Trump's Stupid Coup—Which Hasn't Failed Yet—Is Distracting Us From What Needs to Be Done

From Esquire

The plan on this fine Friday in November was to examine the developing team around President-Elect Joe Biden, which already has some red flags. Anyone with a record of obsessing over The National Debt has no place in a presidential administration that has made noises about FDR-level ambition and will come to power amid FDR-level crisis. We're gonna need you to do better than that, Joe. But unfortunately, the incumbent president is still attempting to steal the election he lost comfortably—again, it was not close by any metric—in a campaign that is now taking shape as The Stupid Coup. That this effort is absurd, delusional, and likely illegal does not mean it will not work, but even if it doesn't work, the damage may be irreparable. We're not the first country to have a Stupid Coup, and it hasn't ended well for others.

But there's no denying that Thursday was, in addition to Stupid, incredibly funny. The spectacle of presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani sweating off what appeared to be his hair dye, the blackish liquid flowing down his cheeks as he yammered about conspiracies pulled deep from the right-wing infotainment vortex, was grotesque and hysterical in every way. (It was also a case study in why political comedy no longer functions. What is there left to parody?) These people are speaking in tongues at this point. They cannot be reached with any kind of appeal to reason. It is a religious fervor, cultivated inside a closed loop of media and information. There are now millions of people operating on a faith-based conclusion—Donald Trump could not have lost, period—and are continually raking in new bizarro theories and fragments of reality to support it. A Giuliani accomplice at the Thursday presser, Sidney Powell, suggested Hugo Chavez was implicated in this effort to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. Chavez died in 2013.

But in a way, the Giuliani approach is already outmoded. The president has basically abandoned his quest to truly prove there was widespread voter fraud that changed the outcome of any state's election, possibly because he and his allies are 1-31 in post-election litigation. They've been laughed out of court by Republican judges, even Trump judges. To a rational observer, this might indicate that there is no actual evidence for what they are alleging. That notion is boosted by the fact that they have in some of these cases openly admitted to judges that they're not trying to prove fraud—Giuliani said so himself in one instance—and currently seem to be making arguments about Michigan based on data from Minnesota.

No, the new M.O. for Trump seems to be to just get his partisans to steal the Electoral Votes for him. This was reportedly one of the backup plans for Pennsylvania quite early on, and it's now in full effect with regard to Michigan. The president has invited the state's Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, to the White House Friday. This is not subtle, to the point that even the sober New York Times has characterized it as part of "His Ploy to Subvert the Election." As this follows on Trump's direct meddling in Wayne County, Michigan's certification of the results there, it's not hard to guess what will happen: he will ask the Republican legislators, in the Oval Office, to prevent their state from certifying Joe Biden's victory there—which, again, was not a squeaker. The Times summarizes the approach here:

If that's not galling enough, consider that these legislatures are often controlled by Republicans because Republican legislators have gerrymandered themselves into the majority, drawing up maps where they can control more seats than Democrats even if Democrats get many more votes. In the Michigan state house, Democrats have won the popular vote statewide in six of the last eight cycles, but have gained majority control of the chamber just twice. That required massive margins of victory. In 2018, Republicans lost the popular vote for both the Michigan Senate and House but retained control of both—which is why Shirkey is the senate majority leader in the first place. This raises the prospect that a president who's set to lose the popular vote by 7 million or more nationally would overturn the popular vote in Michigan via leaders in the state legislature who hold their positions despite their party losing the statewide popular vote. To say this damages democratic legitimacy does not do it justice. This is taking a huge, steaming dump on it.

Just to drive home the absolute disdain these folks have for inconvenient democracy—specifically, the idea that their power derives from the public and that they are accountable to the American people for what they say and do—White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany had the gall to suggest at a briefing Friday that the president's meeting with the Michiganders was "routine."

Yeah, I'm sure he's circling up with Republican leaders from a state he's currently trying to steal but it has nothing to do with that. Maybe they're talking about the water in Flint. Oh, and Rudy already said he would be there to "answer any questions that they have." It now looks like he and the other legal eagles will not attend, but only because they all may have been exposed to the coronavirus via Giuliani's large adult son.

Again, this may not work, though its brazen stupidity is not necessarily the reason why. But as the circus continues, and as the generators that keep the lights on steadily leak noxious chemicals into the soil below, our eyes are drawn away from the actual incoming administration. We should be hounding Joe Biden about his early decisions as president-elect, looking at possible conflicts of interest—of which there may be some already—and whether his team has the ambition and courage necessary to meet this moment. Trump has stolen that from us, too. It's not enough for him to undermine American democracy and even the basic functioning of the federal government itself. He's once again taken away our capacity to look to and plan for the future, trapping us in the swirling chaos of his permanent present for a while longer.

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