Lots of you tune this stuff out, but give me a few minutes of your time, because this doesn’t end like you expect.
Ever since Trump was elected, and probably before, I’ve argued that wouldn’t step down voluntarily — and that he’ll need to be removed from the White House. It has less to do with his ambition than his fear: the moment he’s out of office, his life will become a legal nightmare. The NYS AG’s moves against him made that clear, and Cohen’s tell-all book will provide roadmaps for many, many more inquiries. Trump can pardon whomever he wants for whatever he wants while he’s president, but new investigations will create endless new opportunities for his cronies and quislings to lie to under oath, cover up, and withhold materials. That’ll be a fountain of youth for extending their legal jeopardy more or less indefinitely. And that means more legal jeopardy for Trump and — crucially — his family. Kushner first and foremost.
When this was a future abstraction, a common retort was “they” — meaning you clueless crackpots — “said the same thing about Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama.” But Trump’s full-scale assault on the USPS and mail-in ballots make it crystal clear what a stupid zinger that was. None of those presidents devoted months to escalating attacks on the USPS, filing a blizzard of electoral lawsuits across dozens of states in advance, defunding it, making unsubstantiated allegations about falsified or disappearing ballots, slashing hours, eliminating overtime, ordering workers to delay mail, removing mail-sorting machines, or threatening widespread closures of post offices. None of this is surmise: Trump has explicitly, repeatedly connected his attacks on the USPS with his fears about the election.
This stuff won’t stop on Election Day; on the contrary, it’ll only intensify. He’ll do everything in his power to overturn electoral results in states where it looks like he’s losing. And he’ll have deep support from GOP legislators, because the very same ballots may chisel away or eliminate their majorities in the Senate and many state houses. The usual refrain is “that’s why it needs to be a landslide,” but if Trump is able to all but invalidate the results from entire states, he can — and I think will — argue that it wasn’t a landslide at all. Worse, he’ll argue that he won by a landslide, and all evidence to the contrary is rigged, fake, fraud, treason, insurrection, etc. You can already see how the media coverage will play out, can’t you?
There are about 11 weeks between Election Day on 3 Nov and Inauguration Day on 20 Jan. If Trump lost cleanly, that period would be devoted to a cooperative process of coordinating the transition. But this time around it’ll be a 24/7 rising tsunami of bombast and lawsuits claiming he “really” won. His goal, as always, will be short-term: delay the election’s resolution until after Inauguration Day, when (wait for it…) he’ll try to Inaugurate Himself. You can already hear the jokes about the crowd size, can’t you?
BUT: the Constitution specifies (Art II, Sec One, Clause 8) that the Chief Justice has to administer the oath of office. I think there’s a good chance it’ll boil down to whether Roberts is willing to do it. There’ll be a huge sh*tshow about whether it needs to happen on 20 Jan, whether Trump’s oath in 2016 counts, etc. The bottom line: this is one thing Roberts can’t dodge by refusing to hear the case or kick back to the lower courts for review. You can be sure this has been on his radar for a long time now, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for signals from those quarters — like the unprecedented leaks about Kavanaugh’s memos some weeks back. I’d guess noise about these Constitutional questions will start popping up in the media in October or so.
But that’s all kremlinology. It’s time to start thinking about what WE will do if — I think when — this happens. Protest, of course, but right now I think it’ll take a general strike. So it might be a good idea to start thinking in advance and in gruesome detail about what that could look like for you, your organizations, and your networks. For example, what are the best strategies your and you’re allies can muster for stoppages with maximum well-aimed impact.