I wonder how much more obvious things will have to get before mainstream sources start calling this a coup?
Just a year ago, Trump retweeted someone who suggested he was "owed" an extra two years of the presidency. The "reasoning" behind this? In the parallel universe of alternative facts, Trump and his supporters tried to claim the Mueller investigation was a coup attempt, and that somehow justified Trump performing his own coup to seize power for an extra few years.
That is quite deranged, but extremely serious once we consider his Tweets are official communication from the President. At the time, and at a few other points during Trump's presidency, politicians and the media were willing to throw out the grave term "Constitutional Crisis" to describe the administration's disregard for laws and the uncertainty that legal processes would continue to be followed. At some point (certainly by the point of the Senate's openly corrupt handling of the impeachment trial), we passed from mere Constitutional Crisis to the point where our government and system of laws failed and were successfully subverted--a coup.
Now that the election is nearing and it seems that Trump and the Republican party are likely to lose the election, they are openly engaging in the same kind of corrupt voter suppression and manipulation tactics as despots like Putin.
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Despite winning the 2016 election, Trump constantly declared there were "millions" of fraudulent votes for his opponent. By keeping his supporters paranoid and distrusting of society at large, he has easily been able to turn his attention to attempting to delegitimize the 2020 election process as well.
As early as March 2020, with the first wave of the pandemic in full swing, Trump began to demonize mail-in voting. He even told us his motive: he believed it would benefit the Democratic party.
In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought.
“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/30/trump-voting-republicans/
At a White House briefing on July 30th 2020, Trump suggested mail-in voting would potentially take years to count to determine the winner.
Earlier that morning he Tweeted about considering to delay the election, saying mail-in voting would be both inaccurate and fraudulent.
On August 15, Trump repeated the claim that it could take years and added one critical piece of information. Ballots won't be counted because they're going to get "lost"...
"You know what? You're not going to know this — possibly, if you really did it right — for months or for years. Because these ballots are all going to be lost, they’re all going to be gone," Trump said.
Saying that counting so many mail-in votes would be slow, in itself, might not be nefarious if it were not for the fact that on August 12 and 13 Trump had said he is intentionally trying to defund the Postal Service in order to prevent votes from being counted.
“They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”
“They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting,” Trump said of the Post Office, which is requesting billions in emergency funding. “So, therefore, they can’t do it, I guess. Are they going to do it even if they don’t have the money?”
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If all of this is not damning enough, under the direction of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, post offices across the country are having mail sorting equipment removed in an attempt to delay the mail and manifest Trump's wishes for mail-in votes to be impossible to effectively count. Documents show that at least 671 mail sorting machines are scheduled for removal across the nation this year. The removal process began as recently as June.
On August 7 DeJoy began a massive restructuring of the leadership of the Postal Service. Representative Gerry Connolly, who leads the Congressional committee which oversees the Postal Service, called this restructuring "deliberate sabotage to disrupt mail service on the eve of the election — an election that hinges on mail-in ballots." Even Obama has declared Trump is attempting to suppress votes. A former president accusing the current administration of actively suppressing votes is not something to be taken lightly.
Several Democrats accused the Trump administration of trying to sabotage the country’s mail system after a broad restructuring of the United States Postal Service that some have characterized as a “Friday Night Massacre.” Postmaster General Louis DeJoy moved forward with a significant reorganization of the Postal Service leadership along with a hiring freeze for leadership positions. The reorganization involves the reassignment or displacement of 23 USPS executives, including some who had been at the Postal Service for decades. Among the targets of the reorganization were the two top executives who oversee daily operations at the Postal Service.
In recent days, many on social media have become increasingly alarmed at the number of mail collection boxes being removed from the streets in a number of states. It is allegedly routine for the Postal Service to remove and redistribute these mailboxes due to maintenance or declining mail volume, but with everything else going on it is incredibly suspicious. Congressman Jim Cooper, among others, does not believe the explanation that it is "routine". A Postal Service spokesman says they will stop removing them until after the election.
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Intentionally sabotaging and slowing mail delivery is, of course, illegal.
