and—in the worst case scenario—how to push back against a right wing autocracy should our efforts fail and MAGA Republicans succeed in regaining power.

The book surveys the various arenas in which that pro-democracy campaign can unfold, from protest and civil disobedience to economics, the press, religion, public health, the arts, and simple interpersonal interaction, among others. Notwithstanding the title, it also explains why “resistance” is the wrong word—and wrong mindset—for that effort.

I’ve recently learned of a case study in exactly that process, in Guatemala, whose people have, remarkably, evicted a vicious and entrenched right wing dictatorship by means of precisely those methods.

“Over the past six months,” writes the Montreal-based Venezuelan journalist Quico Toro, an “unlikely coalition of urban professionals and Indigenous people has pulled off something extraordinary,” ousting from power an oppressive kleptocratic regime that had kept the country under its boot for 27 years. “Guatemalans have made an audacious gambit to take their government back,” Toro reports, “And against all odds, they’re winning.”

I am not an expert on Guatemala; what I know about the country could fit in a thimble, with room to spare. Most of this information comes from a piece Mr. Toro wrote for The Atlantic called “How to Defeat a Mafia State.” But if his reportage is correct, at a time when many of us in the USA are contemplating the very real threat of a neo-fascist Christian nationalist regime seizing power in our own country, the Guatemalan model gives us hope, and shows how a determined populace can defeat even the ruthless and dug-in autocracy.

After a week when Vladmir Putin openly murdered Alexander Navalny ahead of another coronation election in Russia, and Donald Trump brazenly promised to deploy the US military within the United States to set up concentration camps on the southern border, and the Supreme Court of Alabama gave us a preview of the fundamentalist theocracy it would like to install, quoting Bible verses by way of declaring that a frozen embryo is a human being, we can use all the inspiration we can get.

LIFE DURING WARTIME

For 36 years, beginning in 1960, Guatemala endured a horrific civil war that took the lives of some 200,000 people at the hands of a military trained and equipped with US taxpayer dollars. “At the height of the violence,” Toro writes, “from 1981 to 1983, the Guatemalan army committed more than 600 massacres,” on behalf of what he calls “the same tiny white elite that’s controlled Guatemala since colonial times.” About 83% of those murdered were from the country’s Mayan peoples. Forcing those Indigenous people out of the country was an explicit goal of the military campaign, “which is why 1.7 million Americans today are of Guatemalan origin.”

After the war ended in 1996, the same officer corps that had committed and directed those atrocities took control of the government, forming what was colloquially known as the pacto de corruptos, or “pact of the corrupt.”

Despite the trappings of democracy—a typical trick of tyrannies—every aspect of Guatemalan governance was under the control of this junta, including all the major political parties, the courts, and the media. Elections were rigged to keep opposition candidates disqualified. Graft and corruption were endemic, with the money all flowing to those in power. Toro:

Guatemala was arguably an excellent example of what the Venezuelan writer Moisés Naím calls a “mafia state”—a country run by a criminal syndicate focused mostly on enriching itself…..

A nested set of criminal enterprises thoroughly colonized the state, infiltrating not just the government, but the courts, the election authorities, and crucially, the powerful office of the public prosecutor.

Of special note: one of the reasons the pacto was able to come to power was because of a broad amnesty after the war that allowed even the guiltiest and most blood-soaked actors to avoid consequences. South African-style truth and reconciliation was rejected in favor of a Spanish style “pact of forgetting.” As former US Representative Tom Perriello (D-Va.), who was a special adviser for the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, told The New York Times, countries that have suffered national trauma and “skip the accountability phase end up repeating 100 percent of the time—but the next time the crisis is worse. People who think that the way forward is to brush this under the rug seem to have missed the fact that there is a ticking time bomb under the rug.”

America: take note.

WHEN THE LEVEE BROKE

After almost twenty years of the pacto’s monstrous rule, popular disgust reached critical mass in 2015 when protests broke out over the outrageous corruption of President Otto Pérez Molina, formerly a general in the Guatemalan army.

During those protests, a tiny group of about twenty academics began meeting quietly to discuss what could be done. Toro describes a debate between one faction—led by a 22-year-old student leader called Samuel Pérez—that argued for forming a political party to challenge the pacto at the ballot box, and another—comprised of older dissidents—who argued for raising money abroad to finance “grassroots democracy-building initiatives.”

