Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Trump reportedly considered using the military to carry out his coup

Just when we thought things couldn't get any more insane and when it couldn't become any more obvious that Trump is engaging in a coup attempt--this happens.

In a news recap post from a few weeks ago, I covered a story about how retired General Flynn, Trump's former National Security Advisor who was convicted for lying to the FBI about his collusion with Russia, advocated for imposing martial law to carry out a 'new' election. Flynn advocated for this about a week after Trump pardoned him for his crimes!

If you aren't seeing the gravity of this, let me make it more clear. Wikipedia defines martial law as "the imposition of direct military control of normal civil functions or suspension of civil law by a government." Flynn is a retired Army General and previously worked at the highest levels of the Trump administration. This isn't a whacko blogger casually advocating for martial law. Flynn understands the gravity and meaning of his words.

Now, Trump himself is reported to have considered the possibility of enacting martial law, according to a story published in the New York Times on December 19th. This story is buried within an article whose headline is about deranged lawyer Sidney Powell (more on this in a moment).


Here's the relevant section of the New York Times article:

"In a meeting at the White House on Friday...

[...]

Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there, two of the people briefed on the meeting said. Some senior administration officials drifted in and out of the meeting.

During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/us/politics/trump-sidney-powell-voter-fraud.html

Other media outlets are wondering why the headline isn't about Trump's consideration of martial law.

"Here is the front page of the New York Times at the moment:

Down below the fold, just barely beating out “Biden Introduces His Climate Team,” is a story headlined “Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist as Special Counsel.” The conspiracy theorist in question is Sidney Powell, who is indeed a complete loon. However, if you click the link and read down to the sixth paragraph, you learn this about Friday’s meeting at the White House:

Ms. Powell’s client, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser whom the president recently pardoned, was also there….During an appearance on the conservative Newsmax channel this week, Mr. Flynn pushed for Mr. Trump to impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election. At one point in the meeting on Friday, Mr. Trump asked about that idea.

Now, I’m not a Times editor with decades of experience with this stuff, but doesn’t this seem a wee bit more important than whether a nutter is appointed special counsel for a few weeks? And also perhaps more important than “Britain Tightens Lockdown” at the top of the page?

It does to me! The president of the United States asked a bunch of his advisors about the feasibility of imposing martial law and having the Pentagon run a new election. In other words, staging a military coup."

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/12/report-trump-asked-about-imposing-martial-law-to-run-a-new-election/

December 19:

"Trump Reportedly Asked Advisors About Deploying Military To Overturn Election.

[...]

President Donald Trump reportedly inquired about an idea raised by his former (and now pardoned) national security adviser, Michael Flynn, that the U.S. military be deployed to overturn the results of the presidential election—a claim shot down by his advisors at a meeting where the president appeared to embrace increasingly fringe notions about his election loss."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/12/19/trump-reportedly-asked-advisors-about-deploying-military-to-overturn-election/

December 20, once again, non-American media are reporting on this. Every time US-based journalists try to deny a coup is happening, non-Americans must shake their heads with pity for the insanity sane Americans have to endure.

"Trump discussed ‘bringing military in to overturn election result’ and calls for ‘wild’ protest on 6 January.

[...]

And there is another protest planned to take place on 6 January, the day Congress meets to officially recognise Joe Biden as president following the 14 December EC vote.

As the coronavirus continues to ravage vast swathes of the country, the outgoing president called on his legion of loyal fans to descend on the capital and join the demonstration.

"Big protest in D.C. on January 6th," he tweeted on Saturday. "Be there, will be wild!""

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-martial-law-us-election-result-b1776750.html


On December 18, before the New York Times story was published, a journalist received a response from military leaders regarding their thoughts on Flynn's advocacy for a military-backed coup:

Just in: @SecArmy Ryan McCarthy and @ArmyChiefStaff Gen. McConville respond to former Gen. Flynn's remarks urging Trump to declare martial law to overturn the election results: “There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election.”

https://twitter.com/laraseligman/status/1339985580785086466

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/19/sidney-powell-trump-special-counsel-448694

December 21:

"Is It Time to Impeach Now That the President Is Reportedly Discussing Martial Law in the Oval Office?

Seems like we could have seen this coming based on every single thing Donald Trump has said and done in public life.

On November 19, we suggested the president may need to be impeached and removed from office in the lame-duck period on the basis he will never stop trying to steal the election and, even if he fails, that he will do untold damage to the country leading up to January 20. This kind of thing was considered alarmist by the Calm, Savvy Observer crowd, who seem to have been asleep for many years, or who at the very least refuse to see—perhaps as a sort of defense mechanism—what is right in front of them, and who certainly lack imagination with regard to what still may come screaming down the pike. It seems bad, for instance, that the Secretary of the Army just felt compelled to issue a statement declaring the U.S. military won't be doing Coup Things.

[...]

Nobody ever went broke betting that Donald Trump will attempt the next most deranged and dangerous stunt on the sliding scale of depravity that forms the backbone of his earthly existence, all in ceaseless servitude to his own pathological self-interest.

[...]

And so we arrived this weekend at the next mile-marker on the road to ruin. The president descended to the next level of right-wing loony-toon hell and summoned Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to the Oval Office for a meeting of the minds, wherein this cavalcade of traitors to the American republic discussed instituting martial law and seizing voting machines by Executive Order for "investigation." (Let's pause here for the mandatory, if grating question: WHAT IF OBAMA DID ANY OF THIS SHIT? OK, let's move on.)

[...]

But the real cream of the crop is retired Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, a true American patriot who in 2016 served as senior adviser to an American presidential campaign and transition team while simultaneously on the payroll of the Turkish government. He also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians, for which, along with "any and all possible offenses" related to the Mueller probe, the American president pardoned him. Now, Flynn is returning the favor by going on one of the TV channels for people who think Fox News is too squishy-liberal and calling for the president who pardoned him to institute martial law and do a mulligan election, this one run by the military."

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a35030462/trump-martial-law-oval-office-michael-flynn-sidney-powell/

The time to impeach him was on January 21, 2017. He's been violating the Constitution and breaking laws every day since then. Since he is never punished for any of his wrong-doings, he continues to push the envelope and do worse things each time. While Republicans are the ones who successfully carried out a self-coup in order to operate outside of the laws of our nation for the entire 4 years of the Trump presidency, almost as much blame deserves to be placed on the Democrat party, since, realistically, they are the only ones who had any hopes of holding Trump accountable. Instead, they let him and his lackeys get away with everything. Instead of playing hardball and jailing Trump cronies for contempt of Congress when they refused to comply, Democrats just gave up and didn't bother pursuing justice. They blew their chance to impeach after the release of the Mueller Report, and the best they could come up with to impeach Trump was his mafia boss "perfect" phone call to Ukraine.

Let that sink in. If Trump wasn't such an imbecile and decided to lay low after Attorney General Barr miraculously covered up the Mueller Report and Democrats somehow completely dropped the ball, there wouldn't even have been an impeachment.

Every president since Nixon got away with all their crimes. Every president since Nixon has been emboldened to commit even greater crimes than the previous president. This must end. We must have a Crimes Commission and punish every single person who aided and abetted the Trump administration's crimes, to the fullest extent of the law. If we don't, America may never recover.

"The Calm, Savvy types are by this point apoplectic. But none of this will work! The coup is stupid! Which brings us, again, to two points: even a Stupid Coup can work, and even if it doesn't, it will cause huge damage to the republic. It already has, even as the president's legal eagles have caught losses in 50-plus court cases. 126 House Republicans signed onto that ludicrous Texas suit seeking to simply throw out the election. This is now mainstream Republicanism—that elections which end in the other party winning power simply do not count. ... Absent massive, transformative change to law and political economy with the next administration, we are well down a path to tyranny. Trump has opened the door, and if nobody finds a way to close it, somebody else will walk through it."

If a majority of lawmakers vote to throw out the election, is that not just another aspect of democracy? All the loopholes of checks-and-balances can't save us when the majority of the populace is morally bankrupt. Trump's term in office has shown us that both Republican and Democrat politicians view the Constitution and laws as merely a "gentleman's agreement" that isn't worth the paper it's printed on when the majority of the populace and majority of politicians are dishonorable scumbags.

This dangerous instability and race-to-the-bottom, which the popularity contest of voting causes, is the reason some Founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton believed the President and Senators should serve for life (although they would be removed if they failed to meet the standard of "good behavior"--meanwhile our democracy can't even manage to remove Trump and others for blatant Constitutional violations...)

"Under Hamilton's system, senators and a national "governor" would be chosen by special electors, and would serve for life. Members of an assembly would be elected directly by citizens; each member would serve a three-year term. State governors would be chosen by the national governor."

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/duel-hamilton-and-us-constitution/

As it stands, members of Congress basically serve for life already. Reelection rates have been over 80-90% for at least the past lifetime. (e.g. Biden was a Senator since 1973, stepping down only to become Vice President. McConnell has been a Senator since 1985. 87-year-old Dianne Feinstein just won another 6-year term to the Senate, despite going senile.)

The criteria for 'winning' office is not having a noble quality of character, good judgment, or wise policy planning. 'Winning' office is a popularity contest where they say literally anything they need to in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator to win votes, and prostitute themselves out to corporate interests in order to take in the campaign funds they need to run propaganda election campaigns.

Hamilton's plan would have at least selected Presidents and members of Congress based on the quality of their character and ability to wisely and selflessly enact policies which benefit Americans as a whole. This is much closer to an actual Republic. (Plato's Republic was certainly did not involve voting. In fact, Plato wisely viewed democracy as the most corrupt form of government besides outright tyranny).


Only when the criteria to hold office is quality-based rather than popularity-based will our government reach a tolerable standard of functionality. It is only then that we will be able to achieve lasting justice and fairness for all Americans.

Federal judges (not just on the Supreme Court) are appointed for life. As intended, this elevates them above the race-to-the-bottom of political election cycles. Even the far-right hyperpartisan judges Trump appointed to the courts have been throwing out his baseless lawsuits rather than help him carry out the coup. And for everyone who wants to abolish the Electoral College--electors were originally autonomous individuals who cast their votes based on their own reasoned judgment. They were supposed to be a "check and balance" against the low-information and reactionary mobs of popular voters. Had the Electoral College been functioning as intended, they would have rejected Trump by a far stronger margin than a 48% vs 46% popular vote margin.

***

Sidney Powell was on the Trump campaign's legal team, but they publicly distanced themselves from her once she started railing on about how dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and communists were somehow the ones "rigging" the US election. She was too crazy to be publicly associated with them, but it seems Trump still likes her. At the same time as Flynn, she advocated for setting up "military tribunals" in order to carry out a new election under martial law.

Ctrl+F for Powell in my previous blog post to read more about this.


She was kicked off the Trump campaign's legal team, but Trump wants to let her lead a witch hunt to overturn the election in his final month in office:

"Trump Weighed Naming Election Conspiracy Theorist as Special Counsel.

In a meeting at the White House on Friday, President Trump weighed appointing Sidney Powell, who promoted conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, to investigate voter fraud.

[...]

Most of his advisers opposed the idea, two of the people briefed on the discussion said, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. In recent days Mr. Giuliani has sought to have the Department of Homeland Security join the campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the election.

[...]

Mr. Trump tends to think of Justice Department appointees when he describes special counsels, but those briefed on the meeting said the idea was for Ms. Powell to serve as a special counsel within the White House, appointed by the president, according to those briefed on it.

Mr. Trump also asked about Ms. Powell being given security clearances to pursue her work, two of the people briefed on the meeting said.

Ms. Powell accused other Trump advisers of being quitters, according to the people briefed.

But the idea that Mr. Trump would try to install Ms. Powell in a position to investigate the outcome sent shock waves through the president’s circle. She has repeatedly claimed there was widespread fraud, but several lawsuits she filed related to election fraud have been tossed out of court.

[...]

Mr. Giuliani has separately pressed the Department of Homeland Security to seize possession of voting machines as part of a push to overturn the results of the election, three people familiar with the discussion said. Mr. Giuliani was told the department does not have the authority to do such a thing."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/us/politics/trump-sidney-powell-voter-fraud.html

***

The following articles give a brief timeline of Trump's actions in the coup since the election ended.

December 21:

"Inside Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election.
No president has ever made such expansive and individualized pleas.

In total, the president talked to at least 31 Republicans, encompassing mostly local and state officials from four critical battleground states he lost — Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The contacts included at least 12 personal phone calls to 11 individuals, and at least four White House meetings with 20 Republican state lawmakers, party leaders and attorneys general, all people he hoped to win over to his side. Trump also spoke by phone about his efforts with numerous House Republicans and at least three current or incoming Senate Republicans.

And it all occurred in parallel to his campaign’s quixotic efforts to launch recounts and file lawsuits demanding ballots be tossed.

Trump’s efforts to cling to power are unprecedented in American history. While political parties have fought over the results of presidential elections before, no incumbent president has ever made such expansive and individualized pleas to the officials who oversee certification of the election results. Trump even used his presidential perch to compel officials to talk with him, summoning state officials to the White House on a few-hours notice and insisting that his outreach was simply part of his presidential duties."

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/21/trump-pressure-campaign-overturn-election-449486

December 21:

"Trump personally pressured more than 150 Republicans to overthrow election for him, report says

[...]

Despite the electoral college announcement, Mr Trump continues to challenge the results. He is now backing a plan by Republican House members and potentially at least one senator – Tommy Tuberville –  to object to the election results when Congress meets on 6 January to accept the election results."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-throw-election-republicans-b1777377.html

***

Trump told his supporters to "stand back and stand by" until January 6th, but it looks like they're not going to wait.

