Ashley Parker writes for the Washington Post. She wrote this ominous article.
A year before the 2020 election, about two dozen constitutional scholars and democracy advocates traveled to Washington to work through a range of scenarios where something goes awry on Election Day.
The country’s political system was being tested by a campaign like no other in modern history, with an incumbent president, Donald Trump, who showed little regard for the democratic traditions and constitutional norms that had guided his predecessors — and who repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through rampant fraud.
So the group considered a slew of hypothetical catastrophes: “What do we do if a vigilante group takes over a major county tabulation facility and burns it to the ground? What do we do if there is a military coup?” But, as Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund tells it, the experts were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States.
“Either we were not creative enough or the norms of civility our nation has seen over centuries were not reliable enough,” said Patrick, a former elections official in Maricopa County, Ariz.
The challenges for American democracy were on stark display almost exactly two months after Election Day, on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters mounted a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. And the challenges have been clear in the eight months since the riot, as Trump and his allies have intensified false claims of election fraud and the former president has remained the Republican Party’s most popular leader.
Now, as Trump looks and sounds increasingly like he intends to mount a presidential campaign rerun, Democrats and democracy experts are grappling with what such a campaign — and a potential second Trump presidency — would mean for the country.
In recent weeks, Trump has maneuvered to firmly establish himself as the predominant and most powerful figure in Republican politics. He has injected his voice into federal and state campaigns, endorsing several secretary of state candidates who embraced his false fraud claims and worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And while still banned from Twitter, he has issued a flurry of angry tweet-like statements through his political action committee.
He has also reemerged at rallies, appearing last Saturday in Perry, Ga., with another rally planned for Oct. 9, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines. Speaking in Perry, the former president promised to “make America great again” and called for “an earth-shattering win in November 2022,” before looking ahead to the next presidential election.
“We’re not forgetting 2020,” Trump said. “The most corrupt election in the history of our country. Most corrupt election in the history of most countries, to be followed by an even more glorious victory in November of 2024.”
In some ways, the concerns among Democrats, constitutional scholars and democracy advocates about what the return of Trump could mean are simply one side of a coin, with Trump supporters representing the flip side.
A majority of Republicans still support Trump leading their party, according to polls. A CNN poll released in September found that 68 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican say democracy is under attack, with about 7 in 10 of them believing that President Biden didn’t win the 2020 election. One side’s nightmare scenario — Trump running in 2024 and reclaiming the presidency — represents to the other side simply the democratic system working as it should.
The threats to democracy that Trump critics envision are largely twofold.
One real risk, they say, is that four years after the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters emerge in 2024 more sophisticated and successful in their efforts to steal an election.
“For me, the scary part is, in 2020, this was not a particularly sophisticated misinformation or disinformation campaign,” said Matt Masterson, who ran election security at the Department of Homeland Security between 2018 to 2020. Referring to some of the outlandish conspiracy theories of ballot fraud posited in the wake of the 2020 election by Trump’s allies, he added: “We’re talking about bamboo ballots and Italian satellites and dead dictators.”
In the future, Masterson said, these sorts of falsehoods are going to become more advanced and nuanced — exploiting genuine areas of confusion in the electoral system — and thus harder to combat.
Masterson pointed to the recall election in California earlier this month, in which Trump and the leading Republican candidate, who ultimately lost, both baselessly claimed fraud before the election even took place. The very existence of these false allegations of rigged and stolen elections erode trust in the democratic process and are also likely to become the norm going forward, he added, because of a growing “cottage industry of election delegitimization and pre-delegitimization.”
Newly revealed details of a memo written by John Eastman, a prominent conservative lawyer who worked with Trump in the weeks before the Jan. 6 insurrection, show that efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election were more brazen than previously known. In the memo, first disclosed in “Peril,” the new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Eastman described the vice president as “the ultimate arbiter” of election results and argued that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to simply toss out the electoral college votes of certain states, thereby clearing the way for a Trump victory. “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected,” Eastman wrote.
