Ezra Klein: A Coup Attempt In Plain Sight

Joe Biden has been nothing but magnanimous towards Republicans in his election victory, and even during the campaign:

“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify, who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.”

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“I’m a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president. I’ll work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did. Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.”

“For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance.”

“It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again. Listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies. They are Americans. They’re Americans.”

And how have Republicans greeted Biden’s magnanimity? The only living Republican former president, George W. Bush, called Biden to congratulate him on his victory.

Only Republican Senators Mitt Romney (UT), Lisa Murkowski (AK), and Susan Collins (ME) have seen fit to issue a statement to congratulate Biden. Collins becomes third GOP senator to congratulate Biden.

Other Republicans are refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the candidate who has received the largest popular vote of any presidential candidate in U.S. history, and a clear Electoral College win. As Biden Plans Transition, Republicans Decline to Recognize His Election:

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepared on Sunday to start building his administration, even as Republican leaders and scores of party lawmakers refrained from acknowledging his victory out of apparent deference to President Trump, who continues to refuse to concede.

[M]ore than 24 hours after his election had been declared, the vast majority of Republicans declined to offer the customary statements of good will for the victor that have been standard after American presidential contests, as Mr. Trump defied the results and vowed to forge ahead with long-shot lawsuits to try to overturn them.

While some prominent Republican figures, including the party’s only living former president, George W. Bush, called Mr. Biden to wish him well, most elected officials stayed silent in the face of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

[R]epublicans’ silence suggested that even in defeat, Mr. Trump maintained a powerful grip on his party and its elected leaders, who have spent four years tightly embracing him or quietly working to avoid offending him or his loyal base. For many prominent Republicans, the president’s reluctance to accept the election results created a dilemma, making even the most cursory expression of support for Mr. Biden seem like a conspicuous break with Mr. Trump.

There has never been a more despicable collection of morally bankrupt sniveling cowards in American history. These Republicans are unworthy of the high office they hold.

This is especially true for the GOP leadership of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Not only do they have an obligation to ensure a smooth transition of power to the next administration, but they have an obligation to work with the president-elect on the next COVID-19 relief bill and federal budget appropriations which will be resolved in the lame-duck session of this Congress. America is in a massive new wave of COVID-19 right now which cannot wait until next year to be addressed, and Donald Trump has abandoned any interest or desire to do anything about it, while he sulks over being rejected by the American voters.

More importantly, Republican leadership has an obligation to reject Donald Trump’s pathological attempt to burn down the legitimacy of America’s electoral process on his way out the door, and to defend American democracy and the sanctity of the vote from what is essentially a coup attempt.

Ezra Klein explains, Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight (excerpt):

Donald Trump is trying to discredit an election he is losing

Joe Biden has won the presidency. But the current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is attempting a coup in plain sight. “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” he tweeted on Saturday morning. This came after he demanded that states cease counting votes when the total began to turn against him, after his press secretary shocked Fox News anchors by arguing that legally cast votes should be thrown out.

I think the important part of this video isn't the flagrantly illiberal theory the Trump administration is selling, but the fact that the Fox News anchors aren't buying. https://t.co/zauokaYnji

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 5, 2020

The Trump administration’s current strategy is to go to court to try and get votes for Biden ruled illegitimate, and that strategy explicitly rests on Trump’s appointees honoring a debt the administration, at least, believes they owe. One of his legal advisers said, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court — of which the President has nominated three justices — to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”

If that fails, and it will, Mark Levin, one of the nation’s most popular conservative radio hosts, is explicitly calling on Republican legislatures to reject the election results and seat Donald Trump as president anyway. After Twitter tagged the tweet as contested, Trump’s press secretary weighed in furiously on Levin’s behalf.

Note: The U.S. Supreme Court just this past June rejected this possibility in the “faithless electors” cases, Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado v. Baca. Law professors Lawrence Lessig and Jason Harrow explain that “the Supreme Court has unanimously decided that presidential electors are not actually ‘electors’ but are instead bound to the people’s vote.” State Legislatures Can’t Ignore the Popular Vote in Appointing Electors:

[A]n anti-democratic suggestion has taken hold among supporters of President Trump that Republican state legislatures could prevent a Biden presidency by directly appointing Trump-supporting electors to the Electoral College, rather than by sending a delegation of electors in line with their states’ popular votes. “GET READY TO DO YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY,” tweeted conservative radio host Mark Levin on Nov. 5. Soon, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted Levin. Later that night, Sen. Lindsey Graham joined the bandwagon. The idea is not entirely new: In September, Barton Gellman in The Atlantic reported that some state legislators were already considering this gambit—though Pennsylvania Republicans soon rejected the notion.

