The #TrumpCoup’s Big Picture

Drip by drip, we get more news of the various little plots and schemes of the GOP and Trump Administration around and after the 2020 election. We hear a little more every day; but it can become habit to examine each new tree, yet never look at the forest. It is coming to the time to step back and look at the whole wacky landscape of fraud; hopefully the Jan 6 Commission will present the American people with a clear map of the whole ecosystem of treason.

When one does put the pieces together, a national conspiracy between the Trump Administration, state and national Republican parties, state government officials, and members of Congress begins to emerge that looks very much like an improbable, but quite serious – and plausibly successful – attempt to autogolpe the American Presidency.

Let’s lay out the pieces:

• A disinformation campaign flowing from the President down to the lowest levels of government repeatedly and constantly insisting, with zero evidence and universal dismissal by the courts, that the election was stolen and that Trump had actually won, “by a landslide” among “legal” voters, that was amplified and reinforced by right-wing media and a tidal wave of dark money.
• An attempt by several state GOP legislatures to “audit” carefully selected portions of the election using partisan hacks, unqualified to do the job, despite repeated confirmations of the result under existing law, thus providing more grist for the disinformation mills of the radical right.
• A coordinated effort to put together “alternative” (actually, simply fraudulent) slates of Presidential electors in seven states, including Arizona; enough to reduce Biden’s electoral vote count to under 270.
• A carefully orchestrated “rally” at the White House at which the President personally commanded participants to go to the Capitol to “fight like hell” (despite there being no permit, no plans, and no infrastructure for any sort of peaceful event at the Capitol building on Jan 6th, only teams of violent insurrectionists who had pre-planned their assault on the building under the cover of the mob), with the result being a violent confrontation with Capitol police that ended in deaths and criminal acts of violence and mayhem.
• A plan to use that mob to pressure the Vice President, presiding over the count, into refusing to certify enough electors (with the excuse of the fraudulent slates of electors) to throw the Presidential count into a House vote by state delegation under the provisions of the Electoral Count Act.
• The encouragement, coordination, and approval of this entire plan by the highest levels of the White House and Congressional GOP caucuses who agreed to, and did, in fact, vote overwhelmingly not to certify the legal electors, and then were clearly prepared to use their numerical advantage of delegations in the House to select Trump as President against the will of the American voters.

When you put the parts together it becomes quite clear this was a coordinated, planned. and intelligent effort by one of our major parties to negate the will of the American electorate and install Donald Trump in the White House for four more years, despite his loss of both the popular vote (by more than 7 million votes) and the electoral college (by the same margin by which Trump was elected in 2016).

When the Jan 6th Commission finally puts out a report stringing together the entire detailed story of this dastardly scheme and the parts played in it by elected Republican officials at every level who have, at minimum, violated their oaths of office, and party officials and grassroots activists, including violent terroristic organizations, who violated our laws and conspired to overthrow the 2020 election result, the denial of reality and disinformation campaign by the GOP will explode with desperation and vitriol. Maybe even renewed violence.

All I know is that we must punish all those involved for every transgression of the law, permanently root them out of the political life of this nation, and hold them up to public exposure and scorn – or this WILL happen again. It was only the ethical behavior of a few people that prevented this coup plot from bearing fruit – the very people who are even now being ex-communicated from every level of the Republican Party and public office – and that should terrify every single one of us.

Republicans should be mindful that there is no guarantee that next time it may not only be Republicans scheming for any possible advantage, with no holds barred. If the GOP thinks it has a monopoly on unethical behavior or a willingness to bend the law to advantage, I assure them, they don’t. Every Republican who is an American first should be very concerned lest Democrats decide by necessity to throw out all scruples and compete for power with an equivalent lack of principle as Trump and his cultists have demonstrated over the past two years. Democrats have proven that, if pressed by circumstance and need, we can play unfairly, too. We have learned to effectively use the same cynical and undemocratic tools of gerrymandering to ensure non-competitive elections where we have control, just to be able to stay in the shitty game that the GOP pioneered in the 2010 round of reapportionment and redistricting.

Nobody should wish that both parties begin to compete for power using means other than genuine and meaningful electoral competition in free, fair, inclusive elections with professional, non-partisan administration of those elections. Unless there is a recognition that competition for political power must have rules and limits in a democratic society, there will be growing chaos and violence. And I fear that unless responsible adults once again control the Republican Party, rather than a sociopathic narcissist with the executive functions of a toddler and a mob of rabidly racist religious zealots with a more-than-passing fancy for fascism, that’s exactly where we are headed.