As everyone knows, Donald Trump has repeatedly refused to commit to honoring the results of the November 3rd election or to ensuring a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. I wrote in August about concluding that I might need to go to Washington to participate in protests if he tries to subvert the election. In the past few days I’ve seen two very different perspectives on that possibility.
One was a Protect the Results webinar my wife and I attended last Thursday. Protect the Results is a collaboration by Stand Up America, Indivisible, and a host of other progressive activist groups, which are making plans to conduct peaceful demonstrations around the country if Donald Trump tries to declare himself the winner of the election before all the votes are in, attempts to halt the counting of mail-in ballots, or in any other way illegitimately tries to stay in office. These are serious people making serious plans for a nationwide mobilization, and they believe that the odds are that such a mobilization will in fact be necessary.
The other perspective is one expressed by Ross Douthat in an OpEd piece in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” Douthat asserts that, while Donald Trump indisputably has authoritarian inclinations, and might well resort to corrupt means to attempt to stay in office, he simply isn’t sufficiently popular or competent to pull it off. What’s more, Douthat writes, “he lacks power over the media . . . he is plainly despised by his own military leadership, and . . . Silicon Valley is more likely to censor him than to support him in a constitutional crisis.” Douthat continues,
His own Supreme Court appointees have already ruled against him; his attempts to turn his voter-fraud hype into litigation have been repeatedly defeated in the courts; he has been constantly at war with his own C.I.A. and F.B.I. And there is no mass movement behind him: The threat of far-right violence is certainly real, but America’s streets belong to the anti-Trump left.
So if you judge an authoritarian by institutional influence, Trump falls absurdly short.
It’s a comforting perspective, if not an entirely persuasive one. Douthat doesn’t note that Trump is about to see his third Supreme Court nominee confirmed — in time for any litigation following the election — and he acknowledges that “Trump could theoretically retain power if the final outcome is genuinely too close to call,” although, he writes, “the same would be true of any president if their re-election came down to a few hundred votes.” He also doesn’t account for the fact that Republicans in Congress have repeatedly, shamelessly, tolerated or outright enabled Trump’s most egregious behavior.
I’m hedging my bets. I’m reading up on the process for certifying the election results and familiarizing myself with the plans being laid by Protect the Vote. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the election delivers such a landslide for Biden that Trump will ultimately be forced to admit defeat.