Posted on 10/03/2020 4:04:01 PM PDT by Ennis85
Amid the unedifying and sometimes indecipherable US presidential debate this week, one comment rang clear: President Trump’s chilling prediction that the election, already under way, “is not going to end well”. The remark was not a bolt from the blue. Last month, the president refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power should he lose. He has declined to state that he will accept the results. In doing so, Mr Trump has thrust to the centre of US politics a question which has been gnawing at Democrats for some time: what if he loses and refuses to leave?
In an attempt to assess how bad things might get, a law professor at Washington’s Georgetown University gathered grandees from both parties to play a kind of political Dungeons and Dragons. Rosa Brooks assigned each participant a character to play, and they “wargamed” how different election results might play out. “A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power,” Dr Brooks told the Washington Post. “Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.”
In all circumstances save one, she wrote, America “reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse”. What does that mean? Are we a month away from the shining city on a hill descending into the kind of political violence common in banana republics? In a country where civilian firearms outnumber people, are the Trump-supporting Proud Boys destined to take their battle against left-wing Antifa (anti-fascists) to the streets, with a political establishment torn in both directions unable to mediate?
Whether you believe such scenarios are fantastical or not, the pretext under which Mr Trump would challenge the election result is clear: postal votes. In the 2016 election, about 24 per cent of Americans voted by mail. A recent poll found that could rise to 38 per cent this time, and much of the surge is expected in places with little history of processing postal votes.
But Mr Trump’s claims that postal voting will lead to a “rigged election” are not backed up by evidence. In the debate, he spoke darkly of postal votes being “dumped in rivers”. Pressed to identify the rivers, Kayleigh McEnany, the president’s press secretary, deflected and claimed that the media was “missing the forest through the trees here”. Just because there’s no evidence of mass postal voting fraud doesn’t mean that the shift to a new way of voting during a pandemic will be seamless. Recent primary elections suffered not only long delays but thousands of votes being ignored on technicalities. In New York, the chaos left the results of crucial races undetermined for six weeks.
Another delay in ultra-Democratic New York in the presidential election next month would have scant national consequence but if similar problems affect swing states the situation could become dicier. Several of them cannot begin counting postal votes until the close of polls, meaning the tally of those who voted in person, counted by machine, will show up first. In some states the counting process could take a week, especially where rules allow postal votes which arrive after November 3 to be counted. In that scenario, with a voting public accustomed to knowing the winner by the time they go to bed, Democrats fear Mr Trump could strike, claiming victory and stoking questions about the integrity of the postal votes yet to be counted. His supporters would need little persuading by that point of the inherent whiffiness of the system.
In remote northeastern Minnesota, Steve Baker, 70, a semi-retired civil engineer, told me that if the president does not win the state, a Democratic stronghold since 1976, it would be because of fraud. Mrs Clinton, he believed, “actually got less votes” nationwide than Mr Trump in 2016, despite the official verdict that she won just shy of three million more.
Democrats in Pennsylvania believed their party had made a mistake by focusing on postal voting earlier in the pandemic. “Mail-in ballots are easier to challenge,” Jim Finn, 53, a party activist and insurance broker, said. “I think if people can stand in line at the grocery store they can stand in line and vote.”
How could Mr Trump challenge the legitimacy of the result? The obvious and traditional route would be through the courts, a prospect Nathaniel Persiley, a professor at Stanford Law School, has described as “Bush v Gore on steroids”, a reference to the 2000 Supreme Court decision which effectively confirmed George W Bush in the presidency, 35 days after polls closed. As with Mr Bush, Mr Trump would find himself before a court with a conservative majority. By election day it may have a 6-3 majority, with Amy Coney Barrett likely to be confirmed to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal icon who died last month.
Yet it may be naive to believe a constitutional clash of such magnitude in such a polarised country at such a fractious time could plausibly be confined to the courts. The reason Mr Trump found himself challenged at Tuesday’s debate to condemn white supremacists is because the sprouting of militias and far-right groups has been one of the big themes of his presidency. Indeed, Mr Biden claims that it was Mr Trump’s response — “very fine people on both sides” — to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where racists chanted antisemitic slogans and a counterprotester was killed, which was the moment he decided to run for president a third time. (For a man who has hankered after the White House all his adult life, it’s not a credible claim but it shows the episode’s resonance in US politics).
