Trump was only five sycophants away from pulling off a coup: legal expert

In a column for Bulwark, longtime attorney Philip Rotner made the case that, with better planning and a little more help, Donald Trump might be serving a second consecutive term in the Oval Office after overturning the 2020 election results.

Using former New York mayor and lawyer Rudy Giuliani as a role model for a standard-issue Trump "sycophant" willing to do anything to keep the former president in office, Rotner claims "five more Rudy's" -- properly placed -- could have made Trump's dream come true.

Admitting that he believes the "attempted coup came much closer to succeeding than many would admit and was just a dress rehearsal for 2024," Rotner claims he's in the "worried camp" that it could eventually happen based on looking at how close the country came on Jan 6th.

"Over two years ago, I wrote that Donald Trump’s failure to recognize, until it was too late, that he needed to corrupt the executive branch all the way down to the level of inspectors general had put him on a fast track to impeachment," Rotner wrote before adding that Trump fortunately failed to figure out he needed to install more of "his people."

READ MORE: All the signs of the Jan. 6 insurrection were there for those who wanted to see them

"Despite Trump’s failure to thoroughly corrupt the federal and state governments, he came frighteningly close to overturning the election or, at the least, throwing the nation into the mother of all constitutional crises. How close? Trump fell five Rudys short," the attorney wrote before elaborating, "Substitute Rudy Giuliani—or Sidney Powell or Jim Jordan or any other Trump cultist—for just five people who held state or federal office at the time of the 2020 election and think about what might have happened."

"Put a Rudy in the place of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who stood his ground in the face of hellish pressure from the president of the United States and certified Joe Biden’s win in the state. Replace Michigan Board of State Canvassers member Aaron Van Langevelde, who bucked GOP pressure to provide the swing vote to certify Biden’s win in Michigan, with a Rudy," he suggested. "Make a Rudy the secretary of state of Pennsylvania instead of Kathy Boockvar, who certified Biden’s win in that state. That puts 42 electoral votes in play in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania alone. Forget about Arizona and Wisconsin—Trump wouldn’t need them. He only lost by 38."

According to Rotner, replacing former Attorney General Bill Barr -- after he refused to help the now ex-president -- would have also paved the way to staying in power.

"Replace Attorney General Bill Barr with a Rudy and have him declare that the Justice Department had determined that massive fraud tainted the results in all of the swing states that went for Biden. Team Trump had an actual plan to do just that, replacing Barr with a brainwashed nobody named Jeffrey Clark, but Trump never pulled the trigger," he wrote. "Or blow the whole thing out of the water in one shot. What if, rather than Mike Pence, a Rudy had been vice president—someone who would refuse to even open the certified electoral ballots, much less count them."

WATCH: Bob Woodward reveals the key to proving Trump's complicity in the Jan. 6 MAGA riot

Admitting that no one knows what might have transpired with a few personnel changes, the attorney asserted, "If the five Rudys had been in place in 2020, at a minimum, three states with more than enough electoral votes to overturn the vote of the people would have been in play, quite possibly with their final vote certifications being decided by highly partisan Republican legislatures. And we know that if Trump had had Rudys in the offices of the attorney general and vice president, they might have created enough chaos to throw the election into the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives where, because the vote would be state-by-state rather than by individual representatives, a strict party-line vote would have installed Trump, not Biden, as president."

You can read more here.