Many Observers, including Republicans, Worry That He Is!

“IS TRUMP PLANNING A COUP D`ETAT?”

by Selvam Canagaratna

“All that we do is done with an eye to something else.”

– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. B.C.)

This summer, shortly after scores of camo-wearing, heavily armed federal agents descended on Portland, Ore., to attack protesters, Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General, pondered the implications of what he was seeing on the streets. What he saw scared him; he remembered the use of paramilitaries by fascist leaders in 1930s Europe, where he was born, and he feared he was now witnessing a slide into para-militarism in the United States. (His family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.)

Sasha Abramsky, writing in The Nation, noted: “Charles Fried felt that President Trump was using the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies in a way that was very menacing. You might as well put brown shirts on them. It’s a very bad thing.”

A Harvard Law School professor who still counts himself as a Republican and a board member of groups such as the Campaign Legal Center and Republicans for the Rule of Law, Charles Fried has grown increasingly worried in recent months about Trump’s willingness to stir chaos and violence as an electoral strategy in the run-up to November’s vote and about the willingness of his Attorney General, William Barr, to burn the country’s democratic institutions to the ground to preserve this administration’s hold on power.

Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, has come to share Fried’s conviction that Trump is a threat to the Republic, although Steele believes the Trump cult is more about naked political opportunism than any grand fascist ideology.

Like Fried, Steele in recent months concluded that Trump, aided and abetted by the GOP’s congressional leaders, is willing to “open up a Pandora’s box of mischief” to remain ensconced in the White House, Steele says. “He’s laying down the predicate — taking shots at vote-by-mail and saying he already knows there’s fraud — and therefore it’s likely he won’t accept the results of the election.”

This summer, Fried, Steele, and other devotees of traditional conservatism began co-ordinating with fellow anti-Trump conservatives around the country, as well as with progressive organizations, to strategize responses should Trump attempt to maintain power despite rejection at the polls. Some participants formed the Transition Integrity Project, which includes campaign experts such as Michigan Democratic ex-governor Jennifer Granholm and Democratic Party consultant Donna Brazile, along with Steele and other old-guard GOP stalwarts.

In their sobering 22-page report, they write of the potential for “escalating violence” if Trump loses and refuses to bow out gracefully. Indeed, on the day Joe Biden accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Trump suggested on Fox News that he could order federal agents, even local sheriffs, into polling stations ostensibly to monitor fraud.

Two of the main organizations that have begun planning mass mobilization are the Indivisible Project and Stand Up America. Between them, they have brought together dozens of organizations and movements — from Public Citizen, MoveOn, and the End Citizens United Action Fund on the left to Republicans for the Rule of Law and Stand Up Republic on the right — inspired by nonpartisan groups such as the National Task Force on Election Crises. The goal is to build a grassroots legal and political infrastructure capable of pushing back against efforts to undermine the electoral process. As Trump’s attacks on it have intensified, additional groups have joined this nascent pro-democracy movement, including the Service Employees International Union and the Sunrise Movement.

“We’re putting a lot of energy into this,” says Ezra Levin, a cofounder of the Indivisible Project and one of the organizers of Protect the Results (a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America). “Indivisible brings to the table people power. We started in December 2016 in response to Trump. Three and a half years later, we have thousands of locally led Indivisible groups around the country. We’re teaming up with other groups, including Stand Up America.”

Some of this groundwork involves getting millions of people in all 50 states to sign up for SMS alerts. Some of it involves getting lawyers to volunteer to help with election-related issues in the weeks surrounding the vote. Some involves grassroots education campaigns — for example, publicizing efforts by the administration to undermine the Postal Service. Some are about talking with labour organizations about the prospect of going on strike and gridlocking the economy if Trump attempts to steal the election. “There’s going to be litigation, mass mobilization, policy options by governors, state attorneys-general, members of Congress,” says Vanita Gupta, the President of the DC-based Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Protecting the elections, says Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn, “will take multiple different tactics. People are starting to connect the dots — and all the work that movements have done across the generations. People are starting to come out. People will be inspired and motivated to protect their country. Will we be successful? We’re going to fight like hell to make sure we are.”

“A concern is what we are seeing right now: federal law enforcement in major cities engaged in actions with protesters that generate civil unrest and battles in the streets,” says Trevor Potter, ex-chairman of the Federal Election Commission and currently President of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “To me, it was a far-fetched, hypothetical idea till we saw it in Portland. It could lead to sufficient civil unrest [such] that it is, in fact, difficult to conduct an election in those cities.”

Trump has talked vaguely about the extraordinary powers he could seize during a putative national emergency. He has demanded — and largely won — increasingly politicized enforcement actions from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and other key agencies. And in recent weeks he’s leaned on legal advice from people such as John Yoo, an author of the infamous torture memos used by the George W. Bush administration, who advocates the use of executive orders to exert virtually unfettered presidential power.

Stuart Gerson, who served as acting Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush, says this moment increasingly reminds him of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which was about a “society based on predictive behaviour, and then along comes a character called the Mule, who upsets the democratic applecart. Trump is the Mule. He throws norms into a cocked hat. He is an egomaniac. The sun travels around him. He thinks he’s Louis XIV.”

Organizers fear that Trump is prepping the ground for a de facto coup. But they also hope that he can be headed off by a massive wave of aroused and empowered opposition. There is, after all, a growing public awareness of the existential threat to the country’s democracy, with a drumbeat of warnings from Biden, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, and other senior political figures. Levin, Fried, and the others involved in Protect the Results are hoping that this will generate an unstoppable electoral wave, resulting in such a thorough, incontestable rejection of all that Trump stands for that his ability to challenge the results will be chopped off at the knees.