December 21:

"Heavily Armed Far-Right Mob Floods Oregon Capitol.

The crowd was a loose collection of members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and others far-right groups, many of them are armed with pistols and rifles. It got ugly fast.

SALEM, Or.—A group of about 300 demonstrators attempted to force their way into two separate entrances of the Oregon State Capitol on Monday, outraged lawmakers were holding a special session closed to the public.

The crowd was a loose collection of members of the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and other far-right groups, many of them are armed with pistols and rifles. At one point during the demonstration, which began around 9 a.m., a woman tried to climb in a window on the west side of the government building. Oregon State Troopers, however, repelled her—before two more troopers showed up to insist that she get off the ledge.

Those troopers were quickly chased off by screaming protesters, many of them toting long black rifles.

Minutes later, the crowd moved to the building’s north entrance and attempted to push their way in. A dozen more troopers arrived at the door, declared it an unlawful assembly, and pushed the crowd back, using some kind of deterrent in a series of “pop” sounds, at which point the protesters swarmed back out again, their eyes watering and coughing.

[...]

Protesters, however, quickly changed course. Three men with long guns moved to the west side of the building and encouraged everyone to open a door there. Once successfully opened, the protesters demanded to be let inside, but troopers forced everyone to remain outdoors.

[...]

“We’re not gonna give up this easily, everybody come in!” said one protester with a knife on his belt and a bulletproof vest as he entered the lobby. “This is our state. This is our building.”

Tensions also ran high during the legislative session. According to OPB, Republican state Sen. Dallas Heard objected to a state-wide mask requirement—and accused his colleagues of being involved in a “campaign against the people and the children of God.” The stunning accusation came after Heard spoke to protesters outside the Capitol, where he also expressed his frustration with the mask mandate and insisted he is for the “people.” The lawmaker asked residents to vote out his Democratic colleagues."

https://www.thedailybeast.com/heavily-armed-far-right-mob-descends-on-oregon-capitol

"SALEM, Ore. – Oregon State Police declared a protest at the Capitol an unlawful assembly on Monday morning and arrested four people while lawmakers met for a special session.

The protest, billed as a "Reopen Oregon" rally, began Monday morning as lawmakers started a special session to offer Oregonians more relief amid the coronavirus pandemic."

katu.com/amp/news/local/protest-at-oregon-capitol-declared-unlawful-assembly


I will remind everyone that a few months ago far-right terrorists tried to incite a civil war by kidnapping and murdering the governor of Michigan. Their plot was foiled and the Michigan governor directly blamed Trump for inciting far-right terrorism. This will probably continue to get worse in the coming months.

***

More news articles related to the ongoing coup.

As expected, the Electoral College cast their votes on December 14th, confirming Biden's victory. But the coup is still not over. The next calendar milestone is on January 6th, when Congress meets to count the electoral votes. This is a mere formality and will change nothing, but Trump and his co-conspirators will continue to stoke the flames.

As covered above, on December 19th the New York Times published an article claiming Trump asked about the feasibility of using the military to back the coup. Stephen Miller said he is going to continue to pursue lawsuits to overturn the electoral vote. Trump told his followers to stage massive riots on January 6th to prevent the final certification of the electoral votes.

This isn't going to be over until January 20th when we get a new president. In fact, Trump supporters will likely continue to riot long after January 20th, and the Republicans in Congress will do all they can to sabotage the Biden administration to prevent it from carrying out a Crimes Commission to bring them to justice. The self-coup Republicans successfully carried out will remain in effect in the Senate and Supreme Court even after the Biden administration takes office. We have a long road ahead.


December 14:

"Electoral College Rejects Trump Coup and Confirms Biden as President.

[...]

Given the claims of the Trump campaign and Trump supporters that the president actually won by a landslide in various states carried by Biden, there have been legitimate fears of angry protests against these pro forma Electoral College proceedings. Threats of violence were credible enough in Michigan that state legislative offices were closed in Lansing until the 2 p.m. vote there had taken place. And one Michigan Republican legislator was actually stripped of his committee assignments by the GOP leadership after he publicly refused to rule out violence in protests against the electoral college vote.

As the electoral college repudiations rolled in, Team Trump unveiled a new wrinkle in its strategy to overturn the election. Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Fox & Friends that “alternative electors” pledged to the president would “vote” today in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

And sure enough, as the hardline pro-Trump Epoch Times reported, Trump-selected would-be electors gathered in those three states and in Arizona to cast what one called “conditional” electoral college votes for the president. That sounds better than “imaginary.”

The idea here is that in theory Trump slates could be recognized either by some future action in the courts (though his campaign has pretty much exhausted its legal remedies after the abrupt dismissal of the Texas lawsuit by the U.S. Supreme Court late last week) or by Congress when it meets to formally count electoral votes on January 6.

[...]

So we proceed with two parallel elections taking place: a fake election conducted by the Trump campaign without any legal authority, and the real election that is leading inexorably to Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/electors-are-meeting-today-to-ratify-bidens-win.html

December 14:

"Stephen Miller, an influential White House official, appeared on Fox News this morning and assured the hosts, "[W]e have more than enough time to right the wrong of this fraudulent election result and certify Donald Trump as the winner of the election."

I'll confess, seeing Miller say there's "more than enough time" immediately brought to mind Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the scene in which the Black Knight keeps insisting he can prevail against King Arthur, even as he's slowly dismembered.

But that's not all Miller said.

"As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we're going to send those results up to Congress," he continued. "This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate state of electors be certified.""

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/stephen-miller-eyes-alternate-electors-distinct-real-ones-n1251139

"The fantasy narrative has spilled out of the internet and into the streets. In Georgia, pro-Trump Republicans claimed to cast the state’s Electoral College votes for Trump. (Biden won Georgia by 12,000 votes.) In Nevada, the chair of the state’s Republican Party held a press conference to “certify” Nevada’s six electoral votes for Trump. (Biden won Nevada by 34,000 votes.) In Michigan, a crowd of would-be electors demanded to enter the statehouse to cast their votes for Trump, but were refused because the actual Electoral College members were already inside."

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/paulmcleod/electoral-college-trump-supporters

December 14:

"On Monday, the state’s 11 electors met, as required by law, and cast their votes for Democrat Joe Biden, as required by law given the fact that he … you know … won the election.

Also on Monday, the state GOP’s 11 fake electors met, as required by no one, and cast their non-existent votes for Trump, as required by their desperate need to continue to live in fantasyland.

The party even sent out a press release – headlined Arizona Republican Presidential Electors Convene To Cast Votes For President Trump, Vice President Pence – along with an all-smiles picture of the 11 fake electors.

Then came the three-page "Joint Resolution of the 54th Legislature", asking Congress to accept the 11 "alternate" electoral votes for Trump or “to have all electoral votes nullified completely until a full forensic audit can be conducted.”"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fake-arizona-electors-vote-for-trump-and-real-arizona-legislators-ask-congress-to-accept-them/ar-BB1bVxFj


Mitch McConnell has publicly accepted Biden's victory now that the electoral college has officially voted, but "libertarian" Rand Paul is helping to keep the coup going.

December 16:

"Sen. Rand Paul falsely claims presidential election was 'stolen', siding with Donald Trump."

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/16/sen-rand-paul-falsely-claims-presidential-election-stolen/3923681001/


Although people like Paul claim to hold principles advocating for liberty and rooting out corruption in the government, it has long been obvious Paul is just as crooked and devoid of principle as the rest. In March 2017, just months after the Trump administration began, John McCain said, referring to Paul, "The Senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."


A year later, Paul was hand-delivering letters to Putin, taking great pride in this.

"“I was honored to deliver a letter from President Trump to President Vladimir Putin’s administration. The letter emphasized the importance of further engagement in various areas including countering terrorism, enhancing legislative dialogue and resuming cultural exchanges,” Paul wrote in a Twitter post.

The White House said the Republican president had provided Paul with a “letter of introduction” for his trip at the senator’s request.

“In the letter, the president mentioned topics of interest that Senator Paul wanted to discuss with President Putin,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement."

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-idUSKBN1KT1RV

"By now, practically everyone has seen that picture of the two guys at President Trump's weekend rally in Ohio wearing T-shirts that said: "I'd Rather be a Russian than a Democrat!"

Many have also seen the visuals of Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul hobnobbing in Moscow this week with members of the Russian Council, sometimes called his "counterparts.""

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/09/636982295/is-it-springtime-for-putin-and-republicans

This came a month after 8 Republicans went to Russia during the 4th of July:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/395719-gop-senators-visited-moscow-on-july-4

I pointed out back in early 2019 how obvious it was that Republican love for Russia was a clear signal that our government had been compromised. Looking back, this is probably some of the earliest clear-cut evidence of the successful Republican self-coup, where the Republican administration operated with total disregard to both the letter and spirit of our Constitution and laws with impunity.


December 9: Russian state media has suggested Trump should go into exile in Russia once his term is over. Heading to a country which supported your regime in order to escape punishment is, you know, something leaders of failed coups often do.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-media-wants-moscow-to-grant-asylum-to-trump-to-help-him-dodge-prosecutions

December 16: Trump wants to fire FBI director for not helping him with the coup, but Trump's lawyers talked him out of it:

"The White House counsel's office has advised President Trump against firing FBI Director Christopher Wray, warning of potential legal consequences for the move, NBC News reported.

[...]

Administration lawyers reportedly told the president the move would make explicit that he expected the personal loyalty of anyone appointed to the position, adding that it could create a ripple effect similar to the 2017 dismissal of former FBI Director James Comey, which led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone and other White House attorneys have also told the president the firing would likely be viewed as retaliation for Wray's failure to announce investigations the president has called for into his political enemies, according to NBC News."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-house-counsels-office-advised-trump-against-firing-fbi-director-report/ar-BB1bYush

Sunday, December 13, 2020

Democrat politicians are now calling Republicans out for their coup attempt!

This is an extremely significant development. No longer is it just dozens of mainstream media outlets (including non-American media outlets!), but now a sitting politician is acknowledging the coup attempt. And not just any politician, but one of the highest-ranking members of the Democrat party.

This milestone deserves its own post, so I will be posting all subsequent updates regarding the Republican coup attempt on this page. Please see the previous post, where I give an account of the dozens and dozens of mainstream journalists and media outlets who were willing to call the coup attempt out.


House Majority Whip James Clyburn:

"This is an attempt to overthrow our government.
You may not call it a coup, but this is an attempted coup.

Some people say Trump is trying to steal the election.
He is not trying to steal the election.
He is in your face trying to overthrow the will of the people." -James E. Clyburn, December 8, 2020

https://twitter.com/WhipClyburn/status/1336313614249189378

(Click the Twitter link to see the full 9 minute interview. Relevant section starts at 3:55.)

"Now, some people say he is trying to steal the election. He is not trying to steal the election. That denotes some kind of unknown activity when you are stealing. No. That’s not what he’s doing. He is in your face trying to overthrow the will of the people. But right here on your network, I said three years ago that this man did not plan to give up this White House."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/12/08/dem_rep_jim_clyburn_trumps_election_challenges_are_an_attempted_coup.html


If Clyburn can step up and tell us this is a coup attempt, journalists and media outlets no longer have any excuses when they try to gaslight us and tell us this isn't a coup and isn't a big deal. This is a coup.

***

The following are additional news articles related to the still-ongoing coup attempt. Please see my previous post covering dozens of other articles on this subject. (Again, I do not necessarily endorse the analyses in any of these articles. I am posting them to demonstrate the vast number of journalists willing to correctly call this a coup. Years from now, when people try to gaslight us and downplay the coup, we can refer to these articles so we never forget the unshakable fact that the majority of the Republican party endorsed and aided Trump's coup attempt.)

We may have thought the coup is over now that all 50 states have certified their election results showing Biden is the clear winner. We would be mistaken. 126 Republican members of the House and 18 state Attorneys General have openly supported a (failed) last-ditch attempt to get the Supreme Court to carry out the coup and throw out the election results in swing states which voted against Trump.


In the wake of the failed lawsuit, Allen West, chairman of the Texas Republican party suggested pro-Trump states secede. (This is called sedition, by the way).

"Texas GOP chair Allen West issued a statement saying that “perhaps” it’s time for “law-abiding states to bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had called on the court to overturn the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, four states that were key to Biden’s victory. Attorneys general in 17 states and more than 100 Republican members of Congress backed the lawsuit that was shot down by the Supreme Court that said Texas doesn’t have the right to get involved in elections of other states.

West made his anger clear shortly after the Supreme Court issued its brief order tossing out the lawsuit. The Supreme Court “has decreed that a state can take unconstitutional actions and violate its own election law,” West wrote. “This decision establishes a precedent that says states can violate the US constitution and not be held accountable. This decision will have far-reaching ramifications for the future of our constitutional republic.” West went on to say that the “Texas GOP will always stand for the Constitution and for the rule of law even while others don’t.”"

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/texas-gop-chair-allen-west-secession-supreme-court.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/529926-texas-gop-chair-appears-to-suggest-secession-after-scotus-rejects


Regarding the failed lawsuit:

December 11:

"Trump’s Republicans are not just attempting a coup — it’s worse than that.

When Texas attorney general Ken Paxton first filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court demanding that all the votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — 10.4 million votes in total — be thrown out completely, the general media response was to call it a stunt. Paxton is under investigation for an alleged bribery scheme, and observers speculated that, by filing this ridiculous lawsuit, he is trawling for a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, whose recent pardon of his crony Michael Flynn has instilled hope among other GOP lowlifes that they can bribe Trump to do the same for them.