The former ultimately carried the day, creating a center-left party dubbed Movimiento Semilla (Seed Movement) that set about painstakingly gathering enough signatures, one by one, to get on the ballot—no mean feat for a movement that was largely white, urban, and intellectual in a country that Toro describes as mostly conservative, Indigenous, and rural, comprised primarily of small farmers.

One might think seeking an electoral solution in a country so wantonly corrupt and controlled by a criminal elite would be naïve beyond belief. It certainly seemed that way at first.

In 2019 Semilla won a mere seven seats in Guatemala’s 160-seat congress, garnering just 5% of the vote. Even that level of success was astounding.

Four years later, the party ran as its presidential candidate a sociology professor and former diplomat named Bernardo Arévalo who had led the opposing faction in those early dissident conclaves back in 2015. (He was also the son of the country’s first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo, who took office in 1945 after a popular uprising overthrew Guatemala’s US-backed dictator Jorge Ubico.) Bernardo Arévalo, Toro writes, “was seen as an intellectual’s intellectual—mild-mannered, precise with language, moderate to the bone. He was also, alas, utterly obscure. A poll taken one month before the first round of the election had him pulling 0.7 percent of the vote.”

But that very obscurity proved to be a superpower.

The government had already found ways to disqualify all the other opposition presidential candidates. But Arévalo’s exceptionally low profile allowed him to slip through the cracks. Opposition voters rallied around him and last June he placed second in the first round of voting, stunning everyone, Arévalo and Semilla included.

In the runoff six weeks later, he was to face the former first lady, Sandra Torres, who was widely reviled. Shocked to find himself favored to win, Arévalo was subjected to lawsuits from the ruling party “challenging Semilla’s party registration on technicalities before judges they controlled.” It was another dose of the very corruption that had disgusted Guatemalans in the first place.

Let’s let Toro take it from here:

A judge closely linked to the pacto quickly handed down a ruling disqualifying Arévalo from the runoff. The move provoked outrage around Guatemala and a strong response from the United States and the European Union, which condemned it as a threat to democracy.

In fact, the pacto had blundered spectacularly: Nothing could have burnished Arévalo’s anti-corruption bona fides like their panicked attempt to sideline him. Pressure to allow him to run in the second round proved too much for the regime. The country’s top court reversed the decision and allowed Arévalo to stand. He won with a crushing 61 percent of the valid vote.

Like father, like son.

But in a funhouse mirror version of the US election of 2020, Guatemala’s powerful prosecutor general María Consuelo Porras, the equivalent of the US attorney general, brought repeated, spurious legal actions claiming Arévalo’s victory was a fraud. “People seethed at this slow-motion coup attempt,” Toro writes.

Hmmm. Déjà vu all over again.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AND THE HIGH TECH CAVALRY

As we have observed, modern tyrannies are keen to use the mufti of genuine democracy—“free” elections, the illusion of an independent press, a kangaroo court system—as camouflage. (Putin’s is the leading example.) But those ploys can create openings that pro-democracy forces can exploit, as Semilla did. And when they do, the bastards usually drop the act, and their gloves. Which is exactly what happened in Guatemala.

It was at that point that by-the-book electoral politics on behalf of democracy passed the baton to something more visceral and outlaw, yet still non-violent.

It happened in a small city called Totonicapán, 120 miles west of the capital of Guatemala City, 98 percent of whose residents are from the K’iche’ Maya people, who had been brutally oppressed during the decades of war. A local NGO known as the 48 Cantons of Totonicapán launched what Toro calls “one of the most consequential campaigns of civil disobedience in Central American history.”

Totonicapán protesters flooded into Guatemala City, sparking copycat protests from other Maya groups and Spanish-speaking Guatemalans. Over the first three weeks of October last year, Indigenous demonstrators more or less shut down the country, blocking key roads around the capital and staging marches to demand that the prosecutor general and the judge who had originally disqualified Arévalo resign, and calling for the president-elect to be allowed to take office.

This was not some symbolic spasm of outrage, but a sustained act of disciplined defiance that carried on at length, making the government feel the pain. “People put their lives on hold for weeks to support the protests, sleeping out in the open at sites hundreds of kilometers from their home and living on handouts organized by local sympathizers.”

