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What If Trump Wont Leave?
Trump is prepared to do whatever it takes to keep power. Can he be stopped?
Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava
August 11 2020, 9:42 a.m.
EVENTS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, Lafayette Square, and Portland have shown the
country that President Donald Trump is prepared to do whatever it takes to
keep power, including embracing militant white supremacists and using
federal troops to tear gas and arrest peaceful protesters. His noxious
proposal to postpone the elections is not the real threat to democracy. He
has openly declared that he may not abide by the election results in a
nationally televised interview on Fox News. Trump has a lot of tools at his
disposal to steal the election if he loses, many of which hes already
putting into motion. Can he be stopped? We believe that he can be, but only
if most Americans are willing to put their trust in people power rather
than courts, norms, and elites to save democracy.
The evidence of the risk we face is impossible to ignore. Trump is
questioning the legitimacy of an election that will rely on mail-in ballots,
even though he himself has often voted absentee. He has threatened to
withhold funding from states that are trying to make it easier for people to
vote, and he is undermining the U.S. Postal Service, both of which are
essential, especially in a pandemic. His Republican allies around the
country have been passing voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, and cutting
the number of polling places in urban areas, forcing people to stand in line
for hours to exercise their right to vote. This is a war on voters who lean
Democratic, specifically Black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native
Americans, naturalized immigrants, poor people, and young people. Weve
already seen in Georgia and Wisconsin how these tactics play out on Election
Day.
Trumps administration has downplayed foreign interference in the elections
that benefit him. He has given succor to white nationalist groups, and the
Republican Party has deputized 50,000 poll watchers to intimidate minority
voters on Election Day. This will be the first election since 1980 during
which the Republican National Committee will not be bound by a federal
consent decree that prohibited ballot security efforts whose real purpose
was to intimidate and disenfranchise minority voters. Lets be clear: Trump
and the Republicans are already trying to steal the election.
Trump is already crying fraud with absolutely no proof and could use the
days after the election to stoke hysteria, rage, and violence among his
supporters.
If all that chicanery fails and Trump still loses, most people assume that
his only option is to concede defeat and leave especially if he loses by a
big margin. But lets picture what things could look like after Election
Day. The new voting procedures implemented in response to Covid-19 will make
this election feel different to many voters, and will also delay the
counting of ballots well past November 3. New York was still counting
ballots over a month after its June 23 primary election. Most people expect
a blue shift meaning that Trump may be ahead in the count of votes cast
on Election Day ballots but that mailed ballots will skew Democratic. Trump
is already crying fraud with absolutely no proof and could use the days
after the election to stoke hysteria, rage, and violence among his
supporters.
To steal the election, we suspect he will adapt the standard playbook of
authoritarians everywhere: cast doubt on the election results by filing
numerous lawsuits and launching coordinated federal and state
investigations, including into foreign interference; call on militia groups
to intimidate election officials and instigate violence; rely on fringe
social media to generate untraceable rumors, and on Fox News to amplify
these messages as fact; and create a climate of confusion and chaos. He
might ask the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security
which he has now weaponized against democracy to deploy to big cities in
swing states to stop the vote count or seize ballots. If he does all this
right, hell be able to put soldiers on the streets, inflame his base, and
convince millions of people that the election is being stolen from him. This
would create the predicate for overturning the will of the voters.
Whats his end game? Under the Constitution, state legislatures decide how
to appoint electors. They have all chosen to rely on the popular vote. But
could they create a false justification to claw back this power? The
legislatures in all of the closely contested states this fall Michigan,
Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina are
controlled by Republicans. Trump could argue that mail-in ballots should not
be counted and ask state legislatures to appoint electors different than the
ones chosen by voters. This would be undemocratic and illegal; its hard to
conceive how you justify changing the rules for appointing electors after
the election. But they have contemplated it before: Floridas Republican
legislature seriously considered doing just that in 2000 before the Supreme
Court ultimately stepped in.
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All this orchestrated chaos could prevent the electors from casting their
ballots as required on December 14 or allow Trump to get a competing slate
of electors sent to Congress from the states. Either way, he will have
pushed our election into January when the new Congress meets to decide the
outcome. At this point, the rules about how to resolve disputes are unclear,
and could be governed by a badly worded law passed in 1887. If neither
candidate receives a majority of the Electoral College votes, the
Constitutions 12th Amendment allows the House of Representatives to choose
the president. You might think thats good news but the rules in this case
give each state delegation one vote, so the lone Republican congresswoman
from Wyoming has the same power as the 52 members of the overwhelmingly
Democratic California delegation. Right now, Republicans control a majority
of the state delegations even though the Democrats control the chamber.
