Is a Donald Trump constitutional coup currently being concocted right under our very noses?
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According to The New York Times and other major news organizations, Trump is so hell-bent on holding onto the presidency that he has entered a last-ditch and dangerous “scorched earth” mentality in order to remain in The White House by any means necessary.
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On Saturday during a heated Oval Office shouting match among several of his senior advisers, Trump said he is preparing to enact a scheme announced earlier in the week by newly pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The plot is to use his powers as president to declare martial law, then deploy the US military to swing states he lost in order to conduct a “do-over” presidential election.
Or, in other words, Trump is willing to destroy democracy and throw away millions of legally cast ballots in order to steal the election for his own personal gain.
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“Within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take the military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states.” – Michael Flynn
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Here’s Michael Flynn on Newsmax saying that Trump could order “military capabilities” to swing states and “rerun an election in each of those states.”
“People out there talk about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.” pic.twitter.com/KNmiAGGiPF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 18, 2020
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During the meeting, Trump said he wants to order the US government to commandeer the Dominion voting machines used in the 2020 election so that his campaign can personally “inspect” them. He also intends to name conspiracy theory wingnut Sidney Powell (who was recently fired from the Trump campaign for being too ‘over-the-top’) as his special counsel for election fraud. If all goes as planned, his moves would amount to an incredibly blatant Trump constitutional coup similar to what one would expect from a third-world nation.
Concerned senior White House advisers and top Republicans now realize that this is no longer a controlled coddling of Trump’s bruised ego in order to cushion the blow of his election loss. If Trump gets away with even half of what he’s considering, democracy will be dead and the precedent will be set for any future president for perpetuity to throw away election results they don’t like just to remain in power.
Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends,” a senior administration official said over the weekend. “People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.”
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I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while. I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell / Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top. https://t.co/NxjC0sUrzI
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) December 19, 2020
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One person in attendance described the meeting as “ugly” and added that Powell and Flynn accused others of abandoning Trump in his bid to overturn the results of the election.
“It was heated — people were really fighting it out in the Oval, really forceful about it,” the source said.
Interestingly, Trump’s lawyer and lead-flunkie Rudy Giuliani was among those arguing against the proposed coup.
Donald Trump is drunk with power. He’s also deeply obsessed with the authority and autocracy afforded to such dictators as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un — and he believes he deserves their same level of totalitarianism despite the US constitution. Additionally, Trump is desperate to avoid myriad legal cases by the State of New York and the almost certain jail time he’d face and would be powerless to avoid via a presidential pardon for himself.
So, this is “do or die” time for ‘The Donald.’ After losing election challenges in every federal court in the nation and watching his own hand-picked US Supreme Court justices slam the door in his face, this proposed Trump constitutional coup is all he has left. It’s come down to the choice of accepting the embarrassment of defeat and almost assuredly spending the rest of his life behind bars, or blowing up 244 years of democracy in order to save his favorite person: himself!
Will the Republican Party establishment stand by and allow this Trump constitutional coup to succeed solely for the sake of retaining political control? Or, is it time to enact the 25th Amendment and immediately remove the man with the nuclear codes from the presidency before he destroys democracy and any and everything else standing in the way of his personal wants and needs?
I waited awhile before responding hoping other readers would chime in first.
Thank you DJ for this follow-up post. You did a related post not too long ago when the New York Times first broke the news of Flynn reprehensible idea – as noted in your post that Trump should ‘use his powers as president to declare martial law, then deploy the US military to swing states he lost in order to conduct a “do-over” presidential election.’
In my response to your initial post I expressed my frustration with the fact that the American news media was NOT giving Flynn’s treasonous suggestion hardly enough attention. Unfortunately it took NEW warnings from inside the White House that Trump is still considering such madness for the American news media to finally take THIS clear and present threat of Fascism seriously.
Again I say….WE deserve better!