Would- be president for life Donald "Rump" Trump and his band of villains in Georgia and Florida have been trying to short- circuit the counting (and re- counting) of ballots since election day. As more ballots (absentee, overseas, military, provisional) are counted, margins for the Republican vote suppressors in those states have been going down. With Georgia Republican and voter purger extraordinaire Brian Kemp desperate to stay above the 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff with Democrat Stacy Abrams, odious fraudster Gov. Rick "Batboy" Scott throwing around lies about fraud while a recount is underway, and future one- term Republican Senator from Colorado Cory Gardner echoing Scott's claims that Dems were "stealing" the election, there's a coordinated Republican effort to disenfranchise voters and to try to de- legitimatize election results when Republicans are in danger of losing. Existential threat to democracy Rump is all in on this strategy, of course.
Paul Krugman discusses how Republicans are being prepared for distrusting any election results that result in Republican losses (not that it takes much preparation):
The attempt by Trump and his party to shut down the legally mandated Florida recount with claims, based on no evidence, of large-scale voting fraud fits right into this partisan epistemology. Do Republicans really believe that there were vast numbers of fraudulent or forged ballots? Even asking that question is a category error. They don’t “really believe” anything, except that they should get what they want. Any vote count that might favor a Democrat is bad for them; therefore it’s fraudulent, no evidence needed.
The same worldview explains Republicans’ addiction to conspiracy theories. After all, if people keep insisting on the truth of something that hurts their party, it can’t be out of respect for the facts — because in their world, there are no neutral facts.
So the people making inconvenient assertions must be in the pay of sinister forces. In Arizona, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won a Senate seat on the strength of late-counted ballots. Did you know that the state G.O.P. has filed a freedom of information request for information on interactions between election officials and, you guessed it, George Soros? [snip]
What all of this means is that what’s going on in America right now isn’t politics as usual. It’s much more existential than that. You have to be truly delusional to see the Republicans’ response to their party’s midterm setback as anything but an attempted power grab by a would-be authoritarian movement, which rejects any opposition or even criticism as illegitimate. Our democracy is still very much in danger.Paul Campos at LGM sees this as a dangerous prelude to the 2020 election (should Rump be around to run), and sketches how the attempts to de-legitimatize election results in close races this year may play out when 2020 rolls around:
(1) He loses a close election, like 2016 except the other way. If that happens, I think there’s a good chance that he won’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the result, and he’ll do everything he can, legally and extra-legally, to stay in office.
(2) He loses, or is obviously going to lose, by a big margin. In this scenario, I can see things getting really crazy in the weeks running up to November 2020. I can imagine him trying to call the whole thing off, on the grounds of some spurious national emergency, or announcing ahead of time that the election results were going to be illegitimate because of “massive voter fraud” (i.e., similar to his reaction to losing a close election, except anticipating the result and trying to delegitimize it ahead of time).
(3) Something basically unimaginable right now (I don’t trust the show runners at all at this point).
Ultimately I don’t think Trump is going to go gentle into that good night. And it’s probably a good idea to start anticipating that possibility.Conservative Jennifer Rubin concurs:
President Trump is back in the United States — and back to attacking democracy. He tweets:
The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018
We should note that this is the talk of authoritarians; it shows contempt for the office of the president, whom the Constitution designates to “to take care” that the nation’s laws are faithfully executed. It’s also a frightful peek at what he might do in 2020 should the vote not go his way.We all need to be prepared and not assume Trump and Trumpism will accede to losing power. These are times very few if any of us have ever experienced before, and the stakes couldn't be any higher.