There are a host of clear legal problems with this suggestion, including that electors are required to be selected on Election Day, not later (absent circumstances not present here), and that due process requires a state to give effect to the fundamental right to vote for president. What’s more, such a move would justifiably be seen by much of the public as a coup. It is a terrible idea.

That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences. Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his thread is worth reading). It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape.

This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

The corruption of the GOP will outlive Trump’s presidency

Members of the Trump family are explicitly, repeatedly, trying to make the acceptance of their conspiracies a litmus test for ambitious Republicans. And it is working. To read elected Republicans today — with a few notable exceptions, like Sen. Mitt Romney — is to read a careful, cowardly double-speak. Politician after politician is signaling, as Vice President Mike Pence did, solidarity with the president, while not quite endorsing his conspiracies. Of course every legal vote should be counted. Of course allegations of fraud should be addressed. But that is not what the president is demanding — he is demanding the votes against him be ruled illegal — and they know it.

What we are not seeing, in any way, is a wholesale rejection on the right of Trump’s effort to delegitimize the election. And thus there is no reason to believe Trump will not retain his hold over much of the party, and much of its base, going forward.

The Washington Post editorializes, Republicans are amplifying the president’s lies. This has never been more dangerous. Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have been the worst offenders.

Even if Trump is rejected in this election, the Republican Party that protected and enabled him will not be. Their geographic advantage in the Senate insulates them from anything but massive, consecutive landslide defeats, and their dominance over the decennial redistricting process has given them a handicap in the House, too.

That divergence almost saved Trump: Though the presidential election will not be close in terms of the popular vote, the margins in the key Electoral College states were narrow, and the would-be autocrat was almost returned to office. How much more damage could he have done to American institutions and elections with another four years? It could have happened here, and it truly almost did.

Timothy Egan writes at the New York Times, American Democracy Survives Its Brush With Death:

So we find ourselves today, still holding our breath, looking back at the bloodied mess of our tattered democracy. As exhilarating as it is to cheat death, we are diminished and badly shaken by what happened this week.

“Stop the count.” Of all the violations of things that we hold precious in this country, this tweet by President Trump on Thursday, demanding that millions of voters be disenfranchised so he can steal an election, is the one that will live in infamy.

Here’s the grim kicker: The conditions that made Trump and this Republican Party possible are set to worsen. Republicans retained control of enough statehouses to drive the next redistricting effort, too, and their 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court will unleash their map-drawers more fully. The elections analyst G. Elliott Morris estimates that the gap between the popular vote margin and the tipping point state in the Electoral College will be 4 to 5 percentage points, and that the GOP’s control of the redistricting process could push it to 6 to 7 points next time.

To say that America’s institutions did not wholly fail in the Trump era is not the same thing as saying they succeeded. They did not, and in particular, the Republican Party did not. It has failed dangerously, spectacularly. It has made clear that would-be autocrats have a path to power in the United States, and if they can walk far enough down that path, an entire political party will support them, and protect them. And it has been insulated from public fury by a political system that values land over people, and that lets partisan actors set election rules and draw district lines — and despite losing the presidency, the GOP still holds the power to tilt that system further in its direction in the coming years.

What happens when the next would-be autocrat tries this strategy — and what if they are smoother, more strategic, more capable than this one?

Zeynep Tufekci at The Atlantic warns “Trump was ineffective and easily beaten. A future strongman won’t be.” America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent.

This is not a story happening elsewhere. It is a story happening here [and] now.

It is a political axiom that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” but the seeds of its destruction are contained in its provisions compromising with slavery.

First, an anti-democratic Senate:

In the incoming Senate, Democratic senators will represent at least 20,314,962 more people than their Republican counterparts — and that’s if we assume that Republicans win both runoff elections in Georgia. If the two Georgia seats go to the Democrats, the Senate will be split 50-50, but the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.

Second is the last vestige of slavery in the Constitution, “the archaic Electoral College, the fortress for the tyranny of the minority.” (h/t Timothy Egan). The current coup attempt by Republicans would not even be a possibility if we elected the president by popular vote as we do for every other elected office in the land.

There would not have been a president George W. Bush or a president Donald Trump, and the federal courts would not have been packed with far-right ideological Republicans.

It is the source of their tyranny of the minority, and why Republicans will resist any Constitutional amendments to make our Republic more democratic and a “more perfect union.” They are committed to anti-democratic authoritarian rule.