Yet even though this suit is widely dismissed as a joke, a slew of other elected Republicans joined the lawsuit on Thursday, lending support to Paxton’s argument that red states should be able to overturn the results of an election that didn’t end well for Republicans. So far, 17 Republican state attorneys general and 106 Republicans in the House of Representatives — more than half the GOP caucus — have signed onto amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s absurd demands that all the votes of the residents of these four states be destroyed. Six states have asked to join Paxton’s lawsuit directly. On Monday, only a couple of House Republicans — mainly Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama — were willing to openly support Trump’s efforts to steal the election. Now it’s the majority of the House GOP caucus.

[...]

And while Republicans in the Senate have not formally signed onto this assault on the concept of democracy, many have done so informally.

[...]

As Amber Phillips of the Washington Post notes, “Paxton is literally arguing that the Supreme Court overturn an election because states counted their votes.”

It only makes sense if you assume, say, that the entire state of Michigan’s votes are inherently tainted because Detroit’s voters were included in the total. There is no non-racist way to assume that.

It’s tempting to write off this entire situation as another Trump-flavored clown show. The fact that Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who never turns down an opportunity to make a fool of himself, has offered to argue the case in front of the Supreme Court is just further proof. (Free drinks to the justice who asks Cruz if Trump was right to accuse his father of murdering JFK.)"

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/trumps-republicans-are-not-just-attempting-a-coup-its-worse-than-that/

The Supreme Court rejected the Texas lawsuit, because it had no standing.


That didn't stop 126 Republicans in the House (and counting?) of supporting this last ditch coup attempt. Their names are published in the following article. Please familiarize yourself.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/skbaer/list-republican-house-members-overturn-election


As I keep saying, even when Biden takes control of the presidency, we are still going to have to deal with the fallout of the (successful) Republican self-coup in the Judicial and Legislative branches of government. There are currently 197 Republicans in the House. 64% of them openly supported Trump's coup by voicing support for the Texas lawsuit to throw out all votes in swing states that Trump lost.

Among them are House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who was one of the first people to follow Trump's lead and call the Mueller report a "coup attempt" years ago--of course, we see now that Trump and him were attempting to control the narrative to distract from the Republican self-coup that was unfolding and ultimately succeeded), Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Steve King, and many of the other usual suspects.


December 10 [note, this article is old, the number of has risen to 126]:

"106 House Republicans Back Trump’s Bid to Overthrow the Government. Nothing to see here, just an attempted coup by the president and half of all Republicans in the House.

[...]

So we don’t actually have to worry about him successfully overthrowing the results of the election, but what we should probably be concerned with are the dozens of Republicans happily, publicly trying to help him execute his coup.

On Thursday, a whopping 106 House Republicans signed their names to an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Paxton, who is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for bribery and abuse of office—allegations he of course denies—falsely claims in his suit that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin violated the Constitution by counting invalid votes, and has asked the court to force all four states to throw out every vote cast and, while they’re at it, appoint electors who support Trump.

[...]

This followed Wednesday’s equally insane decision by 17 Republican attorneys general to file their own brief in support of Paxton’s suit. While the Supreme Court is not going to actually grant these people their wish, if it did it would, as Slate put it yesterday, “commit the single biggest act of vote nullification in American history, voiding millions of ballots to hand Trump an unearned second term.”"

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/donald-trump-house-gop-coup

"GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy Signs On To Election Coup Lawsuit

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) became one of the latest House Republicans Friday to sign on to a lawsuit to invalidate the election results, marking a new low point of depravity for the GOP leader and the Republican conference.

[...]

McCarthy had initially resisted signing on to the petition, which is being led by Republican Study Committee chairman Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

Johnson sent an email to every Republican in the House warning them that Trump would be “anxiously awaiting the final list” of signatories. And when No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise, the minority whip from Louisiana, signed, McCarthy apparently made the decision to follow suit, not to be outflanked on his right by one of the only Republicans who could beat McCarthy in a race to be Speaker.

With both men signed on, House Republicans are being led by two men who support overthrowing the will of the people in service to Trump — or lack the courage to stand up to the president or his supporters."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gop-leader-kevin-mccarthy-signs-on-to-election-coup-lawsuit/ar-BB1bRlcr

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kevin-mccarthy-donald-trump-election-coup-lawsuit_n_5fd3dff0c5b68256b1153faa

Democrats may control the House of Representatives since their party has over 50% of its members. However, Republicans continue to operate outside of the Constitution in the House and are awaiting the day when they can retake the majority of its membership.


Beyond the coup's support among Republicans in the federal government, 17 state Attorneys General filed a brief with the Supreme Court showing support for this coup attempt.


December 9:

"Despite dozens of judges and courts rejecting challenges to the election, Republican attorneys general in 17 states on Wednesday backed President Trump in his increasingly desperate and audacious legal campaign to reverse the results.

The show of support, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court, represented the latest attempt by Trump loyalists to use the power of public office to come to his aid as he continues to deny the reality of his loss with baseless claims of voter fraud."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/trump-texas-supreme-court-lawsuit.html


Their names are the following:

Eric C. Schmitt - Missouri (main author of the briefing).
Steve Marshall - Alabama
Leslie Rutledge - Arkansas
Ashley Moody - Florida
Douglas J. Peterson - Nebraska
Wayne Stenehjem - North Dakota
Mike Hunter - Oklahoma
Curtis T. Hill, Jr. - Indiana
Derek Schmidt - Kansas
Jeff Landry - Louisiana
Lynn Fitch - Mississippi
Tim Fox - Montana
Alan Wilson - South Carolina
Jason R. Ravnsborg - South Dakota
Herbert H. Slatery III - Tennessee
Sean D. Reyes - Utah
Patrick Morrisey - West Virginia

Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas, filed the original lawsuit. So that makes 18 state Attorneys General who openly support this coup attempt.


December 11:

"Republicans Back Trump’s Coup Attempt, Ask Supreme Court to Overturn 2020 Election.

Even before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump was telegraphing that he could use a legal strategy that would send contentious presidential results to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for Trump, if the results of his seemingly countless election lawsuits are any indication, the results haven’t been nearly as contentious as he had hoped. But he’s still ready to bet it all on the big one, and he’s not alone. Republicans have lined up behind the president’s attempted coup."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/republicans-trump-coup-attempt-supreme-court-overturn-2020-election

December 11:

"Editorial: Trump’s court won’t join his coup"

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/editorial-trump-e2-80-99s-court-won-e2-80-99t-join-his-coup/ar-BB1bRAVm

The courts may not have supported the coup, but never forget that Trump and Republicans packed the courts in preparation for this coup attempt. Barrett was confirmed to the Supreme Court after 60 million Americans had already voted, only a week before the end of the election. What would we have done if she and the rest of the court backed the coup?


December 10:

"Editorial: The enduring cost of Trump’s attempted coup.

[...]

The case dismissed in Washington, however, is being succeeded by an even more dubious attempt to bring the high court into the fray. Unlike the Pennsylvania case, which at least was led by a Republican congressman and a losing congressional candidate from that state, the latest complaint comes from Texas, a state whose electoral votes are being awarded to Trump without dispute. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is reportedly under federal investigation, is asking the court to throw out more than 10 million votes in four other states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — based on a collection of false and baseless claims.

It’s outlandish, though not too outlandish to have been joined by 17 other state attorneys general. Likewise, a Washington Post survey of Republican members of Congress found that more than 200 — nearly 9 out of 10 — still haven’t acknowledged Biden’s victory."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-The-enduring-cost-of-Trump-s-15789752.php

December 6:

"Only 27 of 249 Republicans in Congress are willing to admit Joe Biden won the presidential election, a survey found on Saturday.

[...]

Most Republicans seem committed to saying nothing: 12 of 52 senators and 15 of 197 representatives have recognised Biden’s win"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/05/house-republicans-trump-election-defeat-joe-biden

***

This article provides a decent summary of some of the major events in the coup attempt. Refer to the full article for more detail. I obviously disagree with much of the author's analysis, however.

December 11:

"Don't look past Trump's coup attempt: This is a dark moment in American history.

[...]

There is a man who keeps trying to rob banks. But he cannot write a legible ransom note. When he tries to verbally demand money from the teller, he gets nervous, starts mumbling, is scared and runs away.

The police and other law enforcement agents would pursue such a person with great diligence. If that person was eventually apprehended, he could not claim incompetence as a defense. Attempting to commit a crime is a crime in and of itself.

Donald Trump is a political criminal. He is attempting a fascist* coup against American democracy and the American people. That Trump and his gang have technically not succeeded in no way means that he and they are innocent of their crimes.

Moreover, the fact Trump has publicly announced his plans to stay in power by any means necessary, however stupid, illegal or ineffective his scheme may be, also does not make him innocent of committing major crimes against the democratic order and the rule of law.

There are too many examples to count.

After losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election by at least 7 million votes, Donald Trump has encouraged the crime of insurrection by his supporters, including armed paramilitaries, to keep him in power.

Trump's agents (most notably, now-pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn) have publicly called for a military coup to keep the Trump regime in power against the will of the American people. Trump has continued to purge senior officials deemed to be "disloyal" from their positions at the highest levels of the national security state. Trump is also placing loyalists in other positions throughout the government in an effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration."

https://www.salon.com/2020/12/11/dont-look-past-trumps-coup-attempt-this-is-a-dark-moment-in-american-history/

* As I have explained before, Trump is not a fascist and calling him one is counterproductive to left-wing anti-Trump and anti-racist rhetoric.


"America's democracy is a house built on top of a sinkhole. Donald Trump, his successors and followers and their movement will continue to burrow beneath it, trying to make the whole structure collapse. On top of that rubble they hope to build not a shining city on a hill but an ugly monument to white supremacy, Christian fascism and kleptocratic depravity."

The author goes on and on about how great US democracy is (despite empowering Trump and the Republican party--and, you know, democratically upholding slavery and Jim Crow for centuries, etc.). Yet the author also says democracy is a sinkhole that is going to continue to erode (a position which I agree with). False Leftists don't seem to realize they often engage in cognitive dissonance and doublethink as much as rightists.

Why oh why should we be content to continue to keep our nation on top of a sinkhole that could completely collapse at any moment? A sinkhole which could, in the author's words, give way to white supremacy at any moment? (It's already been giving way to white supremacy for the entire Trump presidency, and our government has officially endorsed white supremacy from the beginning all the way to the Civil Rights era...)

How about we move our nation and government to a more firm foundation that can actually ensure liberty and justice for all? This is the hubris of Western Civilization's fetishism for the so-called "Enlightenment era" principles of government. False Leftists would rather keep us on top of a "sacred" sinkhole instead of formulating a better attempt at a system of government... Tyranny of the majority never has been, and never will be, a satisfactory system of government.

***

December 8:

"Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers ask how many times Trump has to lose before he quits his 'coup attempt'

Despite "Typhoid Rudy" Giuliani's "serious illness, the president has vowed to continue the fight against democracy," Stephen Colbert said on Monday's Late Show. In "yet another huge blow to the president's coup attempt," he added, Georgia just "re-certified its presidential election results, once again finding Joe Biden as the winner following three counts of ballots. Well, like the saying goes, third time's the same as the first and the second time, only much more humiliating. But don't feel left out, Mr. President. Biden may have won the Peach State, but you got impeached, and that will never go away."

[...]

"Trump actually called up the governor of Georgia and asked him to overturn the election results — also known as coup calling, because if you're not calling this an attempted coup, then what are you calling it?" Meyers asked. "Just because it's a dumb, lazy coup that won't work doesn't mean it isn't still an attempted coup." That's also true for Trump's many legal losses, he added. "I mean, how many times does Biden have to win these states to prove to people that it's real?""

https://theweek.com/speedreads/953905/stephen-colbert-seth-meyers-ask-how-many-times-trump-lose-before-quits-coup-attempt


December 10:

"I realize I’m just a simple newspaper columnist, but it seems having a lame-duck U.S. president openly advocating a coup is a really bad and insane thing, yet the people who most loudly call themselves patriots don’t appear to give a whit.

[...]

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Roy Blunt and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, during a meeting of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, all voted against a standard and symbolic resolution that would have affirmed Biden as president-elect.

Sen. Ted Cruz threw up his hand this week and offered to argue a ludicrous Pennsylvania election case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court, of course, rejected the case, because it was patently absurd.

Cruz is smart and had to know that would happen. Why does he, and others such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, debase himself over and over again at the altar of a man so clearly destined to be condemned by history?

The time for lame excuses (“We just need to give Trump room to work through this loss”) and tacit approval of frivolous lawsuits (“The president has every right to pursue all legal avenues”) is over.

[...]

We don’t stop this craziness from happening again by downplaying or excusing it all."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/rex-huppke-crybaby-trump-has-gone-e2-80-98coup-coup-e2-80-99-and-gop-nods-along-call-it-what-it-is-crazy-stupid-and-dangerous/ar-BB1bN47x

December 11:

"Arizona Republican Party asking if followers are willing to die for Trump, openly beefing with GOP governor.

PHOENIX — Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey spent much of Donald Trump’s presidency trying not to provoke a confrontation with the president or his fervent defenders. He almost made it through.

But when state law required Ducey to certify Arizona’s presidential election results and sign off on Trump’s defeat last week, four years of loyalty wasn’t enough to protect him from the president. “Republicans will long remember!” Trump tweeted in anger at the governor.

Since then, the episode has spiraled into a public and politically damaging dispute between Ducey and influential Trump loyalists in his own party. Those who believe Trump’s unproven claims of fraud and support his effort to undermine the will of voters say Ducey betrayed his party and are asking on Twitter whether supporters are willing to die for the president. His defenders have dismissed the critics as “nuts.”"

