Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.
He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:
“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”
He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”
He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.
This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.
And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.
This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.
As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:
“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”
Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?
He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.
The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.
This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.
Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.
Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.
After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.
He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.
This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.
He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.
This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terrifying hours he spent sitting in a courthouse charged with 34 felonies for which he could go to prison.
It’s easy for him to imagine, because it’s exactly what he constantly tries to do to people he thinks have slighted him, from Jim Comey to Letitia James to Adam Schiff and dozens of others: he tries to break them financially while threatening them with long and brutal imprisonment.
He’s done this repeatedly, and his most recent threat to break or jail somebody was issued just last week.
But none of what he’s planning works without a lot of ordinary people saying, “Yes,” and that’s also where we may have a say.
That’s the thing about these operations that gets lost when we talk about them as if they’re just the work of one man, America’s Hitler, to quote JD Vance. It’s never one man who pulls the whole thing off, although it does take a lying psychopath with charisma and some leadership skills to get the process rolling.
Ultimately, though, it can’t work without the National Guard captain who decides the order is lawful enough, the county clerk who hands over the machines because a federal agent showed her a piece of paper, the local cop who puts on the riot gear because his sergeant did, and the poll worker who turns his ballots over to masked ICE agents because it feels safer.
My friends who were there in Germany in 1933 told me, as does history, that that country didn’t fall to a majority; the Nazis never got a legitimate victory at the ballot box.
That nation fell, as others have throughout history, because tens of thousands of people in unremarkable jobs did the small thing that was asked of them in the moment it was asked, and told themselves it was only temporary, and it must be okay because somebody higher up must know something I don’t.
Every one of those people made that decision cold, under pressure, with a stranger in a uniform standing in front of them and about four seconds to think.
Which is why the useful work right now isn’t reactive, and it isn’t something we do in November. It’s finding out, before November, what the people around us are going to do.
— Go meet your county election officials; they’re mostly your neighbors, and in a lot of counties they’re the ones who’ll be standing between a federal agent sent by Trump and a ballot box with nobody backing them up.
— Ask your sheriff, on the record, at a public meeting, whether he takes orders from Washington or from the county.
— Ask your state legislators what the plan is if the National Guard shows up, because most of them probably haven’t thought about it and they damn well should. Ask your governor and state attorney general.
— Find out which lawyers in your town do election work and whether they’re organized. Get to know the people on your block well enough that you can call them at midnight, if necessary.
— Get to know your local elected officials and, in the few months ahead, show up at your local Democratic Party meeting.
People who’ve already decided what they’ll do, and who know that the folks around them decided the same thing, behave completely differently when the moment arrives than people who are trying to figure it out on the spot.
That’s not optimism. It’s just how it’s always worked, in Selma and Kiev and Manila and everywhere else people have looked at an illegal order or an out-of-control authority figure and said, “No.”
What matters most in the next four months is going to happen at the local level, in county commission meetings and election offices that nobody’s watching.
Go be somebody who’s watching.