The second possible scenario experts envision is more insidious, they say, a sort of slow-boiling frog of American democracy. In this case, Trump — or an acolyte with similarly anti-democratic sensibilities — runs and wins legitimately in 2024, emerging newly emboldened and focused on retribution. Then, the new president, intent on strengthening his own position and punishing critics, begins remaking the political and electoral system, using legal means to consolidate power and erode democratic institutions.
“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” who is working on a successive volume. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”
Perhaps the most relevant modern example, several democracy experts said, is Hungary under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who returned to power in 2010 after a previous stint as Hungary’s leader about a decade before.
Tucker Carlson — who regularly articulates the intellectual heart of Trumpism — traveled to Hungary in August to broadcast his prime-time Fox News show from there, at one point lauding Hungary as “a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
Upon taking power in 2010, Orbán “has steadily chipped away at the linchpins of a liberal democratic system,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy organization.
“He stacked the courts, he engaged in gerrymandering, he had friends and allies take over the media,” Abramowitz said, referring to Orbán. “So while he has elections, they start from a very, very stacked deck. While it’s not impossible, it’s going to be very, very difficult for him to be dislodged in the normal democratic system.”
The U.S. Constitution, with its protections of free speech and a free press, as well as its prohibition on anyone winning the presidency more than twice, offers a guiding document for preserving democracy. But Trump, during his four years in office, made clear that he wished he had the powers of a monarch or a strongman, repeatedly flouting the nation’s long-held rules and norms.
And he exposed the limits of the system.
Trump, for instance, installed a number of acting Cabinet secretaries when he could not win Senate confirmation for his picks; made clear he expected the attorney general to act as his own personal lawyer rather than represent the interests of the United States; implied that the Supreme Court justices he nominated should rule in his favor out of personal loyalty; and tried to leverage U.S. foreign policy to influence his own political fortunes — resulting in the first of his two impeachments.
A number of traditionally apolitical and nonpartisan federal agencies, too, became embroiled in politics and controversy during Trump’s tenure, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Tim Snyder, a history and public affairs professor at Yale University, agreed that the modern parallels between the United States and Hungary are striking.
“What we’re looking at is actually the typical way that democracies are undone,” said Snyder, who is working on an updated graphic edition of his book, “On Tyranny.”
Asked to respond to the notion that Trump represented a threat to democracy, Trump’s spokeswoman, Liz Harrington, sought to level the same allegation against the current president. “Biden has thrown away our sovereignty at his open border, issued unconstitutional decrees to private companies, and humiliated the United States in Afghanistan,” she said, reiterating Trump’s false claim that the election was rigged to say that Biden and his party “continue to threaten our very constitutional republic.”
Indeed, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2021 report gave the United States a score of 83 — alongside countries such as Mongolia and Ghana — marking an 11-point decline from its score of 94 a decade ago, when it appeared alongside established democracies like France and Germany. Freedom House’s scores are on a scale of 0 to 100.
But Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D), whose own state has been on the front lines of post-election fights spurred on by Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen, said that Trump’s behavior while in office — from potentially using the presidency to enrich his own family to smashing through other traditional guardrails — raises concerns that a 2024 Trump victory could lead to a newly fortified and shameless president, eager to further upend democratic norms.
“All these other things that are just not the normal ways that we operate as a country, that are parameters that elected officials are held to — he never was,” Hobbs said. “And the fact that there’s been a lack of accountability for any of that and then, in fact, potentially rewarded by being reelected is highly, highly problematic.”
Experts said that perhaps the most precipitous recent threat to American democracy, however, remains Trump’s election claims.
“Democracy depends on the belief of losers in a given election to trust the process, and to marshal support so they can win another day,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. “If we have entered a phase where the process is simply not trusted, that is a dangerous situation to be in, where people do not trust elections as being the way that we replace authority.”