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-arizona-republican-party-rift-twitter-20201211-fxq7ys4shnapbgmbv27ucvtjqy-story.html

December 10:

"Every Republican in Congress May Have to Vote on Trump’s Coup

[...]

The president also has enlisted Vice-President Pence to reach out to governors and other party leaders in key states to see what else can be done to help the president. A person familiar with the calls said Pence has not exerted pressure on lawmakers to take specific actions and sees them as “checking in.”

Earlier, Trump was trying to talk Republican legislators in several states, namely Michigan and Pennsylvania, into just disregarding the popular vote and appointing electors pledged to him, but he found no takers. Once the doomed Texas petition asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results fails — which it will — Team Trump will be nearly out of options. But the one remaining option will put Republican members of Congress in the spotlight with nowhere to hide.

Alabama representative Mo Brooks is planning to take advantage of an obscure provision of the Electoral Count Act of 1877 law to mount a final challenge to Biden’s win, as I noted last week:

To make a very long and tedious story short, the last step in any presidential election is the certification of electoral votes by the newly elected Congress in early January. This is normally a rubber-stamp of the results everyone knows on or shortly after Election Night. But the above-mentioned Electoral Count Act provides a way to “pause” the certification if one House and one Senate member protest the award of electors in one or more states. In that event, the two chambers separate and hold a two-hour debate before voting on the electoral votes for disputed states. Only if both Houses disapprove the initial results are they changed.

So far Brooks hasn’t publicly identified a senator who is willing to help him trigger this last resort, but there are plenty of likely suspects, ... The ostensible strategy for the caper isn’t entirely clear: Normally you’d challenge electors in states with multiple, disputed slates that have been sent to Congress (that’s what led to the adoption of the Electoral Count Act, which followed the disputed 1876 presidential election). With all 50 states having already certified electors and the “safe harbor deadline” for replacing them in Congress having already passed, that doesn’t seem to be an option."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/every-republican-in-congress-may-have-to-vote-on-trump-e2-80-99s-coup/ar-BB1bP2Rr


More of the talking heads on TV are joining in. December 9:

"Tapper Goes Off on ‘Clownish’ GOP Coup Attempt: ‘It Is Absolutely Disgraceful’"

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jake-tapper-blasts-clownish-gop-coup-attempt-says-it-is-absolutely-disgraceful

Old article (November 10):

"Trump Attempting a Coup With Republican Support Doesn't Have to Work to be Dangerous."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/trump-attempting-coup-republican-support-dangerous

*****

December 11:

"Democrat asks Pelosi to refuse to seat lawmakers supporting Trump's election challenges

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) is asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to refuse to seat members of the next Congress who back President Trump’s effort to challenge the election.

[...]

“Stated simply, the men and women who would act to tear the United States Government apart cannot serve as Members of the Congress,” Pascrell said in a statement posted to Twitter.

“These lawsuits seeking to obliterate public confidence in our democratic system by invalidating the clear results of the 2020 presidential election undoubtedly attack the text and the spirit of the Constitution, which each Member swears to support and defend,” he added.

Today I’m calling on House leaders to refuse to seat any Members trying to overturn the election and make donald trump an unelected dictator.
— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@BillPascrell) December 11, 2020

Pascrell argues that the 14th Amendment prohibits members of Congress from rebelling agains the U.S., and “trying to overturn a democratic election and install a dictator seems like a pretty clear example of that.”

The text of the 14th Amendment expressly forbids Members of Congress from engaging in rebellion against the United States. Trying to overturn a democratic election and install a dictator seems like a pretty clear example of that.
— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@BillPascrell) December 11, 2020

[...]

Pelosi’s office didn’t comment on Pascrell’s request, but in a Dear Colleague letter sent Friday evening, Pelosi said the Republicans are “subverting the Constitution by their reckless and fruitless assault on our democracy which threatens to seriously erode public trust in our most sacred democratic institutions, and to set back our progress on the urgent challenges ahead.”"

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/529883-rep-pascrell-jr-asks-pelosi-to-refuse-to-seat-lawmakers-supporting-trumps

Pelosi had to be dragged into supporting impeachment and has been continuously unwilling to play hardball against all the criminal activities of Trump and Republicans (i.e. she has been enabling them), so it is unlikely she will actually do this.

Pascrell had previously joined Eric Swalwell in calling for a Crimes Commission to take place to root out all the criminal activity and corruption that occured during the Trump administration. Americans must do everything we possibly can to ensure the Crimes Commission actually gets carried out, or else our nation will never heal.

***

The chickens are coming home to roost as more and more far-right Trumpist voters are trying to tear down the "establishment" Republicans who aided and abetted Trump for his entire 4 years, but are not willing to carry out his coup.


December 12:

"MAGA Protesters Chant ‘Destroy the GOP’ at Pro-Trump Rally

A motley crew of pro-Trump figures was in attendance, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Trump’

[...]

In his speech, Flynn tried desperately to keep hope alive that the president would somehow manage to overturn the democratically chosen President-elect Biden, despite the fact that thus far every one of his attempts has been thwarted. The speech was Flynn’s first public remarks since Trump pardoned him in late November.

[...]

He continued, “The courts aren’t going to decide who the next president of the United States is going to be. We the people decide.”

[...]

Even minor MAGA celebrity Mike Lindell, AKA the My Pillow guy, tried to inject hope into the crowd. “Last night, about two in the morning, I got a text from [Trump lawyer] Sidney Powell’s team, and the Texas lawsuit [rejected by the Supreme Court] had nothing to do with what she’s been working hard on,” he said. “And she filed her lawsuits with the Supreme Court for Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona… I have seen it, the fraud is 100 percent, and Donald Trump will be our president for four more years!”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/protesters-chant-destroy-the-gop-at-pro-trump-rally-1102967/

Recently Flynn called for Trump to declare martial law in order to throw out the election and carry out the coup.


"After Supreme Court dismisses Texas case, Trump says his efforts to challenge election results are ‘not over’.

[...]

In a Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump repeated his false claims of election fraud and said his legal team will continue to pursue challenges, despite the Supreme Court’s recent dismissal of a long-shot bid to overturn the results in four states Biden won.

[...]

A CBS News poll released Sunday shows that 62 percent of registered voters believe that the election is over and that it is time to move on. But, notably, 75 percent of Republicans said that they believe the election is not over and that it should still be contested. Just 18 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2020 said they consider Biden the legitimate winner.

Attorney General William P. Barr, who was appointed by Trump, said earlier this month that he has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” undercutting Trump’s claims of widespread and significant voting irregularities."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/after-supreme-court-dismisses-texas-case-trump-says-his-efforts-to-challenge-election-results-are-not-over/ar-BB1bTxFC


I see a lot of liberal people celebrating this chaos among Republicans, but this isn't good news.

The astroturfed Tea Party movement swept through the Republican party from 2009-2014. In essence, it emboldened Republican voters to move farther to the right and they were successful at replacing "moderate" Republicans with far-right Tea Partiers (like Michele Bachmann, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz). The Tea Party movement paved the way for Republican voters to move even further to the right, allowing for the rise of the Alt-Right. Now, with Trump's open support of white supremacy and other extreme right-wing views (which received no pushback from "mainstream" Republicans), the Overton Window has been pushed so that the Alt-Right is mainstream conservatism.

Alt-Right and Trumpist voters are extremely dedicated and zealous to their "cause" and so-called principles. Like the Tea Partiers, Trumpist Republicans will challenge non-Trumpist Republicans in the primaries and unseat them. If the "mainstream" wing of the Republican Party doesn't push back strongly against Trumpist voters, then Trumpist Republicans could very well become the vocal policy-setting wing of the party, just as the Tea Partiers were only a few years ago.

Again, this is bad news for leftists and sane people. After the Republican party absorbed Tea Party attitudes, they went to never-before-seen lengths to create government dysfunction and have driven partisanship to the highest levels in American history. Now that the party has moved even more dramatically to the right, the Alt-Right and Trumpist Republicans make people like George W. Bush look like liberals in comparison. (Indeed, the psychological trauma from Trump has been so extreme that one can easily find plenty of examples of Democrat voters longing for the "good ol' days" of the "sane" Republicanism of war criminal George W. Bush...)

Trump supporters may try to cause chaos for the Republican party leading up to the Georgia Senate election, but this is only to give them leverage over the party. Trump will leave, but all these millions of fervent Trump voters will remain. They will still be here during the next election, and the one after that, and the one after that. They will run for office and show up to vote. They will not allow Democrats or "mainstream" Republicans to rule unopposed.

The Republican party is very unlikely to reject such a reliable voting bloc, especially due to the fact that Democrats have a growing demographic advantage as the Baby Boomer generation dies off. So brace yourself for the likelihood the Republican party fully embraces Trumpism sooner or later.

In 2016 many people had the fantasy that Trump's chaotic character would end up destroying the Republican party. It didn't. Instead, his chaos and unapologetic corruption allowed the Republican party to successfully commit a self-coup and operate outside of the Constitution for 4 entire years in all 3 branches of government. The internal disputes among right wing voters at the moment won't destroy the Republican party either. When the dust settles, we will likely have to deal with a much stronger and exponentially more dangerous enemy instead.

Monday, November 23, 2020

Mainstream media is finally calling the Trump administration out for their coup attempt!

With Trump and his inner circle doing everything they possibly can to delegitimize the results of the election, the mainstream media finally admits Trump is attempting a coup!

Unfortunately, the authors of most of these articles fail to acknowledge that the ongoing coup attempt began at least as early as June when the Postal Service was sabotaged. The authors are quite late in pointing the coup out, since the judges Trump packed the courts with in preparation for the coup have backed out, and other key pieces Trump needed to pull off the coup (like sabotaging mail-in voting) have fallen through. Much of the momentum has already worn off and Trump missed the prime window of opportunity to pull the coup off. He and his inner circle of grifters are basically going at this alone.

If the Republican party had actually put their full weight behind carrying out this coup, these news articles would have been too little, too late.

(Also, the authors of the following news articles fail to acknowledge the self-coup Republicans successfully carried out early on in the Trump presidency. Retrospective analyses of the Trump administration need to be stressing this fact at every opportunity. Republicans in all 3 branches of government operated outside of the Constitution for the entire 4 years of the Trump administration, with minimal pushback from the Democrat party or media.)

***

Here are some news articles finally calling the coup out. As a disclaimer, I don't necessarily endorse the analysis in any of these articles. I am merely using them to give examples of how the media has waited 4 years before finally, decisively, and no-holds-barred calling Trump out for his crimes. A multitude of mainstream sources have FINALLY stopped whitewashing the grand crimes of the Republican administration, but they could have been 'telling it like it is' the entire time...

 

"Trump is attempting a coup in plain sight
[...]
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."
https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-biden

"A Disturbing Number of Republicans Support Trump’s Coup Attempt

Last week, Axios reported an alarming but vaguely sourced story that “Republicans are talking more” about pressuring Republican state legislators to override the election results in their state and appoint pro-Trump representatives to the Electoral College. The next day, the New York Times identified the specific source of this terrifying idea: Donald Trump himself, who floated it in White House discussions.
[...]
But it’s because his effort is so feeble that the compliance of many Republicans is so striking. While supporting a coup that might come to fruition is tempting, supporting one that is certain to fail is not. Trump’s pathetic campaign to discredit the election is the easiest possible test of his party’s commitment to democracy. Remarkably, a number of prominent Republicans are failing it.

Influential Republican activists like Tom Fitton, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Ken Starr have all demanded state legislators override the election result. Politicians like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham have also signed on.
[..]
Trump’s attempted coup is going to fail because he hasn’t gotten the party fully onboard with it. It’s not hard for them to say no: Trump didn’t even begin to organize his scheme until it was too late, he has too many states to flip, and the alternative facing them — a moderate Democrat constrained by a right-wing court and a likely Republican Senate — is hardly scary.

One can only imagine how the party would respond in a slightly different world: a Republican presidency capable of organizing plans in advance, an election coming down to one or two states, a more unconstrained progressive Democratic administration as the alternative.


The popular Republican stance has been to indulge Trump’s lies while dismissing the danger he poses. “To launch a coup you need more than a giant, suppurating grievance and access to Twitter,” Wall Street Journal opinion columnist and former editor Gerard Baker scoffs. “You need a fanatical commitment, a detailed plan, an energy, a sophisticated apparatus of revolution.”

Not exactly. Those are the things one needs to carry out a coup. To merely launch a coup, you only need a party leader who refuses to abide by an election and recruits allies to cancel its result. That isn’t a fright story told by wild-eyed liberals. It’s what’s happening right now."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/trump-election-coup-lindsey-graham-ron-desantis-fraud-vote.html

 

This article compares Trump's coup with a coup that happened in the city government of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898. Wilmington had elected a multi-ethnic government, but White Supremacists formed an armed mob to run the "blacks" out of town and kill those who refused. I don't think this is the most helpful comparison, but at least this article calls out Trump's coup.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/what-the-trump-coup-and-wilmington-coup-have-in-common.html

"Trump's coup attempt is very real — luckily there are several gaping holes in the plan.
[...]
Before the election, Trump made his strategy clear. He repeatedly said he thought that the election would be decided by the Supreme Court, and he used this point as a justification for rushing through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Now, his campaign is launching a series of lawsuits — which many serious legal analysts dismissed as frivolous and baseless — hoping that something will stick and enable him to remain president.