18 U.S. Code § 1703. Delay or destruction of mail or newspapers:
(a) Whoever, being a Postal Service officer or employee, unlawfully secretes, destroys, detains, delays, or opens any letter, postal card, package, bag, or mail entrusted to him or which shall come into his possession, and which was intended to be conveyed by mail, or carried or delivered by any carrier or other employee of the Postal Service, or forwarded through or delivered from any post office or station thereof established by authority of the Postmaster General or the Postal Service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1703
Trump attempted to plant the idea in our minds that it is somehow normal for mail-in votes to be delayed for 'months or even years'. On the eve of an election, in the middle of a pandemic where many will choose to utilize mail services instead of voting in person, the Postmaster General has decided to drastically reduce the ability of the Postal Service to process mail. Trump has admitted multiple times that his goal is to sabotage the Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting from being feasible, and that his motive is the belief that mail-in voting will benefit the Democratic party.
To spell it out, this is a pretty clear-cut case of corruption.
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Why was DeJoy chosen as Postmaster General? Well, he was a top Trump donor and was in charge of fundraising for the 2020 Republican National Convention. Beyond this, he and his wife hold anywhere between $30 to $75 million in assets of US Postal Service competitors. Such corruption and conflict of interest is not surprising in the current Republican administration.
"The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who resigned in 2017. "It could be that he's planning on selling it, but I don't understand the delay. He has managed to divest a lot of other things. And if he wasn't prepared to sell that off, he shouldn't have taken the job."
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Trump's attempts to sabotage the Postal Service in order to suppress mail-in voting are, once again, more evidence that his party is engaging in a coup. Trump and other Republicans have frequently said that their motive is the belief higher voter turnout will favor the Democrat party.
Ever since it dawned on Trump that mail-in votes would likely increase voter participation, and thus diminish his chances of re-election, he has been doing all he can to cast mail-in voting in a negative light--despite the fact that he himself utilizes it and also committed voter fraud while doing so!
With all the above information taken into consideration, it is crystal clear what Trump means by "doing it right" and "losing the ballots".
"You know what? You're not going to know this — possibly, if you really did it right — for months or for years. Because these ballots are all going to be lost, they’re all going to be gone," Trump said.
Democrats are at least taking this seriously enough to recall the House of Representatives back from August recess, in order to vote on legislation to restore Postal Service operations. Although any legislation will almost certainly not pass the Republican-controlled Senate (which has previously blocked 10 bills designed to defend against interference in the election, among other critical things.)
The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency meeting on August 24 and DeJoy has agreed to voluntarily testify. At the time of writing this article, it does not appear the House has issued a subpoena to legally compel him to testify. (DeJoy declined a previous invitation to appear on August 7, the same day he began what some are calling a "Friday Night Massacre" of the Postal Service leadership).
Representative Jim Cooper urged DeJoy be subpoenaed and arrested if he refuse to answer to the subpoena. Congress does have the power to arrest those who defy a Congressional subpoena, and they should have used it on other Trump lackeys, but Congressional leadership has too often chosen to let them wreak havoc with minimal consequences.
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Back before impeachment began, Nancy Pelosi gave the warning that she believed it was possible Trump wouldn't accept the results of the election and leave at the end of his term. This was extremely shocking, since at the time we were busy criticizing Pelosi for her overly-cautious and sluggish pace for pursuing impeachment. She was not one to say sensationalized things to get media headlines, so for her to say something so provocative meant she and other senior political leaders held grave concerns for the future of our government.
Trump has already spent years inviting foreign interference in the 2020 election and recently said "I don't care" if Russia interferes with the elections again... Trump is even planning to have a meeting with Putin before the election!!!
Foreign enemies meddling in our election is one thing, but now Trump is openly admitting to sabotaging it himself... How much further will we sink before we are honest with ourselves and admit this is not just an aberration but a full-on coup and subversion of our government which has been happening in broad daylight for half a decade?
Surely I'm not the only one to recognize the gravity of what's going on here. We're like the frog being gradually boiled alive. We've been gaslighted for so long that few people are willing to push back on the narrative that Trump and his supporters have spun over the past 4 years, and the Overton Window has moved so far into insanity that many are simply incapable of seeing the freefall we are in. 50 years from now, it will be obvious in the history books, but the damage is being done to us now.
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