A former member of the Proud Boys, the neo-fascist all-male collective which Mr Trump told to “stand back and stand by” on Tuesday, organised the Charlottesville rally. The group, which takes its name from the song Proud of Your Boy from Disney’s Aladdin, endorses “western chauvinism” and the days when “girls were girls and men were men”. Members of the group renounce masturbation and tattoos indicate having reached a certain level of membership. Their uniform is Fred Perry polo shirts in black with a yellow trim — the designer discontinued the garment this week in an effort to disassociate itself from the group.
Ask the group’s members in far-right safe spaces about their beliefs and they will confess that the talk of chauvinism is designed to make their views seem milder than they are. “Let’s not bullshit,” one far-right activist told the The Daily Shoah, an antisemitic podcast. If members of the Proud Boys “were pressed on the issue, I guarantee you that like 90 per cent of them would tell you something along the lines of ‘Hitler was right. Gas the Jews’.”
But the focus on this militia obscures not only the breadth of the far right, but also how fractured it is. The Charlottesville rally may have been designed to unite the right but those marching could be broken down into at least five kinds of groups: white supremacists, alt-right, the KKK, neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. Between and within each group are different perspectives on Mr Trump and politics in general.
It is hard, too, to gauge the far right’s size; 129 million Americans voted in 2016 and the total this year is expected to be higher. The weekend before they were vaulted to international significance at the debate, the Proud Boys held a rally in Portland to which they boasted 20,000 people would show up. About 200 arrived. If 200 Proud Boys, plus members of other far-right groups, felt compelled to rush to Washington to help Mr Trump stay in office after a contested election that would be no small thing. But the march in Portland was organised under official protest rules. In Washington it would not be legal for them to openly carry guns.
It is also not clear that the visible support of far-right militias would be helpful for Mr Trump, especially if they pitched up at a point at which the Republicans were challenging the election in the courts. The quiescence of Congressional Republicans, many of whom once publicly held Mr Trump in contempt and privately still do, has been a big theme of the Trump presidency, but the presence of militias on the streets of the city where they work would surely prompt some to remove their backing from the president.
But not all roads to chaos run directly through Mr Trump. When the transition wargamers played out a perfectly plausible scenario in which Mr Biden, like Mrs Clinton, won the popular vote by a fairly narrow margin but lost in the electoral college, John Podesta, Mrs Clinton’s former campaign chief who was playing Mr Biden, did not admit defeat, contending that the Democratic Party would not allow him to do so.
Instead, he claimed that Mr Biden would say that voter suppression (such as invalidated postal votes) had prevented his victory. He persuaded a handful of Democratic governors in the war game to send supporters of Mr Biden to the electoral college, which formally selects the president, even though their states seemed to have backed Mr Trump. In the pandemonium that followed, the three heavily Democratic states on the west coast — California, Oregon and Washington — said they would secede if Mr Trump was sworn in. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives asserted that Mr Biden was the legitimate president; the Senate, under Republican leadership, opted for Mr Trump. By that point in the roleplay, inauguration day was at hand — on January 20 the presidential term elapses and someone must be sworn in — and the public turned to the army to see who it recognised as commander in chief.
So was Mr Podesta right? Would the Democratic Party refuse to let Mr Biden concede in the event that Mr Trump won, as in 2016, not with the silent majority he claims to lead but with a vocal minority? Quite possibly. The claim by some conservatives that Mrs Clinton did not concede in 2016 is not right. She called Mr Trump on the night to congratulate him as is custom and even attended his inauguration. But earlier this year she urged Mr Biden not to follow her example if the result is close. “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances,” she said, “because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.”
If that’s what Mrs Clinton, a lynchpin of the party’s establishment, thinks, it’s easy to see what Mr Podesta was getting at. “I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory,” the author Shadi Hamid wrote in The Atlantic in a piece headlined, The Democrats May Not Be Able to Concede. “A loss for Biden, having been the clear favourite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change — at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.”
Of course there is already a left-wing faction, one which obsesses about the president, that is disillusioned with electoral politics: Antifa. When Mr Biden dismissed Antifa in the debate as “an idea, not an organisation”, Mr Trump hit back that it was “a dangerous, radical group”. They might both be right.
Unlike the Proud Boys, there is no membership of Antifa: no formal structure to be part of, group rules to be bound by, or a leader to follow. It is really more of an umbrella term for a variety of groups, many of them militant, which oppose neo-Nazis and white supremacists on the streets. The lack of structure makes it hard to identify who is part of Antifa or not. But what is certainly true is that on the fringes of the anti-racism protests this summer were people who believe in violence as a means of social progress. And those who engaged in violence were not all anarchists living outside the system, or “thugs” clad in “dark uniforms” travelling around the nation, as Mr Trump claimed.