And while it initially seemed other Republicans might not stick by him in this fight, they increasingly fell in line. Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News to support Trump's refusal to concede. On Monday, Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, both of whom face runoff races against Democrats in early January, wrote a letter demanding their own Republican secretary of state step down, lobbing vague and, again, unsupported allegations of misconduct in the state's election — which Biden appears to have won. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, on the chamber's floor, defended Trump's refusal to concede and offered support for the president's effort to pursue lawsuits on Monday."
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/10/trumps-coup-attempt-is-very-real--luckily-there-are-several-gaping-holes-in-the-plan_partner/

"The Real Threat of Trump’s Ridiculous Coup Attempt.
Republicans are extending their position that Democrats in power are illegitimate to suggest that Democrats voting shouldn’t count either.
[...]
But more importantly, this is a piece of signaling from the party, which has come to believe that Democrats can never legitimately hold power, that they really mean it, and oh, they will gladly use the collected apparatus of the courts, Big Law, social media, state legislatures, the Justice Department, the media, assorted Trump hacks, the Republican National Committee, and Senate Republicans to make farcical claims about the need to throw out “tens of thousands of illegal ballots,” which, as best as I can tell, are only “illegal” because they have been cast by Democrats."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/trump-coup-threat-republican-minority-rule.html

"Shame the Random, Unknown Government Officials Aiding Trump’s Coup Attempt.

Republicans from Michigan, many of them low-level government officials, have spent the past week flirting with aiding Donald Trump’s coup attempt. On Tuesday, two Republican members of the board that certifies election results from the county that includes Detroit voted against certifying the county’s votes because they favored Joe Biden, leading the group to deadlock. Later that day, they changed their minds and certified the results. Then, after Trump contacted the two Republicans, they changed their minds again and asked to “rescind” their certification votes. It’s as absurd as it is alarming.

There’s also some coup action going on at the state level in Michigan. On Friday, the GOP leaders of the Michigan House and Senate met with Trump in D.C., presumably so the president could ask them to send Trump supporters to the Electoral College. The idea is that they would cast the state’s votes for Trump instead of Joe Biden, who won Michigan about 154,000 votes.
[...]
There has been some public discussion of what should become of the Trump administration’s enablers after Trump leaves office. Many have already been indicted; there may be many more to come. Some will be absorbed into think tanks, Big Law, consulting firms, and various squalid corners of the right-wing media universe. Some, like Stephen Miller, should never live down their crimes against humanity, and should find it difficult to take a spin class or patronize a brasserie in peace.

But the little people, like these Michigan Republicans—the statewide officials and local party hacks who are doing their darnedest to invalidate the votes of the Black Americans who overcame dogged voter suppression efforts to oust Donald Trump—shouldn’t fall through the cracks. They may have had no national profile, but they’ve sure earned one now. ...Let them be harangued as publicly and humiliatingly as possible until they certify the election results, and let their neighbors never forget how they chose to use their stupid turn in the limelight."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/shame-government-officials-aiding-trump-coup.html

"So is President Trump staging a coup, or what?
[...]
But I also think that Trump’s coup maneuvers needed to be taken both literally and seriously — by Team Biden and leading Democrats, and by everyday citizens — and must be forcefully resisted at every possible step. Esper, for his part, told the Military Times that if his replacement is “a real yes man” then “God help us.”"
https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/trump-coup-william-barr-mitch-mcconnell-american-democracy-20201110.html

"Trump, GOP’s ridiculous, flailing coup isn’t a joke. It’s a crime. There must be consequences.
[...]

But it’s time now for all the laughter to die in outrage. Because we need to state in the clearest and most unambiguous terms what is happening in America in November 2020: The president of the United States is using the power of his office to try to overturn, by any means necessary, the fair and democratic election that will remove him from office. In a nation that stakes its claim to “exceptionalism” on 44 peaceful transfers of power (despite one that wasn’t) over 231 years, its current leader is attempting a coup.

It’s not a joke. It’s a crime. And there ought to be consequences — for Trump and his enablers, and to ensure this never happens again."

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/trump-coup-republican-party-state-legislatures-electors-20201122.html

"‘Raise the alarm’: Experts warn of ‘sedition’ and ‘coup’ attempt as Michigan GOP leaders fly to DC to meet with Trump."
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/11/raise-the-alarm-experts-warn-of-sedition-and-coup-attempt-as-michigan-gop-leaders-fly-to-dc-to-meet-with-trump/

"Trump admits Michigan Republicans met to discuss coup.

On Friday, Michigan state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield agreed to meet at the White House at President Donald Trump's behest, a move that was met with intense backlash.

Since losing the election, Trump has for weeks alleged widespread voter fraud in Michigan, a state he lost to Joe Biden by about 150,000 votes. He has not yet produced any evidence of this alleged fraud, but he and his supporters have pointed to typical and minor discrepancies with the vote tally in Detroit as proof that something must be amiss.
[...]
All available evidence points to Trump losing Michigan by a large margin. There is no evidence of fraud, and even if they don't describe it this way, Shirkey and Chatfield were meeting with Trump to discuss what can only be described as an attempted coup."
https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2020/11/21/michigan-congressmen-100-met-with-trump-to-discuss-doing-a-coup

A law professor's analysis on the coup. (Although I'm not sure how multiple coup attempts which have been either supported or passively tolerated by the governing political party isn't in itself a Constitutional Crisis, as the author claims.)

"Yes, Trump Is (Still) Engaged in an Attempted Coup.
[...]
There are many ways for national leaders to commit coups to try to hold onto power, and we should be clear that Trump has already tried and failed more than once to become a dictatorial strongman. In this column, I will first discuss what a coup is, then explain the ways that Trump has failed in his attempts thus far, and finally warn about how this could still end in a constitutional crisis that Trump creates and exploits to stay in power."
https://verdict.justia.com/2020/11/19/yes-trump-is-still-engaged-in-an-attempted-coup-and-yes-it-might-lead-to-a-constitutional-crisis-and-a-breaking-point

"Update on Trump’s Coup: Do Not Think That This Is Guaranteed to End Well.

What we are witnessing is not a “tantrum.” Donald Trump is not in denial, nor is he going through “a process” to make peace with losing the election. He is trying to do what he has clearly intended to do all along, which is to stay in office no matter what. He would have liked to have won the election fair and square, but he never had any intention not to engage in a coup d’état if necessary.

As frequent readers of Verdict are all too aware, I have been sounding the alarm about Trump’s existential threat to the continuation of American constitutional democracy and the rule of law since even before he was elected.
[...]
The people who mock left-leaning college students as “snowflakes” are suddenly the Kumbaya party, telling everyone not to worry that Trump has thrown the country into a constitutional crisis, because he merely needs to find some inner peace after a huge disappointment. Apparently, for some students to ask for extra time on an exam in response to the shock of yet another Black man being murdered by the police is laughable, but a 74-year-old man putting America’s national security at risk because he cannot yet admit that he lost a not-particularly-close election is simply an understandable response to a profound personal disappointment.
[...]
The Fight to Stop the Coup

Once Republicans start filing back on board Trump’s bandwagon, the current environment of bemused calm by everyone else is going to change. As it stands, people are pointing out that Trump’s legal challenges are all falling flat. Indeed, the only question from many of us is why it is so difficult for courts to sanction Trump’s lawyers for making frivolous arguments. Late-night comedians are having a field day with the amateurish efforts by those lawyers, especially Rudy Giuliani.

But those efforts might not continue to fail. Thus far, they have not found witnesses who are willing to lie under oath. But if (when?) potential perjurers receive corrupt promises of legal immunity, that might soon change. The county-level Republicans who have thus far done their jobs with integrity might soon decide that threats to themselves and their families make it not worth the fight.

And even if Trump cannot prove that there has been election fraud, he has tens of millions of people now believing a fantasy in which he rightly won the vote.
[...]
It is true that the Supreme Court would not be likely to weigh in, so long as the legal fight is over the current flurry of baseless suits from Trump’s lawyers. And those are not adding up to much. But the Court could be called upon to act on Trump’s behalf if the Republicans in key states decide to test the “legislatures-alone theory,” which would supposedly allow the Republican-dominated legislatures in key states simply to ignore their own voters and appoint Trump-committed electors to the Electoral College."

https://verdict.justia.com/2020/11/13/update-on-trumps-coup-do-not-think-that-this-is-guaranteed-to-end-well
 

Finally, someone else links the packing of the Supreme Court and the coup:

"The Supreme Court Limbers Up to Aid and Abet Trump’s Coup."
https://verdict.justia.com/2020/10/30/the-supreme-court-limbers-up-to-aid-and-abet-trumps-coup


Even non-American media outlets are calling this a coup:

"With Trump’s attempted coup underway, this is one card liberals can use to their advantage.

It is very important to understand that  Donald Trump is engaged in an attempted coup, vile and brazen even for him."

[The second half of this article uses the US coup attempt to talk about how the UK Labour party should move to the right for some reason.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/us-election-results-trump-biden-mail-ballot-b1614164.html

***

Many other articles are more cautious and instead call it "sedition". This is incorrect, since sedition means conspiring to rebel against or otherwise subvert the authority of the government. Trump is the President. Republicans control the Senate and Supreme Court. Republicans control key parts of the state governments in battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania. They are the government. When a country's leader and governing political party undermine elections and transitions of power, that is called a coup.

Other articles take a very narrow position and are only willing to call out the attempts at election fraud. When a few rouge individuals do it, that is "mere" election fraud. When the President, in coordination with his political party in both the federal government and state governments, conspires to commit widespread election fraud to change the result of an election and prevent a transfer of power, that is a coup.

However, at least these articles are finally pointing the coup and other crimes out. That is better than some articles, which are trying to gaslight us into believing we haven't even been in a "Constitutional Crisis" for the past 5 years!! I predicted this sort of gaslighting would happen, but I didn't think it would happen while Trump was still in office and actively disputing the election and peddling conspiracies!


Any news outlets and journalists which are attempting to tell us a coup is not occurring are aiding and abetting Trump's coup attempt. We must never forget that. They (which includes liberal-leaning outlets) already helped put Trump in office by legitimizing his candidacy in 2016, since he was given 24/7 free air time and far more coverage than any other candidate.

***

How the coup attempt has been unfolding

Although the courts, military, and large portions of Republican Congress members don't seem willing to push the coup forward, Trump's inner circle of grifters keep moving ahead. The following is just a few tidbits of what has been unfolding:


On the morning of November 5, Trump Tweets "STOP THE COUNT!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1324353932022480896

On the evening of November 5, Philadelphia police foiled a far-right terrorist plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center where votes were being counted.
https://6abc.com/amp/pennsylvania-convention-center-attack-plot-pa-election-2020/7689932/

"Police said the men, who did not have valid Pennsylvania firearms licenses, would be charged with firearms offenses. They were set to be arraigned. It was not immediately clear if they had retained lawyers who could comment on their behalf.

The men may also face election law violations, according to officials.

[...]

Krasner said there were some QAnon stickers on the car and that a hat with a QAnon logo was visible inside the vehicle. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that posits President Donald Trump is leading a secret war against a group of political and Hollywood elites who worship Satan and abuse and murder children."

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2-men-detained-after-police-learn-possible-threat-philadelphia-vote-n1246774

"‘Backbone of the #MAGA Movement’: Armed Man Busted Near Philly Vote Center Is ‘Vets for Trump’ Founder"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/armed-man-busted-near-philly-vote-center-site-is-joshua-macias-vets-for-trump-founder
 

November 6:

"Evacuations were underway in Philadelphia on Friday afternoon after bomb threats were called into an area close to the Convention Center where ballot counting is taking place.

[...]

A tip came in that an individual or a group was travelling to the city from Virginia in a Hummer with the intention of attacking the election location.

A man was taken into custody and a weapon recovered. It is unclear whether the two incidents are connected."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/philadelphia-bomb-threat-us-election-pennsylvania-vote-count-b1649814.html



November 6: "Fmr. CIA director is worried Trump will fuel the anger of his base and encourage them to take matters into their own hands."
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/fmr-cia-director-is-worried-trump-will-fuel-the-anger-of-his-base-and-encourage-them-to-take-matters-into-their-own-hands-95481925899


Evening of November 5: "Citing zero evidence, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls on Attorney General Bill Barr to send federal agents to arrest election workers in Pennsylvania." (Gingrich is one of the masterminds who led to politics becoming as polarized and tribalistic as it currently is).

https://www.businessinsider.com/newt-gingrich-asks-attorney-general-bill-barr-arrest-poll-workers-2020-11
https://www.thedailybeast.com/newt-gingrich-calls-on-attorney-general-bill-barr-to-arrest-poll-workers

 

November 6, Trump claims all votes which gave Biden an advantage were illegal:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1324613181466173440

 

The Trump administration has filed dozens of lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Only about two of these have been ruled in favor of Trump's lawyers.

https://time.com/5908505/trump-lawsuits-biden-wins/

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/11/16/trump-election-lawsuits-republicans-battleground-states-vote-count/6177538002/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/election-2020-trump-campaign-election-lawsuits-stand/story?id=74041748

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-lawsuits-trump-republicans-pennsylvania-georgia-michigan-nevada-wisconsin/

 

On November 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "joked" that the coup was still in progress, saying there would be a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration".
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/pompeo-trump-run-2024-election-inauguration-b1720645.html


On November 13, Trump supporters chanted "four more years" at a speech Vice President Pence was giving. Pence responded by saying "that's the plan."
https://www.businessinsider.com/pence-trump-to-be-in-place-for-4-more-years-2020-11

 

Video of Sidney Powell, a Trump campaign lawyer, posted on the official Republican Party Twitter account on November 19:

"We will not be intimidated...We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom."—Sidney Powell
https://twitter.com/gop/status/1329490975266398210?s=21

Despite being promoted on the Republican party's official Twitter and listed by Trump as one of his campaign's legal team, just 3 days later Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani released a statement distancing the Trump campaign from her. This news article quotes a campaign official as saying, “She was too crazy even for the president.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/22/giuliani-releases-statement-distancing-trump-campaign-lawyer-sidney-powell/


Trump supporters in Georgia are mad the Republican party is not supporting Trump's coup, and allegedly pledge to boycott the Georgia Senate election, just to spite the Republican party so they will lose control of the Senate..?

https://www.newsweek.com/georgia-trump-supporters-destroy-gop-boycott-senate-runoffs-1549245


If you've ever looked at the places where Trump supporters hang out, they frequently encourage each other to lie to pollsters and the media so they underestimate the number of Trump supporters. I think it is more likely that this "boycott" is actually a psyop to (1) make Democrats overconfident so they don't work as hard to win, (2) make the non-Trumpists in the Republican party scared and make concessions to the Trumpists, and (3) give an excuse to claim the result of the Senate runoff election isn't valid since it was boycotted.