A number of Republicans have used Trump’s false claim as a catalyst for overhauling election and voting laws, even in states where the 2020 election ran smoothly. At least 250 laws being proposed in at least 43 states would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting, changes that Democrats say could especially disenfranchise minority voters. There are also some Republican-led efforts pushing to allow state legislatures to overturn election results.
“I do hear from the community and faith leaders the concern that we’re losing the ground we gained through literal blood and tears and death during the civil rights movement and so many struggles, that we’re backtracking,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Texas’s largest county.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said she is ultimately “optimistic” because despite “extreme pressure in 2020,” the efforts of elected officials such as herself to protect democracy and ensure free and fair elections ultimately prevailed. Yet she, too, said that the future “effort to undermine democracy” is likely to “be back in a way that is smarter, stronger, probably more organized, perhaps even more intense and better funded than ever before,” and pointed to the new voting laws as one of the challenges.
Unlike after Watergate, however, no clear or sustained effort exists to broadly protect democratic institutions as the nation hurtles toward the uncertainty of the 2024 presidential election. Ziblatt, the co-author of “How Democracies Die” — a book Biden carried around in 2018, scrawling notes in the margins and dog-earring favorite passages — suggested that some reforms are probably necessary to protect U.S. democracy going forward.
“These are soft guardrails that have constrained politicians in the past, and what the Trump administration has made clear is that we need to harden those guardrails,” Ziblatt said.
But, he added, he worries that some are still too squeamish to come to terms with the potential threat U.S. democracy faces if Trump attempts to regain power.
“If you look at how democracies get in trouble in other places, it’s how executives once in office abuse their office, and I think people just don’t want to think that Trump could get back into the presidency,” Ziblatt said. “There’s a way in which we’re not trying to think of the worst-case scenario, which is Trump gets reelected, but I think what we’ve learned is you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”
Scott Clement contributed to this report.
A country that had a choice between two old, corporate-owned, war-mongering senile sex pests thinks it has democracy. LOL.
American political figures, perhaps all political figures, are the result of a much wider group of supporters, together with their ideas and their beliefs.
D77,
Myths endure because their “stories” resolve
contradictions that logic, reason and facts
cannot.
The “foundational cornerstone of democracy”
must continue the “stories”.
“Whose bread I eat, his song I sing…”
Democracy is that “choice” that voters made in 2016 between having Supreme Court Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Supreme Court Justices like Amy Coney Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.
A privilege white person who isn’t the target of disenfranchisement and laws making it as hard as possible for her to vote thinks that there is “no difference” in having a Putin “democracy” and a Biden democracy. What a surprise. Not.
A privileged white person who isn’t the target of racism thinks that democracy is getting exactly what she wants all the time is fine with the far right takeover of this country by ENDING democracy. What a surprise. Not.
Why does this poster keep posting the same Trump fanboys’ pro-anarchy, Steve Bannon/Peter Thiel propaganda? After 2016, only the most deluded people (and paid trolls) agree with this person that having Trump and his backers taking over the country is fine and we should just let it happen.
I think I will listen to AOC and Bernie and not this person who hates everything that AOC and Bernie Sanders stands for. Including democracy. And not the Putin definition of democracy.
Eastman should be IN JAIL.It’s a travesty and totally ridiculous that Eastman is still employed as a “conservative” scholar at CU-Boulder.
Read and weep. Eastman is NO scholar. He’s an insurrectionist. Wonder if he is getting Rubles from Russia?
