Is it just me, or has anyone else also noticed that our president has been melting down even more than usual lately?
That whole “no guardrails” thing, combined with being surrounded by sycophants who are only too eager to do all of his bidding without questioning it and Congressional Republicans who almost without exception remain scared to death of him – plus immunity – has produced a monster who believes no court order applies to him and no law can stop him from doing whatever the hell he wants.
Given the above, I don’t think it qualifies as catastrophizing to conclude that all bets are off when it comes to this guy’s wholly unpredictable behavior and what he’s prone to do when faced with what’s looking like an increasingly likely blue wave washing over the midterms to deliver a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate.
The question becomes less how Trump is likely to act and more what the rest of us will do to stop him if a worst-case scenario comes to pass. Because unlike what some believe, stopping him is not only possible but essential to ultimately restoring the health of the republic.
But let’s try to look at this logically, if anything resembling reason can even matter when it comes to the least stable leader this country has ever been forced to endure by a very wide margin.
Trump has done nothing to indicate he’ll play by any rules other than his own; ergo, I have precisely zero confidence that he will, for instance, heed the original injunction put in place by Federal District Judge Indira Talwani that the U.S. Postal Service cannot refuse to send-out mail-in ballots because a state hasn’t complied with Trump’s onerous new requirements that were essentially rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court.
You know that sense of relief you got on September 14 when the Supremes uncharacteristically declined to overturn Judge Talwani’s order? Well, forget about that.
It would be entirely on brand at this stage for Trump to disregard what the courts said and order the USPS to, for instance, withhold the sending out of mail-in ballots to blue states – in other words, go utterly rogue. He could just say, “I overrule the order because I believe it’s unfair, and as president I have the power to correct this grave error.”
He doesn’t, of course. But who is going to tell Trump he doesn’t? You? Me? Certainly not the lily-livered House and Senate.
Let’s remember that he still has a loyalist presiding in USPS Postmaster General David Steiner. Steiner already announced that he’d abide by the courts’ determination of the post office’s legal authority, but a lot of people have said a lot of things lately that wind up not being worth squat.
So let’s say USPS decides to do the president’s bidding, anyway. Trump would laugh at threats of additional injunctions and civil contempt sanctions. The only thing he seems to understand and heed is brute force, and the courts ain’t got it. However, he personally has it in the form of his very own ICE militia/goon squad.
The Supreme Court doesn’t command an army or police force of its own. Federal courts in general have limited independent means of physically ensuring compliance with their decisions. Before Trump, this was simply not an issue, since we were not an authoritarian state ruled by a would-be dictator. (Actually, I think we should erase the words “would-be” at this point.)
The constitutional system has historically depended entirely on executive officials accepting judicial judgments as binding. I wouldn’t be so sure that’s going to continue.
Imagine this: the president orders defiance on mail-in ballots. USPS leadership complies. Subordinate officials comply. The Justice Department refuses to assist the court (thanks Todd Blanche). Executive officials refuse to implement contempt orders, and even if they do, there’s no one to enforce them.
Even if Congressional Republicans were suddenly to locate their long-lost spines, the whole process of conducting investigations and hearings, subpoenaing officials and even invoking the impeachment process would likely take far too long to save the midterms.
Bottom line: there is no automatic mechanism in place to stop such illegality should Trump and his group of enablers choose to go that route.
Should a rogue Trump fly completely off the rails of legal and ethical comportment surrounding the midterms, the mail-in ballot system would be only one of the alarming concerns (and perhaps not even the primary one).
He could direct federal agents to seize ballots or voting equipment at polling locations, throwing the whole process into chaos.
He could deploy federal law-enforcement troops around polling places, as has already been regularly threatened, to intimidate voters and potentially transform numerous locations into immigration roundup zones.
He could call up the National Guard or other armed military to crack down and toss the election into further turmoil by invoking a sham emergency.
He could use federal investigations to obtain voter registration databases, demanding voter files from states and invoking voting-rights or election-integrity laws.
He could attempt to dictate which voting machines states may use.
He could attempt to impose new nationwide voting requirements and ID laws by executive order, essentially instituting elements of the SAVE Act unilaterally in the purported interest of preventing fraud and keeping election integrity intact.
He could try to disrupt the counting of ballots after Election Day, claiming that suspected federal crimes justify obtaining ballots, records or equipment while tallying or canvassing are underway.
He could attempt to use the DOJ (thanks again, Mr. Blanche) to stop or alter counts, filing lawsuits and requesting emergency injunctions.
Mind you, all of this could be accomplished no matter how any federal court rules if Trump simply decides the judiciary doesn’t matter. That’s more than a mere constitutional crisis, boys and girls. That’s democracy in its death throes.
I would be shocked if at least some of this isn’t on the White House drawing board and/or being prepped for implementation, and so would you. If the rulings of judges are ignored, this thing stands to get very ugly very quickly.
I pray that it doesn’t come to that.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)