One week ago, the people spoke. Our voices were loud and clear. In the largest voter turnout in US history, by a small but clear and decisive margin and across a diverse array of swing states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia), the American people decided that the impeached 45th President of these United States did not deserve a second term.
Trump would now like to overturn that decision, our decision. Throw out the results, ignore the will of the majority of voters and assert an alternate reality. In the predawn hours of Wednesday Nov. 4, long before hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes in key swing states had been tallied, on full parade before a forest of American flags and flanked by his loyal staff, Donald J. Trump began his alternate narrative by simply declaring victory. He let it be known that regardless of the actual final vote count, he would assert victory. Thus began a new chapter in the Trump saga, a final gambit to retain power and avoid prosecution. Over the next 70 days expect Trump to rage on, defy reality and proceed in a full tilt assault against the windmills of voter fraud.
History will record Nov. 4, 2020 as the day that Donald J Trump began his final strongman performance, in an effort to deceive, distract, distort, deny and ignore the will of the majority of the people. That day he began a final desperate effort to bum-rush, bamboozle, and litigate his way to an unearned and undeserved second term, and 4 more years of immunity from prosecution.
Later on Nov. 4, after FoxNews projected that Joe Biden would win Michigan, the pResident blasted out a flurry of counternarrative tweets.
"We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a BIG Trump lead. Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan …"
This might be both pathetic and laughable if the stakes were not so high and the final outcome was assured by the resiliency of the institutions of government. If the checks and balances of the theoretically independent legislative and judicial branches of government were assured and if a well informed democratic populace traditionally willing to accept a peaceful transition remains peaceful and accepts the results of the election, even if that means their candidate was not victorious — then all might end well. However, Trump’s removal of Esper signals his belief that there will be violence — one way or another.
As the vote count proceeded and mailed in ballots were tallied in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, Trumps path to 270 electoral college votes narrowed and finally evaporated. In response, Trump has suggested that his pending loss was the result of voting irregularities and fraud. As he has so often done, Trump threatened legal action and then instructed attorneys to file a flurry of nuisance lawsuits while loudly voicing and repeating ad nauseum claims of widespread voter fraud (without providing any basis or actual evidence to support those claims).
That media refrain regarding the lack of evidence for any substantial voter fraud must have worried Trump and sure enough AG Barr has subsequently announced an investigation of voter fraud, because that is what his boss demanded —
Not unlike Trump’s effort to have Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky manufacture politically charged dirt on Hunter and Joe Biden in exchange for military aid, Trump is unlikely to accept ‘there was no voter fraud’ for an answer. If there is no fraud or lost legally cast Trump ballots to find — Trump expects his allies and minions (both foreign and domestic) manufacture them. This is likely to be his sole claim to the restoration of manufacturing in America, the manufacture of post election votes to reverse the election. That is a tall order — don’t be surprised if the November jobs numbers show epic spikes in the vote manufacturing sector of the economy.
On Saturday November 7th 2020, CNN and other mainstream media outlets finally projected that Joe Biden would win the presidential election. On Sunday, after a second day of golf, when Trump could finally see the writing on the wall and it was crystal clear that his bid for four more years of immunity from prosecution was over and that he would not run out the clock on the statute of limitations for the various federal crimes for which may be charged, Trump made some high level personnel changes. Among those was the removal of the Secretary of Defense — Mark Esper. We knew that was coming, but we should carefully consider why SecDef Esper was removed when he was.
Esper began his fall from Trump’s favor back in December 2019 when he failed to lavish sufficiently hyperbolic praise on his boss during the Reagan National Defense Forum iwww.defense.gov/....
Then in the months leading up to the election, Esper and Trump publicly differed on an issue important to Trump’s base — renaming military institutions honoring Confederate Generals. In the shadow of a growing national debate on systemic institutional racism Trump loudly opposed a plan to rename southern military bases currently named in honor of slave owning Confederate Generals like Henry Benning and Leonidas Polk en.wikipedia.org/..., men who not only owned slaves, and built wealth, privilege, and power as a result of slave labor but were both eager and willing to wage a bloody and brutal Civil War in an effort to maintain the privileges conferred to them by that institution. Not on his watch was Trump’s response to a defense bill passed by Congress in July that provided a plan for renaming military installations www.politico.com/… Esper however was more sympathetic to the idea of removing the names of Confederate Generals from military facilities.
So close to the 2020 election, Trump knew well his need to keep his confederate followers happy. He needed them to turn out in numbers to support his reelection bid — so the obvious move was to forcefully oppose any federal actions that might suppress his support among sons and daughters of the Confederacy.
With the election over, the naming issue is no longer of any importance to Trump. The post election tweeted termination of Defense Secretary Mark Esper had one and only one cause — Esper’s frim stance on the domestic use of active duty military personnel. Esper asserted, as have all of his predecessors, that the US Military could not and would not be deployed on the streets of America to act in a law enforcement capacity. Esper would not violate The Posse Comitatus Act and sanction use of military force to clear the streets of protesters exercising their 1st Amendment Rights in response to any effort by Donald Trump to assert a second term. So Esper had to go.
In his Military Times exit interview — Esper laid it out.
Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’
And then God help us.” www.militarytimes.com/...
Institutional resiliency in response to a last ditch Hail Mary power grab by Donald Trump is in question. In the gentle wake of Esper’s termination, Trump is likely to be emboldened to follow by removing Chris Wray at F.B.I and Gina Haspel at C.I.A. Folks that enters the scary territory where we should seriously wonder if Trump is planning a Coup.
As reported in the NY Times yesterday, “two White House officials said later on Monday that Mr. Trump was not finished, and that Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, and Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, could be next in line to be fired. Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the nation’s national security bureaucracy — would be without parallel by an outgoing president who has just lost re-election.” www.nytimes.com/...
Removal of the Secretary of Defense, F.B.I. Director and C.I.A. Director should be seen as a stage setting move to continue in the effort to defy the election results, to overturn the will of the people, and to finally play the part of the strongman that he has admired for so long.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. If this is where Trump is headed, we need to shine a bright light on it so everyone can see it coming, expose it for what it is, and under no circumstances sit by silently and let it happen.