Month: June 2021

I have often said that modern Democrats have never really learned the art of losing well, by which I mean winning while losing. I think this is an important tactic in politics since a lot of what they do is foreordained by the numbers they have in the congress and the political incentives of various players. You don’t win everything outright but you can set yourself up for a win by how you lose certain battles along the way.

Today, faced with the obstinacy of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (as well as others who are using those two as human shields) the Senate Democratic leadership seems to be deploying that tactic in order to illustrate the GOP’s determination to block everything and create momentum to reform the filibuster:

After a busy beginning to the year—during which Democrats passed a $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, confirmed Biden’s cabinet, and wrote into law a bipartisan hate crimes measure—liberal lawmakers are finally bracing for impact. With the Senate split 50-50, the longstanding filibuster has become the brick wall standing between Democrats and their top goals.

The next month, then, could be the toughest stretch yet for Democrats. In a letter to senators last week, Schumer said as much, forecasting an “extremely challenging” June that will “test our resolve.”

Schumer seems to be setting up his party for failure for a couple of reasons. Many Democrats believe—or, at least, hope—he is trying to force a gut check for some individual members, like centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Demonstrating to Manchin that Democrats can’t succeed while the filibuster persists could produce some momentum toward ending the 60-vote threshold. And, at the very least, Schumer could be giving Democrats a political cudgel to beat Republicans in 2022 and beyond.

Call it The Month of Taking the L—in hopes that those losses eventually turn into wins. Democrats have little choice but to trust the process, even if some big dominoes have to fall in the right direction quickly.

“If any of these lead to the reform or elimination of the filibuster,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) told The Daily Beast, “my response is, bring it on.”

Some progressive lawmakers are anxiously welcoming the succession of votes on dead-on-arrival bills as a wake-up call to filibuster holdouts.

“With each vote on lifesaving common-sense legislation that gets shot down because of the filibuster,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), “the American people and the senators themselves who are still holding out hope that filibuster reform is unnecessary will see that it is.”

Meanwhile, liberal activists who have been working over Congress on the filibuster for years sense their best opportunity yet to push the envelope—particularly in the wake of the GOP’s filibuster of a bipartisan push to create an independent commission on the Jan. 6 attack.

“It’s a really, really important step,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the group Indivisible. “Because fundamentally, we need to elevate the understanding of exactly how serious the Republican obstructionism is right now. We need to dramatize it.”

Even if some Democrats can see a filibuster endgame developing, in the short term, there are difficult steps that will require the party to grapple fully with internal differences, not just wail on Republicans. After all, some of the most important bills for Democrats lack 50 votes in the Senate.

Their ability to handle all of this successfully, say lawmakers and advocates, will determine whether they keep the promises they believed they were elected to fulfill—and whether they will keep power after the 2022 midterms.

There’s a lot riding on all of this, of course. And I have no idea if this tactic will move the dial with the centrists. I think everyone has been hoping the whole thing is a kabuki dance and Manchin will eventually lead his little band to sanity. You’d think the January 6th commission would have done the job but apparently, Joe and Kyrsten still aren’t convinced.

In fact, Kyrsten made some insanely fatuous comments about the filibuster yesterday so I’m not all that hopeful:

“I have long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies. When you have a system that’s not working effectively – and I think most would agree the Senate is not exactly a well-oiled machine – the way to fix that is to change your behavior, not to eliminate the rules.”

I’m sure Mitch McConnell, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett had a good laugh about that. And, in a way, she’s right. If you want to move something in the Senate you merely have to “change your behavior” and simply do whatever Mitch McConnell wants you to do. He makes the rules.

It doesn’t sound like she’s going to switch, but they have to do something or the Democratic majority is over before it starts, at least legislatively. And there is just too much at stake right now to let that happen again. They have to try something.

Donald Trump now has the notion in his head that he could return to the White House in August. But the twice-impeached former president isn’t getting that idea from constitutional scholars or his attorneys. Instead, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell apparently inspired him.

“If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly,” Lindell told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

In the past few weeks, two people close to Trump told The Daily Beast, the ex-president had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power. What’s more, he claimed that a lot of “highly respected” people—who Trump did not name—have been saying it’s possible. Both of these sources said they decided not to tell the former president what they were thinking, which was that it’s not going to happen.

It’s unclear, exactly, who these “highly respected” individuals are, and who first got the August chatter in Trump’s ear. But the August deadline tracks with comments made by Lindell, one of the ex-president’s most ardent supporters and personal friends.

“Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August,” Lindell said in a late-May appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, claiming that even liberals like MSNBC host Rachel Maddow would admit the election was stolen. (So far, Maddow has not.)

Other top Trump allies have claimed that Trump could soon return to office. “He can simply be reinstated, but a new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in,” pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell told a QAnon conference last weekend.

But the August deadline seems to be unique to Lindell. “The August part is me,” Lindell told Bannon in another podcast appearance in March.

He’s getting worse.

This is the city. Washington, D.C. I work here, I’m a congressman. I wear a pin. My name is Swalwell.

It was Wednesday, January 6th. It was cold in Washington….

The heat is on. Hundreds of Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-Ala.) brothers-in-insurrection have been arrested and charged for the riot and deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th instigated by Donald J. Trump with the help of Brooks and Republican colleagues.  

“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” Brooks told the StopTheSteal rally on The Mall. He then asked rally attendees if they were willing, like their ancestors, to sacrifice “their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives” to fight for America. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? [cheers and applause] Louder! Will you fight for America?“

No Republican officials have drawn charges yet, but Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) has detectives attempting to run down Brooks for his role. Brooks is dodging being served with a lawsuit (CNN):

Federal Judge Amit Mehta, after learning of Swalwell’s inability to serve Brooks with the lawsuit, gave the Democrat’s legal team another 60 days to get to Brooks with their formal notification. The judge, however, won’t allow the US Marshals to deliver the lawsuit to the Republican congressman “due to separation of powers concerns,” Mehta wrote, after Swalwell asked for the US Marshals Service’s help.

After Swalwell — a California Democrat — sued in March, his attorneys tried to reach the Alabama Republican through calls to the congressman’s office and by sending a letter to formally provide him notice he had been sued, a necessary step in this type of court proceeding.

When they couldn’t get the lawsuit to Brooks, the Swalwell legal team hired a private investigator to find him — only to be hampered in April and May partly by the visitor lockdowns around the US Capitol complex, which were put in place for Congress’ protection after the siege, according to their filing Wednesday.

“Counsel spoke to two different staff members on two separate occasions, and each time was promised a return call that never came,” Swalwell’s attorneys wrote on Wednesday.

Following the Swalwell team’s calls, they emailed, too. “Neither Brooks nor any member of his staff has responded to his request,” their filing said.

Swallwell’s attorneys have had to hire a private investigator to find and serve Brooks. Brooks is a slippery devil.

In the suit, Swalwell alleges that former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Brooks broke Washington, DC, laws, including an anti-terrorism act, by inciting the riot, and that they aided and abetted violent rioters and inflicted emotional distress on members of Congress.

Swalwell claims that the four men prompted the attack on Congress with their repeated public assertions of voter fraud, their encouragement that supporters go to Washington on January 6, and in their speeches that day. Each man had told the crowd that Joe Biden’s electoral certification in Congress could be blocked, and that Trump’s supporters should fight, the lawsuit alleges.

This story is true. The names have not been changed….

When President Biden called out two members of the Senate Democratic caucus for voting “more with my Republican friends” on Tuesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the dig was not subtle. Everyone knew he meant Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, both dug in against reforming the filibuster rules. The quip was inaccurate, but a sign of Biden’s growing frustration and his attempt to pressure them into allowing his agenda items to make it to his desk over Republican opposition.

Even to make changes to (if not to eliminate) the filibuster would require the assent of Manchin and Sinema. For her part, Sinema gave an incoherent defense of retaining the filibuster while standing beside GOP Sen. John Cornyn (Texas).

Ex-Justice Department official tells Kyrsten Sinema to check her 'completely wrong' facts on the filibuster – Raw Story – Celebrating 17 Years of Independent Journalism https://t.co/zYHw5QlILC

— Sue Stone (standing with 🇺🇦) (@knittingknots) June 3, 2021

I've argued this before, but this is incoherent. First Sinema claims we need the filibuster to incentivize bipartisan conduct (ie, rules shape incentives). Then she turns around and says if the filibuster is incentivizing *bad* conduct, people should just change their behavior. https://t.co/PUyEYsxk8b

— Greg Sargent (@GregTSargent) June 2, 2021

With so much discussion about eliminating the Jim Crow-era Senate procedure, there has been less discussion of what modifications to the filibuster the two Democrats would accept. Bringing back the talking filibuster, for example.