These are the types of people who still think Hillary Clinton is engaged in some global conspiracy 4 years after she lost the election. These people think the Democrat party elite literally eat babies (look it up). They aren't going to sit this critical Senate runoff election out and risk Democrats gaining control of the Senate.

On the other hand, maybe it is not a psyop. Maybe they really are going all-in to force their party to follow through with the coup? Afterall, Trump appealed to many voters who knew he was a "chaos candidate" and wanted him to tear down the old order of politics; why would they care if the Republican party gets obliterated when Trump is gone?

"Attorney L. Lin Wood, who has been filing lawsuits for President Donald Trump challenging the election results, called on Republicans to withhold their votes for two GOP senators in an upcoming runoff election that will decide which party holds the majority of the Senate, Mediaite reports.

In a series of weekend tweets, Wood asked Georgians not to vote for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue unless they help overturn the election results in the state."
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/georgia-election-loeffler-perdue/2020/11/23/id/998342/

(Regardless of what is going on within the Republican party, every single person who is sick of Trump and the Republicans who aided and abetted all his crimes need to support the Democrat candidates in the Georgia Senate runoff election, which ends on January 5, 2021. Georgia citizens can still register until December 7, which includes anyone turning 18 by January 5. If both Democrat candidates win the Senate election in Georgia, the Senate will be split 50-50, with the Vice President casting a tiebreaker vote. If not, the Republicans, under the iron fist of Mitch McConnell, will very likely continue to keep our nation in a state of Constitutional Crisis for as long as possible.)

 

November 19: it was announced top Michigan state lawmakers would meet with Trump to discuss the results of the election. 

https://apnews.com/article/trump-invites-michigan-gop-white-house-6ab95edd3373ecc9607381175d6f3328 

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/11/michigan-trump-steal/ 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/michigan-gop-lawmakers-heckled-arrival-white-house-meeting-n1248396


On November 19, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed there were 300,000 illegitimate votes in Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/11/19/rudy-giuliani-targets-wayne-county-raising-claims-judge-found-not-credible/6341765002/

Michigan citizens have been fighting back, filing a lawsuit against the Trump campaign for their attempted voter suppression:

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/526997-michigan-group-sues-trump-campaign-for-alleged-mass-voter-suppression 

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/20/michigan-black-voters-lawsuit-438935

***

I'm putting this in a separate section because it is one of the highest profile crimes going on to support Trump's coup at the moment:

November 16:

"Georgia’s secretary of state says fellow Republicans are pressuring him to find ways to exclude legal ballots.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said Monday that he has come under increasing pressure in recent days from fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who he said questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state.
[...]
Raffensperger said he was stunned that Graham appeared to suggest that he find a way to toss legally cast ballots. Absent court intervention, Raffensperger doesn’t have the power to do what Graham suggested because counties administer elections in Georgia.

“It sure looked like he was wanting to go down that road,” Raffensperger said."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/brad-raffensperger-georgia-vote/2020/11/16/6b6cb2f4-283e-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html


With this story, the mainstream media has affirmatively stated Lindsey Graham has committed election fraud. Finally, telling it as it is and pointing out the criminals with no "maybes" or "possibly-s"!

"Lindsey Graham’s Alleged Attempt to Toss Georgia Ballots Is Felony Election Fraud. If he weren’t a senator, Graham might be facing years in prison, according to legal experts in Georgia.

Since narrowly losing Georgia to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has promoted baseless claims of voter fraud in a desperate effort to overturn the results of the election. So far, however, the only individual credibly accused of a fraudulent effort to steal the election is South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. On Monday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who, like Graham, is a Republican—told the Washington Post that Graham asked him if he could throw out all mail ballots from counties with a high rate of signature mismatch. Raffensperger later clarified that he believed Graham wanted his office to throw out valid, legally cast ballots. The senator has contested this account.

Graham’s alleged request is unseemly and corrupt. But is it criminal? In short, yes, according to multiple Georgia election law experts. If Raffensperger’s account is true, there is virtually no doubt that Graham committed a crime under Georgia law.
[...]
Republicans are not always so lenient toward those accused of election-related crimes. In 2012, a GOP district attorney charged Olivia Pearson, a Black woman, with voter fraud after she helped someone use a voting machine. She was acquitted after two trials, avoiding a five-year prison sentence. In October, she was arrested again for trying to help someone else cast their vote. State officials have also launched an ongoing investigation into voter fraud with the intention of prosecuting individuals who made mistakes that did not affect the outcome of any election. Graham’s phone call with Raffensperger might seem like a relatively minor offense. But if he weren’t a white Republican senator, he may well be facing years in prison."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/lindsey-graham-brad-raffensperger-georgia-election-fraud.html

From the beginning of the Trump presidency, many have speculated that Graham's strange change of heart--going from saying Trump would destroy the Republican party and that the party would deserve it, to licking Trump's boots at every turn--was from blackmail or something personally damaging. Afterall, how do you explain why someone who once said Joe Biden is "as good a man as God ever created" and the Republican party will get destroyed, and deserve it, for supporting Trump, is now helping Trump commit fraud in some state he has nothing to do with? If Graham simply stood up and said "No" to whoever is pressuring him, surely the fallout would be no where near as bad as literally helping to destroy our nation?

Of course, Republicans have been pressuring Raffensperger long before Graham got involved:
"Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he believed that, because he was overseeing the election, it would be a conflict of interest for him to take sides. Around the country, most secretaries of state remain officially neutral in elections.

The attacks on his job performance are “clear retaliation,” Raffensperger said. “They thought Georgia was a layup shot Republican win. It is not the job of the secretary of state’s office to deliver a win — it is the sole responsibility of the Georgia Republican Party to get out the vote and get its voters to the polls. That is not the job of the secretary of state’s office.”"
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-campaign-officials-started-pressuring-georgias-secretary-of-state-long-before-the-election

Georgia has been an epicenter of election fraud. In 2018, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp was running for governor. Kemp's office oversaw voter registration, and cancelled the registration of 340,000 citizens. I don't think I need to explain how it is a conflict of interest for someone to control the voter rolls in an election they are running in! (Spoiler alert, Kemp won, but his challenger, Stacey Abrams, was instrumental in turning Georgia blue in the 2020 election.)


Going back to Lindsey Graham, he has openly said voters need to be disenfranchised in order for the Republican party to continue to win:
"In a Monday night appearance on Fox News, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the quiet part out loud—twice.

First, he attempted to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election, accusing the Democratic Party of cheating to win—by making voting more accessible through mail-in ballots—and second, he admitted that improving the quality of democracy in the United States would render future GOP victories all but impossible.

"Republicans win because of our ideas and we lose elections because [Democrats] cheat," Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
[...]
Later in his remarks, Graham claimed that "if we don't do something about voting by mail, we're going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.""
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/10/lindsey-graham-admits-making-voting-more-accessible-renders-gop-victories-impossible

***

While Graham and other Republicans have been pursuing the coup through government institutions, others have been advocating for more direct and violent means.

Trump's former top advisor Steve Bannon was banned from Twitter after advocating government officials be beheaded and their heads placed on pikes, as well as hinting at civil war. (Remember this any time Bannon or people like him try to call Muslims or "non-whites" barbaric...)

Perhaps Bannon is just trying to save himself from obscurity by catching headlines, but recall he used to be Trump's former top advisor. In fact, in the first days of the Trump presidency, Bannon's influence was so strong that people used to call him "President Bannon". The man who used to write Trump's policies is now advocating for the barbaric execution of government officials who would rather do their jobs and remain loyal to America than "get in line" and support anti-American behaviors of a wannabe mafia boss.

"Twitter banned an account used by former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon after he called for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray on his podcast Thursday.
[...]
As of Thursday evening, Bannon's account was still active on Facebook, where the video calling for Fauci and Wray to be executed had been viewed nearly 200,000 times in ten hours. Late Thursday, Facebook said it had removed videos of Bannon's remarks for violating its policy on violence and incitement.
[...]
On the Bannon podcast, the right-wing provocateur said a second Trump term "kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci.

"Now I actually want to go a step farther but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I'd put the heads on pikes, right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats: 'You either get with the program or you're gone -- time to stop playing games.' Blow it all up, put (Trump campaign adviser, former acting Director of National Intelligence and ex-U.S. Ambassador to Germany) Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI. That'll light them up, right."
[...]
Co-host Jack Maxey said, "You know what Steve? Just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors."

Bannon replied, "That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/twitter-bans-a-bannon-account-after-he-says-behead-fauci-and-wray/ar-BB1aKsH4


Perhaps echoing Bannon's calls to violence, Giuliani said someone needs to cut the head of the Democrat party. This metaphor probably wouldn't be cause for concern if it were not for all the other blatant and thinly-shrouded calls for violence that Republicans have made over the past few years... 

https://www.businessinsider.com/rudy-giuliani-fox-news-cut-head-off-democrats-trump-biden-2020-11

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1329615303169466370


Even a former CIA Director has warned this sort of rhetoric will lead to violence perpetrated by riled-up Trump supporters. So we should not take this lightly.

Indeed, Trump's constant flirting with far-right groups already facilitated a foiled terrorist plot to kill the Michigan governor a month ago!!!

***

Trump's last attempt to carry out the coup without beginning a military-backed coup (they won't support him) or starting a literal civil war is to convince state governments to disregard Biden's popular vote victory and appoint pro-Trump electoral college voters anyway. This is explained briefly in the following article. Although the outcome of the election is clear, the electoral college does not officially confirm the new president until mid-December.

"The Trump Campaign Is Reportedly Plotting an Election Coup to “Bypass” a Biden Win"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/trump-campaign-election-coup-bypass-biden-win

***

I doubt Trump will actually try to start a civil war to stay in power, but far-right violence is only going to increase in the days leading up to the change of administrations. About 50% of Republicans believe Trump's alternative facts that he actually won the election! Seriously. Even if Trump leaves quietly, many of those people own guns and are not going to simply accept the change of administrations.

This isn't the biggest problem, however. The thing is, although Trump may not have enough internal support within his party for them to fully back his coup attempt, you better believe they are going to analyze this as a dry run and fine-tune things for the day when their party gets a competent and mentally-stable version of Trump...

(Some in the mainstream media are already recognizing this as well!)

 

Republicans had everything they needed to pull off the coup if they genuinely desired to:

• A packed Supreme Court and lower courts (with a crony confirmed to the Supreme Court after 60 million Americans had already voted, 8 days before the end of the election!). Recall that the Supreme Court was already used to give George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 (if all votes were counted he would have lost!)

• An Attorney General willing to cover-up all the administration's crimes.

• The ability to drop an "October Surprise" on the Democrats to tip the tide of public opinion at the last moment. (Attorney General Barr was tasked with trumping up such a Surprise with his "investigate the investigators" witch hunt, but, unlike Comey in the 2016 election, he did not drop an October Surprise).

• A Senate which will prevent the removal of the President, no matter the evidence of his crimes.

• A Senate which will allow any unqualified crony they want into the courts and Executive branch agency positions.

• A sabotaged Postal Service which could have resulted in an electoral vote tie or Trump victory if Trump had his way and prevented mail-in votes from being counted!!!

• In the event of an electoral college tie, each state delegation in the House of Representatives would cast a vote for President. Since there are more "red" states, Trump would have won the tie.

• They control enough state legislatures to bypass the election results and directly appoint electors. (This is still a threat, and they are continuing to keep this option on the table).

• Extremely successful propaganda on news media and social media to sway public opinion. (Fox News was started by Republicans on the belief that a strong right-wing media could have swayed public opinion enough that Nixon wouldn't have had to resign. They've been so successful that Trump was able to commit treason with Russia and his approval rate hasn't dropped. They've been so successful at Big Lie tactics that they've literally convinced people to believe "alternative facts" and countless other Orwellian attitudes!!!)

• Hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of zealously dedicated armed followers ready to "stand by" and start a civil war if Trump gave the signal.

The only thing Republicans didn't have this time was the military, although we may imagine enough Generals, officers, and enlisted troops would support a mentally-competent Republican leader in this situation in the future to cause serious chaos.

***

If the Biden administration does not carry out a Crimes Commission to hold every last person in the Trump administration accountable for their crimes, everything the Trump administration did will have been legalized. Republicans will commit more self-coups whenever they control the Presidency and Senate, and will organize more coup attempts to seize the Presidency.

This is the pivotal political moment of our lifetime. Comparable to the chance to rid ourselves of the political tyranny and corruption of the British during the Revolution, the chance to rid ourselves of racist tyranny and corruption during Reconstruction, and the chance to rid ourselves of both political and racist corruption during the Civil Rights Movement and Counterculture. Reconstruction utterly failed and it took an entire lifetime to get a second chance with the Civil Rights Movement. Rooting out political corruption during the 1960s-70s failed (see the section in my article outlining the unbroken legacy of corruption from Nixon to the present).

