The Trump Coup is Not Funny
Trump and his cronies are failing. But the right-wing project to undermine democracy is still in full force.
President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election appear to be failing miserably. His lawsuits are getting thrown out left and right. His hail-mary plan to have Republican state legislatures appoint pro-Trump electors is being publicly rejected by key conservative lawmakers. His recounts have virtually no chance of success in any state.
Without a doubt, there is something eerily satisfying about watching it all go down in flames. Rudy Giuliani’s breathtaking display of ignorance before a Pennsylvania judge was undoubtedly hilarious, as was the freakish image of his hair dye dripping down his face on national TV. It feels, for the first time in his life, that Trump’s incompetence may finally catch up to him—and one cannot help but smile.
But the full story, unfortunately, is not so funny.
It is easy, and comforting, to interpret this attempted coup merely as a long-shot effort by a doomed president that is destined to fail. And yes, if the question is solely whether Trump will remain in the White House on January 20, 2020, it is most likely going to fail. But anyone who has observed what Republicans have been up to for the past decade knows that installing minority rule, and obstructing the democratic process, is a project that extends far beyond Trump. And it appears to be going quite well right now.
As Reuters reports, Trump’s attempted coup is not limited to hopeless recounts or a scattered array of frivolous lawsuits. Rather, Trump is looking to capitalize on the decades-long effort to smear democracy at its core, not through lawsuits but through a sinister appeal to the right’s affinity for grievance and conspiracy theories:
A senior Trump campaign official told Reuters its plan is to cast enough doubt on vote-counting in big, Democratic cities that Republican lawmakers will have little choice but to intercede. The campaign is betting that many of those lawmakers, who come from districts Trump won, will face a backlash from voters if they refuse to act.
By some measures, this plan is already succeeding. On Wednesday, Reuters released a poll showing that a whopping 71% of Republicans do not believe that Joe Biden rightfully won the election. This is, of course, entirely delusional and without even a shred of credible evidence. But it doesn’t matter, because Republicans have been laying this groundwork for years. By consistently spreading baseless claims of voter fraud and convincing their voters that an army of liberal elites are conspiring against them, Republicans have built a firm and widespread framework for contesting or undermining elections, regardless of the evidence. This has, indeed, become the official policy of the Republican Party:
Of course, even if Trump is successful in convincing enough state legislatures, in enough states, to orchestrate his coup, it is still illegal and unlikely to work. But what is alarming, and what Trump is capitalizing on, is the extent to which complete, outright rejection of democracy is becoming a politically viable, if not preferable, position for Republicans. Indeed, this was the plan all along.
Voter suppression has been a key aspect of the Republican agenda for many years now, but it has largely operated under a guise of legitimacy. Actual laws were passed by actual legislatures, votes were still counted, and Republican lawmakers for the most part kept the not-so-hidden agenda secret. But not anymore. What Trump is doing, apart from making a fool of himself and his friends, is providing cover for Republicans to operate their anti-democratic agenda in plain sight, and there appears to be no limit to what they are willing to do.
Republicans are now outwardly discussing simply throwing out votes cast in Detroit, a majority-black city that handed Michigan to Biden. And while that particular effort was unsuccessful, it worked perfectly well in Florida, where Governor DeSantis simply ignored a law allowing felons to vote, which prevented potentially hundreds of thousands of disproportionately black voters from casting a ballot in a key battleground state. It also appeared to convince Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who called up a Georgia election official and asked him, point blank, about throwing away votes. And it apparently sparked the interest of the two leading Republican lawmakers in Michigan, who are traveling to Washington, D.C. to meet with Trump today.
We all knew that American elections are profoundly unfair—the Electoral College, gerry-mandering, voter suppression and the Senate are all set up to give Republicans an enormous advantage. But a head start is different than ignoring the race altogether. Now, Republicans appear prepared not only to reap the benefits of an unjust system, but also to literally disregard unfriendly results at their sole discretion. To date, virtually no prominent Republicans have spoken out against the effort to toss-out votes or have state legislatures disregard them entirely—to them, it’s apparently just a legitimate part of the process.
Is it enough to push Trump over the edge in 2020? Probably not. But as we are all laughing at Trump and Giuliani getting booted from courtroom after courtroom, the right-wing anti-democratic engine is purring along. After this, it is hard to see how Republicans will ever accept a losing election in the future, and why would they? If Republicans can operate this corruptly in an election they lost by 74 electoral votes, and 6+ million actual votes, imagine what they can do when it comes down to one state, or when the candidate isn’t abhorrently incompetent, or when they recruit a lawyer who understands basic principles of constitutional law.
In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, Republicans successfully persuaded the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act. Free of the confines of federal regulation, they then spent the next decade convincing enough state legislators that voter suppression laws were necessary to combat fraud. Now, they find themselves marching swiftly towards the ultimate goal: the ability to maintain power without any accountability to the majority whatsoever. In that sense, Republicans are winning, even if their current candidate is on the verge of losing. And that is no laughing matter.