Statement on Visiting Professor Eastman: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/04/29/statement-visiting-professor-eastman
Published: April 29, 2021
The campus’s decisions regarding Professor Eastman were made in accordance with its university policies concerning freedom of expression and academic freedom. Consistent with First Amendment principles and the university’s policies, Professor Eastman is able to speak on any subject he wishes and pursue his scholarship. The university has taken no action that would deter a reasonable person from engaging in free speech, and Professor Eastman continues to express his views in writing, John Eastman’s Statement on His Retirement from Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law – The American Mind, on television, Now-Retired Law Professor John Eastman Says His Words at Trump’s ‘Save America’ Rally Did Not Incite U.S. Capitol Siege (msn.com), and at in-person events, What Really Happened? An Insider’s Perspective on Representing the President and Claims of Election Fraud. The university, however, is not constitutionally obligated to have him serve in a representational capacity when he exercises his right to free speech. Professor Eastman was not suspended. The College of Arts & Sciences canceled his spring courses for low enrollment in accordance with its policies. Provost Moore appropriately relieved him from performing outreach functions on behalf of the Benson Center, because his continued performance of those duties would likely cause disruption and harm to the center.
My comment: Keeping Eastman causes disruption and harm to CU-Boulder. CU-Boulder is SO WRONG.
Now I”m just depressed. Far from wanting to bury my head in the sand, we should see this insanity for what really is at its core – white people becoming another minority like everyone else. Much of white America is collectively feaking out to where they’ll burn their own house down (American democracy) rather than accept a pluralist soriety that is happening whether the bigots want to accept it or not. The future is not written in stone, despite all sorts of predictions, we cannot say what’s going to happen. What is a definite is that America is more diverse than ever before and its getting more so. Will white bigots try apartheid-South African-style-white-minorty-rule? Sure. Look at Texas. It’s already happening, and look what kind of upheaval it wrought in South Africa. The bigots here do not realize that they’re setting us up for another civil war – maybe not the bloodbath of 1861-1865 (hopfeully not) but cultural and political. The majority of Americans (especially the millions of young people, and more specifically young people-of-color, coming into voting-age) are not going to sit by and accept this. Only time will tell what will happen. Meantime, I’m still depressed, but aware and knowing that we have to galvanize and fight bigotry and fear and not take our democracy for granted but strengthen it.
It would be nice if young people were out there organizing now rather than waiting until after Trump forces take over. Unfortunately, young people also can tend to be intolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with them 100%, and young people alone cannot save the country. They have to be willing to look toward saving the country rather than manifesting their vision of utopia. Bernie Sanders has it right. He sticks to his principles but is willing to compromise to get things done. Maybe we make concessions to get enough people to go along with a plan. Living in a pluralistic society means pluralistic views. Either we work with that or we let the fascists take over.
YES, and as a moment in US history when the White population is irrevocably losing power and status, how could we expect otherwise? The question remains: would we choose to go backwards simply to feel that artificial White power social peace and less chaos—-maybe call it the fifties?
I wake up every morning with these thoughts: I want to see headlines that report what happened to George Wallace on May 15, 1972, just happened to Trump, and the shot came from one of Trump’s former unstable followers that “woke” one morning and realized he’d been a fool all along and couldn’t live with that.
Glad you said it not me.
For how long does the Teflon Don 2.0, Agent Orange, IQ45, get to continue his traitorous undermining of our democratic system? I checked in on his latest ranting (at a rally in Georgia). There he was continuing to talk mostly about how the election “was stolen” from him. And, ofc, there are a LOT of idiots in the U.S. who believe him. Curses on the Garland DOJ for not going aggressively after this career criminal and traitor.
18 U.S. Code § 2384 – Seditious conspiracy
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.
Thank you for that, Joel. This describes precisely what Teflon Don 2.0 did.
White supremacist Tucker showed us that Hungary is the Russia RepubliQan blueprint for tanking our democracy. Do anything, say anything – to secure the office legitimately and then spend every subsequent moment undermining every democratic norm and institution. It’s vital that the incipient fascist achieves the appearance of democracy. Like those fully staffed beautiful Western-style North Korean shopping malls where nary a shopper can be found….
Talk show host and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, drummed up right wing grievance and tribalism this week by claiming Coach Gruden’s firing was the result of his religion,….
Salon and Media Matters, among others, reported about it.