There are many takes around talking about how Trump’s antics may not succeed but they’ve laid the groundwork for a future fascist to exploit the weaknesses in our system. This one by Jamelle Bouie in his newsletter is nice and concise:
It is true that Donald Trump is attempting to overturn the results of the election and seize power over the will of the voters. It is also true that this attempt is as haphazard and amateurish as you can imagine, spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani and a handful of other third-string Trump loyalists. They hope to throw out as many ballots as needed to change the results in the five swing states that gave Joe Biden his victory. If that fails, which it pretty much already has, they hope to create confusion around certifying the votes in those states and then pressure state legislatures to ignore the voters and send Trump electors to Congress.
There have been contested elections and attempts to reverse the results, but there’s never been anything quite like this, where the loser of a fair election attempts to discard the outcome. Success would mean the end of constitutional government in the United States. Yes, the Electoral College theoretically allows state legislatures to assign a state’s electors as they please, but not in a post hoc fashion. More fundamentally, no matter what you might think of our political institutions, the foundation of American government is the consent of the governed. We have an absolute, fundamental right to choose our own leaders. To subvert this is to end the American republic.
Now, Trump won’t succeed. His margin of defeat is too great, and he lacks the institutional support in the courts and the military he would need to pull off a successful coup. But his effort, however ramshackle, is still an unacceptable attack on our democracy. It does not bode well for the future. Somewhere, quite possibly in Washington, an aspiring American autocrat is watching this, seeing the vulnerabilities in our system, feeling for those places where, with a little more effort, you could make a breakthrough.
Trump will fail in his attempt to overturn the election. But absent serious reforms to our political system, he’s cleared the ground for whatever wickedness follows in his footsteps.
And it didn’t start with this post-election carnival. He’s been showing the way for the cynical, authoritarian strain in American politics since he took office, starting with firing Comey.
But I will say again, as I’ve been saying on loop for years now, it isn’t Trump. None of this would be possible if he didn’t have the full support of his collaborators in the Republican Party. In fact, you can go all the way back to Bush Sr’s Christmas pardons and the machination of the 2000 recount and more recently MItch McConnell’s outright theft of a Supreme Court seat in 2016. In fact, the latter was a real escalation in that it could have been done without completely busting the norms that governed normal procedures. They had the majority. They could have slow-walked the hearings, created diversions done any number of things before finally simply voting him down closer to the election. The result would have been the same but it would have preserved the notion that presidents have a right to name Supreme Court justices.
McConnell wanted the people to see that he had the power to say “no, we’re not doing that, we’re changing the rules” simply because they had the power to do it. And then he demonstrated that he had the power to change them back. That lesson should have told Americans everything they need to know about what the Republican party stands for.
Trump has also demonstrated the power of the executive but more by blundering around like a bull in a China shop and constantly challenging Republicans to remain loyal so that they could achieve their own ends with the power of the presidency. They more than rose to the occasion. They have shown that a president can use his power without limit if he has the support of a ruthless party that will back him to the hilt. That lesson will not be lost on the next one.
Update: Masha Gessen at the New Yorker discusses the difference between a con and a coup in this piece:
“Con versus coup” might be a false dichotomy. A coup is a power claim made illegitimately, often but not always with the use of force, sometimes illegally but sometimes within the bounds of a constitution. A con is a mushy term: it can be a criminal act or simply an unethical one, perhaps just wily and manipulative. A con, in other words, is an illegitimate act of persuasion. A coup always begins as a con. If the con is successful—if the power claim is persuasive—then a coup has occurred.
You can see it better with failed coups. In August, 1991, the leadership of the Russian K.G.B. and some Politburo hardliners placed President Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and declared themselves in charge of the country. On the second night of their coup, they held a press conference. Journalists who had for a few years enjoyed unprecedented freedom seemed to fall in line and accept the coup plotters’ power claim; they asked questions about, say, plans for rejuvenating the command economy. Then a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Tatyana Malkina rose and asked, “Do you realize that last night you committed a coup d’état?” Something shifted in the room. Journalists started bombarding the coup plotters with more combative questions, and the plotters themselves suddenly looked like lost, hungover men in ill-fitting suits. They ended the press conference, which state television had broadcast in its entirety, and in less than forty-eight hours the coup collapsed. We may never know what else was going on out of public view, but this is how many Russians remember it: the brave reporter in a frilly dress, the trembling hands of crooks and hustlers who didn’t believe in their own legitimacy, the end.
In July, 2016, a faction of the Turkish military attempted a coup. The government thwarted it within hours. The instant end of the coup was televised: people the world over saw tanks on bridges in Istanbul and immediately began speculating that the coup was merely a pretext for the larger crackdown that followed. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government arrested tens of thousands of people and fired many more, mostly on suspicion of belonging to the Hizmet movement, led by the émigré cleric Fethullah Gülen. Gülen denied that he had anything to do with the coup and suggested that it might have been staged by Erdoğan himself. Skeptics pointed to the holes in the coup plotters’ plans: they failed to secure total control of the media, they didn’t manage to arrest Erdoğan, they were poorly coördinated. Were they even serious? Similar conspiracy theories still circulate about the 1991 Russian coup: the plotters didn’t close the airports or turn off the Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s home phone. What kind of coup is that? A failed one.
Successful coup plotters don’t do everything right, either. No aspiring dictator can commandeer enough military power to be able to dominate an entire country that refuses to recognize him. No coup plotters can close every channel of communication and stop all movement. No one usurping power can force people to forget that different norms and expectations existed as recently as yesterday.
What successful coup plotters do is con enough people into thinking that they have already taken power. No one can fully predict when such a claim will succeed or fail.
Yeah. I’ll be thinking about that for a while. I think we know that they have already convinced an enormous number of people that they won the election despite the fact that it is a complete fantasy…