Joy Reid Slams Kyrsten Sinema on Filibuster: She Knows What Republicans Are Up To ‘And Wants It To Proceed’ #SmartNews https://t.co/QgDyxL1L44

— Amp💫🤙🏾💫 (@adgs8) June 3, 2021

Why the filibuster debate is the wrong debate

An Associated Press/NORC poll last month found that Biden enjoys an enviable 63% job approval rating. FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracker shows Biden with a 53.4% average (June 2).

Polls last month from left-leaning Data for Progress and Southern Poverty Law Center found over 60% in favor of the For the People Act (HR 1) for protecting voting rights. The SPLC poll found 55% of voters agreed that “a simple majority of Senators should be required to pass any bill in the U.S. Senate.”

A The Economist/YouGov Poll released days ago posed this question: “The U.S. Senate’s filibuster rule lets a minority of Senators prevent voting on a bill unless 60 out of 100 Senators vote to end the filibuster. Is this a good or bad rule?”

Good: 36%
Bad: 28%
Not sure: 36%

Asked if the filibuster rule was “mostly good” or “mostly bad,” respondents split 50-50.

Two points.

Reporters need to ask Manchin and Sinema what constituency they believe there is in their states (or in any other senator’s) for the Senate filibuster? How many voters are asking them to preserve it? As opposed to voter interest in passing a comprehensive infrastructure plan to bring jobs there? Or for any other of the popular Biden agenda items?

Second (and this is important for activists and Senate Democrats), voters are not interested in this fight over Senate procedure. Voters are interested in their families’ physical and financial health and in basic fairness. Stop obsessing over rule changes and Sinema/Manchin and start loudly touting the benefits voters will receive from passage of the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan and the For the People Act, etc.

Navel-gazing over the filibuster is the sort of inside-the-Beltway fight voters see as evidence that both major parties are out of touch. They want tangible improvements in their lives.

How much would Manchin be willing to bend to get high-speed internet across West Virginia?

Hey Democrats. Do you think “kitchen table issues” are going to beat this?

https://twitter.com/AuditWarRoom/status/1400117458720018437

https://twitter.com/ArizonaAudit/status/1399785556083503105

https://twitter.com/ArizonaAudit/status/1400159578671620098

https://twitter.com/AuditWarRoom/status/1400173815175413760

These GOP Pennsylvania “legislators” are planning to put in place the mechanisms to “audit” any election results they don’t like until they achieve the results they do. This is happening in swing states all over the country.

But sure, let’s just pretend it isn’t happening, shall we?

Apparently, the government acting as a safety net actually helps people keep food on the table. Imagine that:

Julesa Webb resumed an old habit: serving her children three meals a day. Corrine Young paid the water bill and stopped bathing at her neighbor’s apartment. Chenetta Ray cried, thanked Jesus and rushed to spend the money on a medical test to treat her cancer.

In offering most Americans two more rounds of stimulus checks in the past six months, totaling $2,000 a person, the federal government effectively conducted a huge experiment in safety net policy. Supporters said a quick, broad outpouring of cash would ease the economic hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Skeptics called the policy wasteful and expensive.

The aid followed an earlier round of stimulus checks, sent a year ago, and the results are being scrutinized for lessons on how to help the needy in less extraordinary times.

A new analysis of Census Bureau surveys argues that the two latest rounds of aid significantly improved Americans’ ability to buy food and pay household bills and reduced anxiety and depression, with the largest benefits going to the poorest households and those with children. The analysis offers the fullest look at hardship reduction under the stimulus aid.

Among households with children, reports of food shortages fell 42 percent from January through April. A broader gauge of financial instability fell 43 percent. Among all households, frequent anxiety and depression fell by more than 20 percent.

While the economic rebound and other forms of aid no doubt also helped, the largest declines in measures of hardship coincided with the $600 checks that reached most people in January and the $1,400 checks mostly distributed in April.

Maybe Andrew Yang is on the right track with UBI after all.

None of this will surprise anyone who have ever lived hand to mouth. Cash makes all the difference. Ask any poor person.

Apparently, there’s no big market for anti-Biden books. After all, he’s not a witchy woman or a foreign Black man or a 60s era hippie. He’s just Joe, the regular white guy:

In the conservative book world, nothing is supposed to set off a gold rush like a new Democratic president. Ever since Bill Clinton inspired a wave of right-wing best sellers in the ’90s, publishing houses that cater to Republican readers have learned to make the most of a new villain in the Oval Office, churning out polemics and exposés that aim to capitalize on fear of the new president.

