Trump’s Terrifying Election Strategy: Will This Be America’s First Fascist Administration?

September 25, 2020 (Posted by) Don Pelton

Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, thus implying that he supports violence. He says “there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.” But his willingness to support violence is not even the worst possibility. It is no longer hyperbole to suggest that we are facing the death of our democracy, and the first truly fascist administration in American history.

Barton Gellman’s new article in The Atlantic is the most frightening description of Trump’s election strategy that you are likely to read. The editors felt that it is so important that they have now published it online a full month before it was scheduled to be printed in the November issue. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have misconceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”

Here Gellman explains it. Listen to what he says. It is absolutely terrifying.