This is far from an exhaustive list of what could go wrong in the 78 fraught
days between Election Day and inauguration. Experts have considered the
mechanisms in our rickety constitutional order that a would-be autocrat
could use to defy the will of the people and the provisions that might
restrain the usurpation. It turns out that our democracy rests on a set of
shaky norms more than on ironclad rules. The possibilities for malign
mischief are legion.
We will be urged not to politicize the process, to wait patiently and to
not prejudge the results. We need to ignore such advice and take to the
streets.
What must we be prepared to do if Trump questions the legitimacy of the
electoral results and wont concede defeat? We can learn what not to do from
the disastrous 2000 election in which George W. Bush lost Florida and
therefore the election to Al Gore but ended up taking the White House
anyway. Republicans famously mobilized a Brooks Brothers riot of young
white male campaign staffers, many flown in from D.C., to protest the
recount and create an atmosphere of intimidation and chaos. Democrats
dithered, mobilized no one, and played by Marquess of Queensberry rules.
They naively relied on the courts and local election officials to validate
Gores victory. The ultimate result of this pathetic Democratic strategy was
not only a Bush victory but the Iraq War, the racist and inept response to
Hurricane Katrina, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the rich.
Exactly the same dilemma will face us this time if Trump wont accept
defeat. Joe Bidens campaign is recruiting lawyers, not organizers, and
Biden himself has expressed misplaced confidence that the military will
escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch on Inauguration
Day. Democratic Party operatives, good-government types, an army of
constitutional lawyers, and other self-appointed experts will urge us not to
politicize the process, to wait patiently and talk about the rule of
law, to not prejudge the results to trust the process and the courts,
to stay home and let the smart boys in D.C. work things out on our behalf.
We need to ignore such advice and take to the streets. We have been through
four horrendous years in which our vaunted institutions have failed to hold
Trump to account most notably with the failure to convict him in the
Senate after the House impeached him. The Republican Party and Fox News have
divorced themselves from both the formal rules and the unwritten norms that
constrained unaccountable executive behavior. During the public health
crisis, the president and many Republican leaders have shown contempt for
truth and a willingness to fan the flames of outlandish conspiracy theories.
Theres no reason to believe that there are any norms that will constrain
this president, who likely faces criminal prosecution when he leaves office.
His fellow Republicans have had four years to reign him in and have chosen
not to. And if you think John Robertss Supreme Court will save us, think
again: For all the attention given to a few unexpected victories for
liberals, the Court ruled four separate times this term against voting
rights.
While institutions, norms, and elites have failed us, there is abundant
evidence that mass protest produces change. We are living in a golden age of
social movements. Most recently, the Movement for Black Lives changed how
white people think about policing in America, put bold new demands on the
agenda, and is producing substantial, albeit thus far insufficient, changes
in policies. The immigrant rights movement responded to the Muslim ban and
the caging of children at the border with mass protest that forced a
national reckoning with these cruel policies. Workers, often outside of
union structures, have taken to the streets in extraordinary numbers from
the Fight for 15 to strikes by teachers and mobilizations by Amazon
employees and essential workers. They have won big increases in wages and
improved working conditions. The Occupy movement reintroduced the problem of
economic oligarchy into the political debate. Bernie Sanderss and Elizabeth
Warrens presidential candidacies were powered by this movement vision and
pushed the Democratic Party to the left. And the resistance groups that
mobilized early in the Trump years the Womens March, Indivisible, and
others have built muscle memory among millions of people of what its like
to engage in sustained activism. Most encouraging, these movements have
recruited millions of new supporters. These groups together provide a
powerful social base from which to contest the presidents planned
usurpation of power.
And the movements have substantial leverage in two decisive arenas: politics
and the economy. In politics, the Democratic Party relies on voters allied
with these movements. If the party decides to play hardball, it can stop
Trump from stealing the election. Right now, Democrats can insist on funding
for a free and fair election as well as the Postal Service, and ensure that
local election systems have the resources and systems in place to
accommodate the surge of mail-in ballots. And when Trump tries to steal the
election after November 3, Democrats will control governors mansions in
Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If the Republican
legislatures in these states try to overrule the will of the people,
governors can push back and send a legitimate electoral vote tally to
Congress. Likewise, after the election, Democratic House and Senate members
will have leverage of their own.
Getting Democrats to use the full extent of their power will not be easy. It
will take a mass movement on a scale we have not yet seen, and the
mobilization will need to be sustained for weeks and possibly months.
Intense pressure from millions of people that rivals the intensity of the
Trump base will be needed to stiffen the spines of national and state
Democratic leaders.