You have your fire evacuation plan if you’re a Californian who has lived through 2020. You also have your voting plan if you haven’t already cast your ballot. But have you also developed a Trump attempted-coup action plan? If not, it’s time to think this one through.
This past Friday, my wife, Sarah, and I had a rare dinner without the kids. The topic of conversation: talking through what we’ll do if Trump loses and follows through on his blatant vows to steal the election. Our plan in this case, we determined, is to pack up our car, snap our six-year-old and four-year-old into their seats, and hit the road for Washington, D.C. My phone says it’s 2,426 miles to the Washington Mall—one day and 18 hours of driving. I’ll brew up a couple gallons of coffee and bring The Armies of the Night to read out loud along the way.
Does it terrify me to think of standing with a million others on the Mall, worrying about Covid-19 and right-wing nuts looking to bludgeon anyone daring to stand up for democracy? Hell yes, it does, but if the darkest of scenarios play out, recent world history teaches that only a full-fledged people-power revolution could save us from Trumpist authoritarian rule. My personal hero John Lewis, who told me that removing Trump would only be a “down payment” on reclaiming our future as a nation, sacrificed so much, the least we can do now is get out and show that we give a damn.
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Of course, Sarah and I aren’t going to jump in the car without waiting to make sure this is a full four-alarm existential crisis of democracy. I’ll follow the advice of Christine Pelosi, author of Campaign Boot Camp 2.0 (and daughter of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi), and watch to see what develops.
“Democrats will be taking our cues from Joe Biden when he addresses the nation Tuesday night and giving him and all candidates our support in counting every vote,” she told me on Sunday. “It ain’t over till it’s over, no matter what a sore loser afraid of the voters’ verdict might tweet. Ignore the manipulation, stay home, and promote peaceful efforts to count every vote in your community. We need vigils for democracy everywhere as we protect our civic sacrament and our civil servants who will not doubt face threats from miscreants.”
In those crucial first hours, Pelosi added, “We need help locally, lest we cede ground to the local Trumpers who want to have hundreds of ‘Brooks Brothers riots’ across the USA.”
I woke up early Sunday morning to a round of polls that confirmed what I’d believed for weeks: Joe Biden will more than likely win this week’s election, he’s going to receive millions more votes than Donald Trump nationally, and he’ll have an edge in actual votes cast in enough key states to reach the magic mark of 270 electoral votes. The question is: How far will Trump go to try to steal the election, and what will we do to try to stop him?
Trump’s last-ditch scheme is to hope that on Election Day, the in-person voting that he’s urged on his followers (even if that means some might die of Covid-19) will give him a lead, and then he could rely on some combination of thuggery and court intervention to shut down the counting of votes.
On Sunday, Trump came right out and said, “We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election is over, we’re going in with our lawyers,” openly signaling that his strategy centers on hoping the courts will stop the legitimate counting of votes.
Like most people, I’ve been spending way too much time on Twitter, reading nervous speculation about what might happen, but some analysts have used social media to make a lucid, compelling case, like Hussein Ibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute. “Trump is clearly hoping that the Supreme Court will intervene to save his presidency by invalidating thousands or even millions of lawfully cast ballots,” Ibish told me via Twitter DM. “However, if that happens, it will plunge the country into an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. It’s already bad enough that George W. Bush beat Al Gore largely with the help of the Supreme Court… Nobody would have any reason to regard Trump as a legitimate president, at least in democratic terms.”
Desperate men are dangerous. Very desperate men with power and no scruples are very dangerous. It’s not “liberal” spin to say that if Trump bows to the inevitable and accepts the results of the vote, he could be living out his days confronting an eternity of bad hair days behind bars.
“He knows that if he doesn’t manage to stay in office he’s in serious trouble,” Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece and author of the mega-bestselling Too Much and Never Enough, told Jane Mayer for a new must-read New Yorker piece. “I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” The last thing in the world Trump can handle is having history brand him Biggest Loser Ever. In the Trump family, Mary Trump explained, “losing was a death sentence — literally and figuratively.”
Terrified enough yet? Picture trying to get a big cat into a bathtub, and you sum up where we are with the polls and an astonishing outpouring of early voting — now at 97.8 million votes already in, as of Monday, or more than two-thirds (71%) of all votes cast in 2016. Data folks can tell us whatever they want about “Trump can still win” (yes, Nate, I’m talking about you), but I’d argue at this point — with a majority of votes already cast — that’s just PTSD from 2016.
Back to my point: What will we all do — what will you do — if a desperate Trump does his best to burn the country down rather than accept defeat? The past four years show how often we’ve been too passive about letting a cynical opportunist corrupt so much about life in this country. If anyone thinks posting angry words on social media is going to stop a full-fledged Trump coup attempt, it’s time to wake up and smell the CS gas. And if anyone thinks chanting “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Donald Trump has got to go!” anywhere in the state of California does any good whatsoever, then it’s time to inflict hours of Fox News grandstanding on your already frayed nerves.
If you look at recent world history, the only thing that really works in a case of blatant violation of the democratic will of the people is massive mobilization in the streets — not diffused, but concentrated. If Trump and Barr and a complicit Supreme Court majority go this route, that might be our only chance.
Let me be clear: I don’t think it will come to this. I don’t think we’re going to have to activate our Trump attempted-coup action plans. Too many people have turned out to vote for Harris-Biden for Trump to get the opening he needs, even with still more nefarious help from Putin. But too much has been corrupted for us to rule out further skulduggery, so now is the time: Talk this over with your loved ones. Be ready to act. None of us can say later that we didn’t see it coming. Think about how you want to look back on your reaction to the endgame of the most criminal and corrupt president in U.S. history.
