Trump's coup goes beyond a grift: The president is desperately seeking any path to stay in power
By Amanda Marcotte
For weeks now, Donald Trump's hopes of stealing the 2020 presidential election from the winner, Joe Biden, have been fading. Nonetheless, the dumbest and worst president in American history continued sending out fundraising appeals to his endlessly gullible supporters, giving birth to the theory — to which I, personally, subscribed — that Trump's coup is little more than another one of his many schemes to defraud people. After all, the Trump campaign spent very little on the actual legal efforts to challenge the election and redirected most of the cash into what is likely going to be used as a slush fund for Trump and his family.
And yet, as Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs reported in the New York Times on Saturday, Trump is deep in talks with an increasingly unhinged cast of characters, all of whom believe there must be a way to steal the election even though the Electoral College made Biden's win official last week. The president invited conspiracy theorists like his former lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn to the White House on Friday to discuss a potential declaration of martial law as a last-ditch effort to force a second vote in some swing states. That suggestion came from the disgraced Flynn, who has been involved in violently oppressive work on behalf of Turkey's authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The group also discussed "an executive order to take control of voting machines to examine them," though it's unclear what that would accomplish. There's no reason to think the voting machines were hacked and it's unlikely that Trump's team has the technical know-how to alter the machines to generate vote tallies more pleasing to Trump.
The chattering politicos of Twitter responded to news of such a bizarre spectacle by arguing about the odd placement of the article on page A28 in the New York Times print edition, with one side arguing that the president considering a military coup is major news no matter what, and the other side arguing that because Trump isn't going to pull it off there's no reason to get fussed about it. The latter group is wrong, of course, as Trump is still incredibly successful at undermining democracy, even if he's failing to steal the White House.
READ MORE: Trump's coup goes beyond a grift: The president is desperately seeking any path to stay in power
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Tuesday, December 22nd 2020 at 8:35AM
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