In one notable case in New York, Colinford Mattis, 32, an Ivy League-educated corporate lawyer, and his friend Urooj Rahman, 31, a human rights lawyer, are on bail, charged with hurling a petrol bomb through the window of a police car. They could face life in prison. Whether they identify as supporters of Antifa or not, they are part of what appears to be a growing trend on both wings of American political life of countenancing violence to advance their aims.
Between November 2017 and December last year the percentage of Democrats who believed violence was at least “a little bit” justified to advance political goals doubled from 8 per cent to 16 per cent and Republicans from 8 to 15 per cent, according to YouGov. A separate poll by Nationscape last month found far higher numbers: 33 per cent of Democrats accepted some level of violence, as did 36 per cent of Republicans.
It is easy to understand Democratic fury with the electoral college system, which has handed the Republicans victory in three of the past five presidential elections despite failing to win the popular vote in two. Thomas Wright, of the Brookings Institution think tank, said that another election where the popular vote and the electoral college disagreed would “damage the legitimacy of the system” and that it is “a real problem if that occurs regularly for American democracy”. But ultimately, he said, “it’s one which will be worked through, probably painfully, over several years. That is different than a combustible situation where we’re in November with a million or more people on the streets and nobody accepts the result of the election, or we don’t even know what it was.”
Another important difference is that Mr Biden, bruised though he would be to lose the election, would surely not inflame the combustible situation. He has, whatever Mr Trump says, denounced left-wing violence. Mr Biden spent almost 40 years in a Senate characterised by backslapping bipartisanship. The entire point of his campaign was to insist that Democrats could still change America with gradualism.
Where Mr Biden has a long political record of moderation, Mr Trump’s response to electoral defeat is unknowable. In 2012, when he was still just a celebrity Republican endorser who had half-heartedly flirted with a presidential run, he claimed Mitt Romney was cheated out of victory and called for “a revolution in this country” and a “march on Washington [to] stop this travesty”. Even in 2016 he was a sore winner, claiming Mrs Clinton’s popular vote victory was fraudulent.
In truth, it is hard to find anybody who does not believe Mr Trump will claim the election was rigged. The unanswerable question of how far he might push it is one of psychology as much as anything else. Tweeting angrily and refusing to engage with a transition would be a surmountable obstacle for US democracy. Encouraging supporters to take to the streets to barricade him in office would be quite another, with far less predictable consequences.
But what would be more comfortable for the privileged New Yorker who many believe became president by accident: to test America’s democratic institutions to destruction or to fashion a bitter retreat? Mr Trump hates losing, but he often does not seem to enjoy the presidency much either. He may come to yearn for the consoling embrace of Trump Tower and the life he left behind. Whether by that point the militia men he has emboldened would still be listening to him is another matter altogether.
Biden thinks he’s tough.
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Born in Pa. grew up with many like him. Challenge them to a real physical one on one and they turn tail and slink away.
Excellent summary! Especially the description of the wrong side.
One thing I learned was real tough guys don’t mouth off.
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Bingo. My experience also
So a petrol bomb was thrown but not sure he’s genuinely called Antifa or not?
Biden would say the guy who threw it was merely “an idea.”
True, his famous challenge to beat him brutally in the backyard or something. Somehow, bravely, President Trump conquered the potential fear of Biden's menace and went on to face N. Korea and other bullies and stare them down. /s
What hasn’t been examined is Biden’s conduct during his term as VP and his reaction when Obama used the Bully Pulpit to create racial division during the Zimmerman trial.
When as a result of Obama’s inflammatory racist comments suggesting a racist murder. Where Obama’s remarks were interpreted by black gangs suggesting retribution for a racial incident went on attacking non blacks innocently entering “hoods” and attacking and sometimes killing them like the Australian from Melbourne; Christopher Lane, here on a college scholarship in Duncan Oklahoma who was murdered while exercising on one of Duncan’s streets.
That didn't turn out well for a number of southern states back in the 1860’s.
My preference is the ballot box, the courts and then as an absolute last resort, the streets and violence. If street violence is attempted by those supporting Biden, I think there will be a lot of blood in the streets, mostly liberal blood.
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