Unless, that is, the new president is Joe Biden.

His presidency may be young, but industry insiders have told me in recent weeks that the market for anti-Biden books is ice cold. Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and—though the hypothesis has yet to be tested—it’s widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his superpower, the American right has gone hunting for richer targets to elevate.

To some in the publishing industry, the apparent lack of appetite is bewildering. “In the past, it’s been like taking candy from a baby to write a book about the Democratic president,” one frustrated conservative editor told me, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about internal business practices. Now? “Nobody is trying.”

To others, though, the apathy makes sense. Eric Nelson, the executive editor at Broadside Books, the conservative imprint of HarperCollins, told me that the right-wing media’s portrayal of Biden as a weak, addled old man is not conducive to book-length takedowns. “Nobody who watches Fox thinks that Joe Biden is in charge of the country,” Nelson said. The popular narrative on the right is that Biden is a kind of figurehead whose White House is actually being run by radical leftists behind the scenes. “If somebody came to me and was like, ‘I have a book on Biden’s secret plan to destroy America,’ I would ask, ‘How many times does the word nap appear in the index?’” Nelson said.

Putting aside whether the perception of Biden as a bumbling geriatric bears any resemblance to reality, the fact that it’s so firmly embedded in the conservative media means that it will be difficult to dislodge. To gain literary traction on the right, a villain has to generate fear and outrage, not simply ridicule. Consider the past three decades of conservative best sellers. When Bill Clinton was on the cover, the books were laden with prurient (and in many cases dubious) details about his alleged affairs and personal corruption. When it was Barack Obama, the books portrayed him—many in barely veiled racial terms—as a dangerous radical trying to transform America. And though she was never actually elected, the ominous prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency generated years’ worth of right-wing best sellers. (In 2006, when she was still a senator considering her first presidential bid, journalist Ben Smith wrote that Clinton had already been the subject of about 30 books, with a dozen more in the works, and compared the Hillary-book boomlet to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon.)

Jonah Goldberg, a former National Review columnist who has written several popular conservative books, told me it was never hard to make Hillary Clinton seem “sinister” to readers of a certain stripe. “Hillary was a kind of Zelig figure of the post-’60s left. Some of the associations were tenuous, but you could play the political equivalent of the Kevin Bacon game with her without needing more than one or two degrees of separation. Black Panthers! Communist law firms! Sidney Blumenthal! Saul Alinsky!” Biden, an aging white guy who spent decades in the Senate, is by contrast “somewhat boringly conventional.”

But this sort of gets at the real problem:

And there’s another problem, Goldberg told me: “Most of the good ammo against Biden—which I’ve deployed in the past—isn’t as effective after four years of Trump. He says crazy things! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! He has a ridiculous ego and lies about his brilliance and expertise! All of this is true. But all of that has been normalized by Trump.” To a conservative movement that has been “mainlining crazy for five years,” it’s hard to get excited about measured criticism of Biden and his policies.

I don’t think it’s true that Biden says crazy things, doesn’t know what he’s talking about or has a crazy ego and lies about his brilliance and expertise. That’s just Goldberg being an ass. But it is absolutely true that Trump did all those things and the contrast between him and Biden is obvious making it impossible to portray the latter as addled, narcissistic and delusional. Or an extremist. Or even old! Trump couldn’t walk down a ramp. He held his glass with two hands. He had weird verbal slips like “the oranges of the investigation” that indicated some mental misfiring. HE IS OLD TOO!

Let’s face it, Biden is boring. And that makes him a very difficult person to demonize in this crazy mediaverse we are currently trapped in. That’s a good thing.

And not everyone’s cut out for it:

Former President Donald Trump has shuttered his blog weeks after it went live, a senior aide confirmed to Forbes on Wednesday, ending a project his team launched with fanfare after the president was kicked off most social media platforms in January. 

(Blogging since 2003…)

Josh Marshall takes a little trip down memory lane to remind us of just how long the GOP’s descent into madness has been going on:

With Texas Democrats refusing to attend a state legislative session in an effort to block the state’s election crackdown law it reminded TPM Reader MR of a similar instance 18 years. It was a story I covered closely at TPM and MR dropped me a note this morning reminding me. It’s than just a trip down memory lane. What happened in 2003 in Texas was a preview, prologue to almost everything that would happen over the subsequent two decades. It presaged the debt ceiling hostage taking; it presaged Merrick Garland; and it presaged Donald Trump.