Then came the force multipliers, as the term of art goes, both in the form of modern technology and of international pressure.

“A little army of Semilla Gen Z activists documented the whole thing on TikTok,” Toro writes. “Their social-media game was exceptional, mobilizing support against the coup far beyond the K’iche’ Maya group that had launched it,” marking a “kind of cross-community cooperation—Indigenous rural Guatemalans teaming up across the ethnic divide with Spanish-speaking city people—(that) is rare in Guatemala.” (And not just in Guatemala, says I.)

And the anger of the people prompted action from the muckity-mucks.

Amid this outpouring of popular anger, the Biden administration led an international coalition in a diplomatic offensive. The US sanctioned Prosecutor General Porras for “Involvement in Significant Corruption.” The EU followed suit. That outside pressure in turn prompted Guatemala’s business elite, who were not leftists by nature, to side with Arévalo, an unprecedented move. The sight of the country’s top business leaders “calling for the same thing as radical Indigenous street protesters felt positively surreal—an unimaginable coalition between people long assumed to have nothing to say to each other.”

At this point, the pacto had truly become desperate to hang on to power by any means necessary, which by then were the only means available.

In another echo of the US in 2020, “(t)he pacto tried to derail the transfer of power right up to inauguration day, including a last-minute decision to bar Semilla representatives from leadership roles in congress.” Pacto congressmen delayed—and tried to stop—Arévalo’s installation in office, just as MAGA congressman tried to stop Joe Biden’s. After a tense, nine-hour delay, Arévalo was sworn into office in the wee hours of Monday January 15, 2024, as Guatemalans all over the country stayed up late to watch the historic moment on TV. The former student leader Samuel Pérez, now 31 and newly elected as the head of  the Guatemalan congress just hours before, himself administered the oath of office.

Back in 2015, Arévalo thought Semilla might never get off the ground for lack of Indigenous support. Today he owes his presidency to the Indigenous groups who mobilized to support him, especially the K’iche’ Maya of Totonicapán. The day after he was sworn in, Arévalo and his vice president took part in a Maya ritual to invoke the deities’ protection on his behalf.

GREEK TO ME

Toro writes that, “Semilla appears to have pulled off a master class in how to achieve a bloodless liberal revolution in the 21st century.” And how did it do that, against all odds? Through a stalwart combination of approaches and methods:

  • Grass roots organizing
  • Conventional electoral politics
  • Use of the courts and justice system
  • Civil disobedience
  • High tech social media
  • International pressure
  • Economic levers

What Guatemala’s pro-democracy movement did not do was resort to force, or give in to a feeling of powerlessness, resignation, or despair. And perhaps above all, it did not surrender to its enemies’ self-serving and deceptive presentation of themselves as invincible.  

All these avenues of pro-democracy agitation are covered in detail in RESISTING THE RIGHT.

At the heart of this entire campaign was the discipline, strategic thinking, and dedication of Semilla and its leaders. But the party succeeded only because the masses of ordinary Guatemalan citizens rallied to its cause.

Because that’s what demos kratia means: the power of the people.

We in the United States can take a lesson from what the people of Guatemala did as we confront the threat of a similarly repressive right wing regime on our own shores.  “To beat back mafia states, democratic forces have to build coalitions across divides that feel permanent,” Toro writes. “Guatemalans are showing the way, with a mixture of political daring and prudence, pragmatic coalition building and moral zeal, as well as plenty of good luck.”

It remains to be seen if Semilla can hold onto power against a foe that has repeatedly demonstrated its ruthlessness, shamelessness, and overt criminality. It won’t be until October 2024 that the pacto-affiliated justices of Guatemala’s Supreme Court are off the bench, while the pro-fascist attorney general Porras will remain in office until the end of 2026, which as Toro notes, puts every Semilla minister “just one slipup away from jail.” Not to be a buzzkill, but it also remains to be seen if Semilla can maintain its integrity and principle now that it’s in charge. Many an idealistic movement has failed in that regard.

As Toro writes, “Their fight is far from over. But as of right now, Semilla is winning.”

We can too.

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Thank you to Quico Toro for his excellent article. I wish all my blog posts could be so effortlessly cannibalized from the reportage of others.

Photo: Agence France-Presse / Johan Ordóñez

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