Today, we are presented with a second chance to root out this corruption and cut out the cancerous tumor that is destroying America. We may not get a third chance.

 

*****


_________
Update 11/30
: more articles. Every time someone in the media publishes an article trying to gaslight us into believing this wasn't a big deal or never happened, they are actively helping Trump control the narrative and paving the way for Republicans to try coups again in the future. For the past 5 years Trump has been able to control the narrative and push the Overton Window to such a degree that political views which were once considered mentally-unstable fringe views are now mainstream right-wing positions among elected Republican politicians. Month after month Republicans have shocked us by committing acts of corruption so unthinkable that not even the most "outrageous" liberal predictions of 2016 have come close to the reality that has unfolded in the years which followed. Trump has achieved all of this by turning to extreme hyperbole and incessantly pushing his rhetoric until even liberal-leaning media outlets were using his talking points.

We need to acknowledge the insanity that has been happening and not fear that we're being hyperbolic when we point out the plain facts of the nation's most corrupt, criminal, and treasonous administration. Anyone who doesn't is merely helping Trump do damage control. Trump's spokespeople literally coined the term "alternative facts"!!! They've pushed us so far into an alternate reality that even countless liberal-leaning people are afraid to admit real facts, since saying the plain truth has nearly been pushed outside of the Overton Window... Insanity.


November 25:

"Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt: ‘We’ve entered the corrupt pardon phase of the Trump coup’"
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/steve-schmidt-we-ve-entered-the-corrupt-pardon-phase-of-the-trump-coup-96633925837

Remember that the Lincoln Project is made up of mainstream pre-Trump Republicans, many of whom worked for George Bush, Rudy Giuliani (before he became a Trumpist), the Republican party during the Clinton impeachment, John McCain, etc. So now both mainstream non-Trump conservatives and liberals are calling Trump's actions a coup attempt. At this point, anyone who tells us Trump is not attempting a coup is gaslighting us and actively aiding and abetting his coup attempt. I cannot stress this enough. Look up who the founders of the Lincoln Project are. They are not "progressive" liberals and they are not even conservative Democrats. They are rank and file pre-Trump Republicans.


November 29, the mainstream media says exactly what I have said already:
"Donald Trump's coup was still ongoing when the takes preaching the value of forgiveness and letting bygones be bygones started to come out.
...
Unfortunately, Biden is living up to every stereotype of the quisling Democrat and taking this advice seriously. Reports suggest that in the interest of national "unity," Biden is discouraging the idea of prosecuting Trump.
...
This pattern — Republicans screw everything up and are allowed to get away with it in the name of "unity," and take that as permission to go even further the next time — has been playing out since Richard Nixon first snagged his post-Watergate pardon.
...
But can a wound really heal when one party is busy applying bandages, while the other lurks in waiting, ready to stab the victim again? Of course not. And that's the problem we're facing. The "unity" isn't unity at all. It's a fake unity in which one side — the side that did not cause the damage wrought by Trump or Bush or Reagan or Nixon — does all the work, while the other side keeps looking for new opportunities to cause trouble. If anything, conservatives grows ever bolder in their corruption, realizing they will never face consequences for their actions, and in fact can count on the left to clean up all their messes for them."
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/29/forget-about-moving-on-from-trump--the-nation-cant-heal-without-accountability/

(If Biden does not pursue a Crimes Commission to root out all the corruption in our government, he will be legalizing all Trump's crimes and thus complicit in the self-coup Republicans have successfully carried out over the past 4 years.)


November 18:

"Trump’s coup might not work. But he may pave the way for the next failed candidate.
[...]
Having lost the election, and a string of attempts to challenge vote counts, he demanded on Wednesday that state officials simply refuse to certify the results. The end game, according to Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, is to enable Republican state lawmakers in a swing state such as Michigan to award their state’s electoral college delegates to Mr. Trump despite President-elect Joe Biden’s unassailable vote margins.

The Post’s Robert Costa reports that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, is also talking up what would amount to a coup. He knows that his desultory lawsuits will not succeed, but calculates that if enough states are prevented from certifying their votes by legal deadlines, the election could be thrown into Congress, which might hand the presidency to Mr. Trump — again, against the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump demonstrated Tuesday that he will retaliate against those who fail to read from his corrupt script by firing Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security election security boss who publicly refuted the president’s unfounded allegations that voting systems were manipulated.
[...]
Mr. Trump’s coup might not work this time. But he, Mr. Graham, Mr. McConnell and far too many others may be softening the ground for the next failed candidate who has no scruples about torching American democracy."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-coup-might-not-work-but-he-may-pave-the-way-for-the-next-failed-candidate/2020/11/18/418ca536-29d6-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html

November 21:
"The Danger (and Ineptitude) of Trump’s Failed Coup.
[...]
Some may have dismissed this as mere hyperventilated campaign rhetoric. But in the days that followed the election, Trump fulfilled the stark prophecies. He has seized whatever powers he still has in his grasp to rattle the system and to take vengeance against his successor by leaving him with a ruin.

Trump has attempted to retain power much as he wielded it throughout his term: with a comic ineptitude of his means that made it difficult to absorb the seriousness of his ends. If you had predicted four years ago that Trump would finish his term by proposing to cancel the election and reinstall himself in a second term, you’d have been brushed off as a hysteric. And yet here he is attempting to do just that and recruiting Republican allies to his mad scheme. The certainty of his failure does not make the damage caused by the coup effort disappear. It simply makes it harder to see clearly.
[...]
To lead his attempted coup, Trump has turned once again to Rudy Giuliani. Just weeks before, Giuliani — who is the subject of a criminal investigation for his efforts to shake down Ukraine while working for Trump and who was colluding publicly with a man identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a Russian spy — had produced what he called “evidence” of a global criminal plot by Joe Biden and his family.
[...]
The purpose of this spectacle was not so much to lay out a legal claim as to create a political pretext for Trump’s allies to cancel the election results. A senior Trump-campaign official explained to Reuters that its strategy was “to cast enough doubt on vote counting in big Democratic cities that Republican lawmakers will have little choice but to intercede,” lest they face “backlash” from voters in Republican districts.

Under this plan, Republicans would use their control of legislatures in key states, heavily gerrymandered to a level that renders them almost impervious to voter backlash, to refuse to certify election results and then appoint Trump delegates to the Electoral College. The scheme would amount to nothing short of a coup. Indeed, Trump’s supporters barely disguised their aims. “The entire election, frankly, in all the swing states, should be overturned, and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for Trump,” urged Powell on Fox Business. Here was the president’s lawyer openly calling to “overturn” a federal election.

This idea has drawn public encouragement from an influential array of conservative media personalities (Tom Fitton, Kenneth Starr, Mark Levin) and mainstream Republican politicians (Lindsey Graham and Ron DeSantis). A handful of prominent Republicans has denounced Trump’s attempted coup. The majority has followed a calculus explained crassly by one senior Republican official to the Washington Post: “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-danger-and-ineptitude-of-trump-e2-80-99s-failed-coup/ar-BB1beweq

Even celebrities are saying it:
"Whoopi Goldberg calls Trump a wannabe dictator and berates him for ‘attempted coup’
[...]
“This is an attempted coup,” she said on “The View,” where she’s a co-host. “This is what dictators do when they want to take a country away from its people.”"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/see-it-whoopi-goldberg-calls-trump-a-wannabe-dictator-and-berates-him-for-e2-80-98attempted-coup-e2-80-99/ar-BB1bi6Nm


November 30:
"A member of the Proud Boys threatened an armed revolt during a "Stop the Steal" rally in Phoenix, Arizona on Monday as President Donald Trump continues to push unverified claims of widespread voter fraud in an attempt to reverse his election defeat.

[...]

Speaking at the rally in Phoenix, Arizona—taking place outside of where Rudy Giuliani was meeting with GOP lawmakers to cast doubt on Trump's loss in the state—one member told the crowd, "It is the moment that we've got to fight back."

"At the moment, we're free. But the moment they start trying to take our Constitution is the moment the Second Amendment kicks in," he said. "It's the moment where we've got to start telling them, we're not taking it anymore.

"We're not going to 'stand back and stand by' anymore.
We're standing up and going after you if you come after us," the man added."
https://www.newsweek.com/proud-boys-member-threatens-armed-revolt-outside-giuliani-meeting-not-going-stand-back-stand-1551261

Recall that at the presidential debate on September 29, instead of condemning White Supremacists, Trump told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." Now more and more are itching for an armed uprising, whether Trump gives the signal or not...


Already the media is publishing retrospective looks at the Trump coup attempt. But, again, the danger isn't over until January 20th. Neither Trump nor his supporters have stepped down from their efforts. The electoral college hasn't officially met yet, and far-right militias are itching for an insurrection...

"Trump's coup failed – but US democracy has been given a scare

The president pulled every lever to stay in power. It didn’t work, but how would the US handle a closer election?
[...]
Trump made no secret of his gameplan even before the election, and it has come into sharper focus with every madcap day since: cast doubt on the reliability of postal ballots, claim victory on election night before most of them were counted, and then sow enough confusion with allegations, justice department investigations and street mayhem with far-right militias to delay certification of the results.

Such a delay would create an opportunity for Republican-run state legislatures to step in and select their own electors to send to the electoral college, which formally decides who becomes president. That would produce a constitutional crisis that would ultimately be settled by the supreme court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority and has become increasingly politicised.For the plan to work it required political fealty to trump actual votes but, at several crucial decision points, that did not happen.

The key ingredient for a classic coup – a politically motivated military – was absent from the start, though not for want of Trump’s efforts. He tried to bring active duty troops on to the streets to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer, but the defence secretary, Mark Esper, refused to cooperate.

After Esper was fired in the wake of the election, and Trump loyalists were installed in senior decision-making positions
, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, used a planned public appearance at the dedication of an army museum to send a pointed message.
[...]
The next lever of power that Trump tried to yank was the justice department and the FBI. The attorney general, William Barr, authorised US attorneys to conduct investigations into alleged voter fraud if there are “clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities”.

The opening of such investigations would have supercharged conspiracy theories and given more cover for state-level Republicans to delay certification of the votes. But justice department prosecutors rebelled. The official in charge of investigating electoral crimes, Richard Pilger, resigned and others made their objections public.
[...]
The next line of defence was state-level Republican officials involved in the machinery of certifying results. They came under intense pressure, including in a couple of cases a direct call from the president. In some cases, notably in Michigan, they buckled, but in most states they held firm, as in the case of the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who confirmed Biden’s slim majority of victory and consequently became a pariah in his own party.
[...]
It is possible more competent plotters could have done more damage. Trump appears to have left it until after the election to assemble a legal team, and ultimately handed control to his fiercely loyal, but erratic and hapless personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Ultimately Biden’s margin of victory (over 6 million nationwide and tens of thousands in most of the battlegrounds) was so clear, and evidence of fraud so slight, that even with better lawyers, the legal channel would have been near impossible.

But the 2020 experience has raised concerns about how US democracy would weather a closer election, and a more disciplined group determined to wield the power of the state to steal it. The militias, who were not coordinated enough to emerge as the intimidatory force Trump hoped for, could be stronger on the next occasion.

President Trump’s rhetoric appealing to these groups has been dangerous from day one of his campaign, giving these groups tacit support for their illegal activities. And the lacklustre law enforcement response to public violence committed by these groups has exacerbated that problem,” said Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and who as an FBI special agent was tasked with infiltrating extremist groups. “Their ability to organise and recruit and test tactics and networks has been strengthened. So once there is an effort to police them, they will be much more difficult a problem.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/25/trumps-coup-failed-but-us-democracy-has-been-given-a-scare

The article above mentions one of the key ingredients Trump did not have was support from the military. The danger of Trumpists who have been elevated to high-ranking military positions is not going to go away any time soon, and many are concerned:

"Retired Navy Admiral Michael Mullen—who was appointed as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by former President George W. Bush—said he is "very concerned" about things "Trump loyalists" in the Pentagon could do during the transition from President Donald Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.
...
"I think I'm actually very concerned about the Trump loyalists who have now gone to work in the Pentagon," Mullen warned during an interview with NBC News' Meet the Press. "I mean, recently, Secretary [of Defense Mark] Esper was fired, and a host of other people left the building. And there are some real Trump loyalists there now in charge and it's pretty difficult to think that over the course of 50 or 60 days you can do something constructive, but you can do something that's really destructive,""
https://www.newsweek.com/retired-admiral-says-hes-very-concerned-about-trump-loyalists-pentagon-during-biden-transition-1551018 

https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/527883-mullen-national-security-issues-do-not-wait-for-presidential

 

November 30: Adding to Bannon and Giuliani's previous calls for non-Trump supporters to murdered, one of the lawyers on Trump's campaign team called for the summary execution of former Director of the Cybersecurity Chris Krebs. Krebs obtained this position in 2017, under Trump, and was fired on November 12, 2020 for stating that the election was secure and debunking Trump's conspiracy theories regarding the election.

"Trump Lawyer: DHS Whistleblower Should Be Executed.
During Newsmax call-in Joe diGenova said Chris Krebs should be put to death.

[...]
DiGenova, appearing on the Howie Carr show, which simulcasts on Newsmax, took aim at Krebs as an aside during a wheels-off segment full of false claims about how the United States election had been rigged.

“Anybody who thinks the election went well, like that idiot Krebs who used to be the head of cybersecurity [for Trump]. That guy is a class A moron. He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot,” diGenova said.