As we know from looking forward to the 2022 midterm, once a decade there’s a federal Census, a reapportionment of congressional seats and redistricting in every state that have more than one representative. It happened in 2010, setting the ground work for Republicans storming back into the majority in the House. Democrats rightly fear something similar will happen next year.

But there’s no actual rule that says you can only redistrict once a decade. There’s no law or constitutional impediment to remapping the districts for each election. The tradition originates from the fact that especially early in the country’s history states added and sometimes lost seats very often. Adding or losing seats forces at least some redistricting. Demography also changes over a decade. So even if a state has the same number of seats it makes sense to review the maps.

The logic of not doing it more than once a decade is first that if you’re constantly doing it it creates a lot of instability for everyone. Incumbents can gain from redistricting. But it’s a danger too. The other reason not to do it more than once a decade is that there’s really no conceivable reason to do it other than maximizing the power of the party which controls redistricting in the state. Gerrymandering or maximizing advantage almost always play a role. But once a decade there’s at least a rationale if not always a pressing need for doing so which isn’t tied to partisan advantage. In any case, that’s the rule and everyone’s lived by it for centuries.

Texas is such a Republican state today that it’s easy to forget that quite recently conservative Democrats were a key force in the state, especially in the state legislature. Republicans worked really hard to control the state legislature in time for the 2000-2002 redistricting cycle. But they failed. So when they finally did get the majority in 2003 they decided there was no need to wait until 2010. They just went ahead and did a partisan gerrymander way ahead of schedule.

Done and done.

Democrats were predictably outraged. (They eventually absconded to New Mexico to block the move.) Journalists and commentators were surprised, flummoxed, caught off guard. Pick your verb. This just doesn’t happen. You can’t do that. It just disrupts the system of how everything works. But of course, you can do it. There’s no actual law saying you can’t.

Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) was the mover behind the whole effort, even though he wasn’t in the state legislature. DeLay was an early progenitor of the ascendent Republican view that all there is is power. If it’s not expressly illegal you can do it and you should do it. Indeed, you must do it. It was the principle that there are no restraints on Republican political power short of criminal statutes, and often not even those. (DeLay was at the time fighting off a long running political corruption case that would eventually drive him out of Congress.) It’s the same principle that had Ted Cruz threatening to force a default on the national debt if Barack Obama won’t give in to his demands. It’s the same principle that leads Mitch McConnell to hold open a Supreme Court seat for a year to secure a corrupt appointment under Donald Trump.

The other night I recalled that Democrats were forced to leave the state in a similar power grab in Wisconsin some time ago but had totally forgotten about DeLay’s gambit. It was a shocking deviation from the norm at the time. It seems almost tame by comparison to what they’re doing today.

Back in 2016 when Trump brought former General Michael Flynn onboard his fledgling campaign, most people outside of military and national security circles had no idea who he was. And because very few people took the Trump campaign seriously, I don’t think many cared. My first clue that we were dealing with a Strangelovian Jack D. Ripper character, however, was when Flynn appeared at the GOP convention and led the crowd in “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton. It was clear: He was afflicted with the right-wing disability called Fox News Brain Rot. So when Trump unexpectedly won his upset that November, one of the most unnerving of his early decisions was to make this unbalanced former general his national security adviser.

I wrote about Flynn several times in 2016, gravely concerned that such a man was being tapped for such a powerful post, noting that he was so far submerged in the right-wing fever swamp that he had practically grown gills:

Speaking to a gathering of young conservatives at Trump’s Washington hotel, Flynn said, “I was with Dinesh D’Souza last night, and the other, for the young audience here, for the young ones here, I mentioned it to a couple of you, I was also with Milo Yiannopoulos. . . . See, a lot of people in here won’t know who he is. I tag him on Twitter, you know, because he’s a phenomenal individual, and I’m mentioning him tonight because he spoke alongside of me last night to another group of folks.”

That was a week after the election. By that time, Dana Priest at the New Yorker had written a hair-raising profile of Flynn’s descent into madness at the Pentagon and everyone knew he’d had some very odd interactions with the Russian and Turkish governments. Suffice to say that Michael Flynn was nutty from the get-go and the mere fact that he was once the director of the Defense Intelligence Intelligence Agency and then became the White House National Security Adviser should make all Americans question the quality of our national security system overall.

As we all know, Trump fired Flynn in the early months of his presidency before he realized he didn’t have to play by any rules. But the reverberations of that firing led to the subsequent firing of FBI Director James Comey and eventually the Mueller investigation into Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election. While Flynn was indicted, pleaded guilty and then reversed his plea, he was finally pardoned by Trump. And ever since Trump’s election loss, Flynn’s been calling for the military to take control of the government in one way or another.

Recall this from December 2020?

Here's Michael Flynn on Newsmax saying that Trump could order "military capabilities" to swing states and "rerun an election in each of those states."

"People out there talk about martial law like it's something that we've never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times." pic.twitter.com/KNmiAGGiPF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 18, 2020

Trump was listening to Flynn during that period, along with other crackpots in his circle who enabled his delusional belief that he could somehow overturn the election. Over the holiday weekend, Flynn upped the ante and caused quite a stir when he attended a big QAnon event in Texas and responded to a questioner asking if there’s any reason America can’t have a military coup like Myanmar by saying, “No reason. I mean, it should happen here.”

Here is the video of former national security advisor Michael Flynn saying that he thinks a coup like the coup in Myanmar should happen in the US. pic.twitter.com/7mGYjfXg18

— Mamie (@MC_Hyperbole) May 30, 2021

He later tried to say that the media had distorted his words and that he doesn’t think there should be a coup, which is big of him. But he’s not the only former military man in Trump’s circle suggesting such a thing.

Former Col. Douglas Macgregor, the frequent Fox News guest who Trump first nominated as Ambassador to Germany and then dispatched to the Pentagon in the waning days of the administration, recently wrote a very provocative opinion piece along the same lines. And the idea of a Myanmar-style coup has been circulating for some time in QAnon circles, as CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan has documented:

Talk of a Myanmar-style coup in the United States has been popular among some Trump supporters and QAnon believers for months. pic.twitter.com/PVFKQ6LukA

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) June 1, 2021

According to the NY Times’ Maggie Haberman, “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August” and that “he is not putting out statements about the “audits” in states just for the sake of it. He’s been laser-focused on them, according to several people who’ve spoken with him (as well as WaPo reporting a few weeks ago).” And Trump and Flynn’s former lawyer, Sidney Powell, attending the same conference, said that she also expects Trump to be returned to the White House, although she didn’t specify that it would be in August:

As far as I know, this is the first case of abject fraud and obtaining a coup of the United States of America. So, it’s going to have to be dealt with. It should be that he [President Trump] can simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration day is set. (cheers) And Biden is told to move out of the White House. And President Trump should be moved back in.

There you have Powell seemingly stating that a coup already happened and that it would have to be “dealt with” which she doesn’t explain. It sounds as if both she and Trump think these “audits” happening around the country will somehow give him back the White House which is even crazier than the idea of a military coup.

At the "Patriot Round Up" QAnon conference in Dallas, Sidney Powell informs the crowd that Trump won't get credit for "time lost" after he's reinstated as president and Biden is forced to leave the White House.

Feels like she's setting them up for more disappointment. pic.twitter.com/PqNrunvzi3

— Travis View (@travis_view) May 30, 2021

Flynn’s comments caused quite a stir and for good reason. It isn’t every day that you hear a former US Army general and national security adviser calling for a military coup d’etat against his own government. But even if you add his addled suggestion to the recent letter from a bunch of retired right-wing brass calling themselves “Flag Officers 4 America” complaining that the election was fraudulent and Joe Biden is a Marxist dictator because he reversed Trump’s executive orders, their isn’t any evidence that the military is actually interested in jumping on the QAnon bandwagon.

Still, that doesn’t mean this talk isn’t dangerous.

As we saw on January 6th, there are plenty of Trump followers who are willing to commit violence on his behalf. And we have Republican politicians all over the country using this new “lost cause” myth to create a system that will essentially enable legal coups going forward. The threat is dire enough that over 100 leading experts on democratic systems issued a frantic warning that unless the federal government acts to protect the electoral system, we may just lose our democracy for good.

They write:

The playbook that the Republican Party is executing at the state and national levels is very much consistent with actions taken by illiberal, anti-democratic, anti-pluralist parties in other democracies that have slipped away from free and fair elections.”

It doesn’t take a military coup to accomplish that. All it takes is for the Republicans to continue to pass laws that allow partisan hacks to overturn elections they do not win. And they are feverishly working to make that happen all over the country. 

Salon