This is not just a random Parler troll trying to get attention. This is an attorney speaking on behalf of the President of the United States’ re-election campaign. And while it may read like a macabre joke, the direct nature of diGenova’s comments make it impossible to interpret as anything other than a real wish/threat against a public servant for offering truthful testimony."
https://thebulwark.com/trump-lawyer-dhs-whistleblower-should-be-executed/



On November 26, Trump said he'll leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for Biden. This has been the first time Trump publicly hinted that he will accept the results of the election. However, the very next day, Trump continued his rants about how the election was fraudulent. It looks like the coup attempt won't be called off any time soon.
"the 2020 Election was a total scam, we won by a lot (and will hopefully turn over the fraudulent result)"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1332337895584264197
"Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1332352538855747584


According to Marc Elias, who is on Biden's legal team, Trump has so far had 39 losses in court and only 1 ruling in his favor (he used to have 2, but 1 got overturned).


November 29:
"Mr Trump claimed, without providing any evidence, that some states allowed voters to turn in ballots after Election Day; that vote-counting machines were rigged to favour Mr Biden; and even that the FBI, the Justice Department and the federal court system were complicit in an attempt to cover up election fraud."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-interview-fox-bartiromo-election-fraud-b1763535.html
"“My mind will not change in six months,” Trump told host Maria Bartiromo by telephone on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “There was tremendous cheating here.”
...
In the Sunday interview, Trump said he is “going to use 125 percent of my energy” to continue to contest the results through the courts and signaled that he would be open to having a special counsel investigate the election. Any such appointment would be made by Attorney General William P. Barr."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/my-mind-will-not-change-in-six-months-in-first-post-election-tv-interview-trump-renews-baseless-claims-of-voter-fraud/2020/11/29/5068b4e4-3261-11eb-b59c-adb7153d10c2_story.html

(Translation: Trump is mad the FBI, Justice Department, and federal courts are not backing him in his coup attempt.)


This situation is not normal and not to be taken lightly. Trump isn't merely being a "sore loser" like this is some amateur league sports game. This is the kind of behavior that occurs in coup attempts. Trump isn't a baby whining and crying. He is a senile old man who is attempting a coup in the nation in control of the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal. Any media outlet or journalist who isn't treating this situation with the gravity that it deserves is actively aiding and abetting Trump's coup attempt via gaslighting us.

 ***

November 26:

"Trump: Georgia Sec. of State Raffensperger is an 'enemy of the people'"
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-georgia-sec-state-raffensperger-235627574.html

Raffensperger said he and his family voted for Trump and now they are shocked he is turning on them. While I am glad Raffensperger is not helping Trump commit a coup, he has reaped what he sowed by voting for someone who was known to be a selfish wannabe mob boss at the time of the election.

Buddy, did you expect anything different from a megalomaniac conman?

***

_________
Update 12/7


Every day, things reach a new level of unthinkable. This will be the "new normal" until we can admit this was a 100% real coup attempt (and not just hyperbolic rhetoric) and until we rid our nation of this unspeakable corruption by pursuing criminal charges against every. single. person. involved.


Former Trump National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, was pardoned on November 25, 2020 by Trump. Flynn was convicted for lying to the FBI about his collusion with Russian government officials. Despite pleading guilty for his crimes, Trump pardoned him in the final days of his presidency. Now, less than 1 week after he was pardoned, he is calling for Trump to impose martial law and hold "new" elections.

"It Seems Bad That the Guy the President Just Pardoned Is Calling for Him to Execute a Military Coup.

Many of the high clergy in the Church of the Savvy have been calmly explaining for weeks that although Donald Trump's brazen and pathetic post-election behavior is corrosive to democracy, it does not technically count as a coup attempt. The president's myriad lawsuits attempting to throw out the results of democratic elections have not worked, these folks explain, therefore they were never going to work (Logic), and concern about them working—on the basis that no Law or Norm has much mattered for four years—was hysteria. This is too stupid to be a coup! It's just a grift, because these things are mutually exclusive. And besides, a coup involves using the military or the security apparatus to seize power. He's just getting laughed out of court.

Welp, now his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a man the president pardoned just last week for "any and all possible offenses" related to the Mueller probe, has endorsed a call for the president to "temporarily suspend the Constitution," "declare limited martial law," have "the military oversee a national re-vote," and "silence the destructive media." Wow! Sounds a bit like a coup. Maybe the best part is the idea that you can have "limited" martial law, or that suspending the Constitution would just be "temporary," or that the only organization that could oversee a legitimate election—read: one where Donald Trump wins—is the military."
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a34846863/michael-flynn-trump-military-coup-suspend-constitution/
 
https://twitter.com/GenFlynn/status/1333916403389370369

"The appeal—made by the Ohio non-profit We The People Convention in a Washington Times advert Tuesday—urged the president to declare "limited martial law" in order to hold a new election.

The advert cited President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War as precedent, adding: "Then, as now, a President with courage and determination was needed to preserve the Union."

WTPC claimed the "threat to our United States by the international and domestic socialist/communist left is much more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has faced in its history—including the civil war.""
https://www.newsweek.com/michael-flynn-call-martial-law-comes-amid-violent-threats-trump-election-defeat-1551769


Trump's former campaign team lawyer Sidney Powell went further and retweeted something saying Trump needed to suspend the election and "set up military tribunals".
 

Lin Wood, another crazy pro-Trump attorney who is closely associated with Powell and Flynn, retweeted the same nonsense and said "Our country is headed to civil war."
https://twitter.com/LLinWood/status/1333788036815937537


These aren't random nobodies. These are people who compose Trump's inner circle. A former military General who was NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR while being a foreign agent for fucks sake.
 
Every single Republican who is not vocally anti-Trump is supporting this. Every single journalist who attempts to tell us this isn't a big deal is marching side by side with people like Flynn and writing propaganda to help Trump, whether they are conscious of this fact or not.

Even ultra-corrupt Attorney General Barr, who specifically applied for his job to help Trump cover up his crimes, and who started multiple witch hunts, just admitted there was no fraud in the election. The posts by Flynn and others might be their last ditch attempt to carry out the coup and counteract Barr's statement. Turning on their own, professional election rigger and convicted criminal Roger Stone, and others, called Barr part of the "deep state."

"Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”"
https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud-b1f1488796c9a98c4b1a9061a6c7f49d

December 2: further fractures between Trump and the Justice Department.
"The official serving as President Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.

Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.

Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said.
[...]
The Trump administration has been working to have liaisons report directly to the White House instead of the agencies where they work. Across the administration, there have been concerns that the liaisons were undercutting the work not just of career professionals but also of Trump’s own political appointees.

Shortly after the election, the presidential personnel office had also instructed the liaisons to fire any political appointees who were looking for jobs while Trump refused to accept the election results. Trump’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20. Several thousand political appointees across the government will see their jobs end by that date.

The White House personnel office has been headed by former Trump personal assistant John McEntee, who has renewed Trump’s push to rid the administration of those deemed “disloyal” to the president."
https://apnews.com/article/heidi-stirrup-banned-justice-department-7624560e990ec55383a2a3e421c3a52e

The President is attempting to undermine the function of federal agencies and, even though the agencies are packed with ultra-corrupt Trump-appointees who have done his every bidding for 4 years, they are no longer giving him their full backing. That's what happens in failed coups when the coup leader loses internal support among his faction.


December 1:
"Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling: "Mr. President ... stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt. Someone's going to get shot. Someone's going to get killed. And it's not right.""
https://twitter.com/MaddowBlog/status/1333963974539436032

"Gabriel Sterling is a Republican who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system. During a routine news conference at the state Capitol to provide an update on the recount of the presidential race requested by Trump, Sterling admonished the president and Georgia’s two U.S. senators, who are both locked in tight runoff races against Democrats and have called on GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign over claims that he mishandled the election.

“Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. Senators, you have not condemned this language or these actions,” Sterling said, visibly angry. “This has to stop. We need you to step up, and if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.”"
https://www.al.com/news/2020/12/this-has-to-stop-georgia-election-official-gabriel-sterling-says-of-threats.html

"Gabriel Sterling, one of Georgia's top elections officials, fiercely rebuked President Trump and Georgia's senators Tuesday in response to threats and intimidation targeting the state's elections workers, and he appealed to the president to accept his electoral loss in the state and "stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.""
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/georgia-elections-official-rebukes-trump-after-threats-to-workers/ar-BB1bxaDF

"A high-profile QAnon influencer orchestrated a Twitter campaign targeting a 20-year-old contractor for Dominion Voting Systems, which led to death threats against him and his family, and a noose being placed outside his home in Georgia.

The incident was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Gabriel Sterling, voting systems manager for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, during an impassioned press conference on Tuesday night. ...

He called on President Donald Trump and on high-profile Republicans to come out strongly to condemn the conspiracy theories.

But just hours later, Trump, rather than condemning the death threats, responded by doubling down on baseless claims that the election had been “rigged” — again without providing any evidence.
"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgzgqa/qanon-left-a-noose-outside-a-20-year-old-election-workers-home

December 4:
"President Donald Trump's nominee to become a senior Pentagon official spread debunked conspiracies on Twitter that called Trump's election loss to Joe Biden a "coup" attempt and shared tweets that suggest Trump should declare martial law.

Scott O'Grady, a former fighter pilot and Trump loyalist, repeatedly retweeted tweets that falsely stated Trump won the election in "landslide fashion" and that millions of votes were stolen from the President.

On November 25, O'Grady retweeted a tweet that said, "Trump won & Biden & his Comrades will now attempt a coup," next to a photoshopped image of Biden beside Xi Jinping, the President of China.

On December 2, he retweeted an account that shared an article that said former national security adviser Michael Flynn had shared a petition that called for martial law. He then retweeted the same account which suggested that Trump should declare martial law.

"I don't know who needs to hear this," the account said, "But calling for martial law is not a bad idea when there is an attempted coup against the president and this country happening right now."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/04/politics/trump-nominee-pentagon-martial-law/index.html

December 5:
"Trump demands names of the congressional Republicans who said they recognize Biden as winner"
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/528899-trump-demands-names-of-the-congressional-republicans-who-said-they

December 5:
"Donald Trump has told crowds in Georgia, without evidence, he has "never lost an election" and that he'd be a "very gracious loser", in his first political rally since losing the presidential election.

Amid chants of "stop the steal", "four more years" and "we love you" from maskless supporters in the town of Valdosta, Mr Trump began his speech repeating falsehoods about voter fraud.

"You know we won Georgia, just so you understand," Mr Trump told rallygoers."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-06/donald-trump-holds-rally-in-georgia-first-since-us-election/12954882


December 7:
"Tuesday’s ‘Safe Harbor’ Deadline Should End Trump’s Failed Coup.

From a political perspective, Donald Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 presidential election will probably never die. But the extremely slim viability of his legal challenges to Joe Biden’s win, which descended into farce some time ago, will all but vanish on December 8, when the “Safe Harbor” deadline for certification of state results should cut off any further efforts to steal the election.

This deadline, created by the notoriously confusing Electoral Vote Act of 1877 (itself a reaction to the contested Hayes-Tilden election of 1876), essentially prohibits any challenge in Congress to state electors certified by that date, set at six days before the Electoral College virtually “meets” to cast votes for the next president. While it has never been fully tested, a state certification of results and electors existing at the time of this deadline should also be very difficult to question in state or federal courts.

Presently, 47 states plus the District of Columbia have already certified their results and their electors (all but Hawaii, Missouri, and New Jersey, none of whose results are in any doubt at all).
[...]
Speaking of absurd efforts by Pennsylvania Republicans, the most ludicrous thing we saw last week that did not directly involve Rudy Giuliani was a letter signed by 60 Republican legislators asking Congress to challenge the Keystone State’s Biden electors, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:

    Just hours after GOP leadership in the state House indicated they would not move to upend Pennsylvania’s election results in Harrisburg, Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff joined more than 60 Republican colleagues Friday in calling on members of Congress to do it instead.

After Republican legislative leaders conceded they had no power to appoint Trump electors as the president’s campaign has been demanding in all the states with relatively close results, Giuliani attacked them on Twitter, and Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis called them “liars,” “cowards,” and “traitors.” They then produced the letter fecklessly asking Congress to do what they admitted they could not do: steal Pennsylvania’s state-certified 20 electors from Biden. As I explained last week, even if there were some sort of unanimous revanchist uprising among Republican members of Congress in January aimed at “choosing” Trump electors in states he lost, it’s not clear there would be any available to choose after state certification of results. And in any event, it would require a vote by both the Democratic-controlled House along with the Senate to overturn the results, which of course is not happening."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/safe-harbor-deadline-trump.html

December 7:
"Trump doubles down on false claim he ‘won two’ elections and calls US ‘third world country’

 ‘So I’m 2 and 0, and that’s pretty good too, but we’ll see how that turns out’"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/trump-election-lost-medal-of-freedom-b1767600.html

This coup attempt will go down as one of the strangest and darkest chapters of American history. Week by week it has only become more obvious and more depraved. When I originally wrote this post, I said Trump did not have support from the military. Now retired General Flynn and Trump's pick for a senior Pentagon position, Scott O'Grady, are urging for Trump to declare martial law and throw out the results of the election in order to carry out the coup. While this may not indicate widespread support for the coup among the military, it should be extremely shocking nonetheless.
 
All the journalists who are gaslighting us by telling us this isn't a big deal are nothing more than Trump apologists, who are functionally no different from Trumpist Republicans. The more they whitewash Trump's crimes for him, the less likely it becomes that he and others carrying out these high crimes and misdemeanors will be held accountable.