by Mark C. Eades
In a free, fair, and honest election, Donald Trump could never be elected President of the United States, much less re-elected. In 2016, he was elected president thanks to Russian meddling, right-wing media disinformation, Republican voter suppression, and an undemocratic Electoral College system that favors conservative rural states and installed Trump as president against the expressed will of a clear majority of voters. In 2020, given the abject failure and firehose of scandal that his first term as president has been, he may need even more than that to win a second term.
Unfortunately, Trump will have much greater means of rigging our election in 2020 than he had in 2016. Trump now holds the levers of state power and enjoys complete control over a completely corrupt Republican Party. In 2020 the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, will function as little but an arm of the Trump re-election campaign. We will see fake “investigations” of Trump’s political opponents by the DOJ and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. We will also see rampant voter suppression in Republican-controlled states. We will see the Russians again, too, as well as any other corrupt foreign players Trump can draw into his re-election effort. Right-wing media will be a cesspool of disinformation, as will Facebook and other social media.
This we all knew before the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, the Trump GOP will also have a pandemic more widespread and deadly in the United States than any other country in the world to exploit to its political advantage; and is already finding ways of doing just that. The Trump GOP’s use of the COVID-19 outbreak “to wage partisan civil war” has clearly “become part of the fabric of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.” America stands at the edge of an abyss, and Democrats will need a massive effort to protect our votes and stop the Republican drive toward authoritarianism.
The latest news this week on the Trump GOP’s efforts to rig the 2020 elections includes its plan to recruit 50,000 “poll watchers” including off-duty police officers and retired military personnel to monitor polling sites in areas with large concentrations of Democratic voters. Particular targets for GOP “poll watching” — long seen as a thinly-disguised form of voter intimidation — are “inner city” areas and communities of color. Republican intentions in its “poll watcher” plan are clear: To reduce Democratic turnout through intimidation, particularly in swing states where presidential elections are often decided by razor-thin margins. The racial implications of the plan are also clear, since it principally targets African American, Latino, and Native American voters.
In December, Trump adviser Justin Clark was caught on a recording telling Republicans in Wisconsin to expect more aggressive GOP poll watching in 2020 than in the past. “Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," said Clark, “Let’s start protecting our voters. We know where they are…. Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.” Clark later claimed that he was referring to false accusations of voter suppression by the GOP, but this claim doesn’t appear to jibe with what he actually said at the Wisconsin event.
If Russian meddling, Republican voter suppression, and Electoral College inequality fail to deliver Trump a victory on Election Night, his back-up plan will be to claim that he lost only because of “voter fraud,” refuse to concede, and try to get the election nullified by the Supreme Court and/or Republican state officials who control the vote count and the awarding of electoral votes in their states. There are indeed scenarios in which Trump “could lose the election and remain president.” If that route fails, he will try to incite his rabid cult followers into an armed insurrection by telling them that “illegals” stole the election from them. Count on it: If Trump loses on Election Night, this will happen.
Trump recently gave us a preview of his “voter fraud” strategy during the May 12 special election for California’s 25th Congressional District. When a new voting location was added in Lancaster north of Los Angeles, Trump went on Twitter to accuse Democrats of “trying to steal” the election, demanding that “These votes must not count. SCAM!” In fact, the voting location was added at the request of Lancaster’s Republican mayor, who told local news media, “There should not be even the appearance of affecting the outcome by limiting the ability to vote.”
“It’s hard to avoid the impression that Trump simply wants to undermine confidence in any election Democrats might win...,” wrote Ed Kilgore at New York Magazine following Trump’s outburst, “All the before-the-fact shrieking by Trump is a very bad sign of how he might approach his own re-election bid in November, by claiming the election is ‘rigged’ in advance in order to rile up his base and delegitimize any possible adverse results in advance…. It’s a heads-we-win, tails-you-lose kind of proposition, in which there is only one legitimate outcome: MAGA!”
This week, Trump went beyond a mere rehearsal for his “voter fraud” strategy by threatening the states of Michigan and Nevada over mail-in voting. In a matching pair of Twitter outbursts, he misrepresented mail-in voting as an “illegal” attempt to encourage “voter fraud”; and threatened to “hold up” federal funding during the COVID-19 crisis if the states go ahead with their plans for mail-in voting. Trump followed up his attacks on Michigan and Nevada by saying, “We don’t want anyone to do mail-in ballots” unless “they’re sick” or “they live in the White House.” In fact, mail-in voting has been widely practiced across the United States for many years, there is nothing illegal about it, and there is no evidence that it encourages voter fraud. What is illegal is for Trump to try to blackmail states into helping him get re-elected by threatening to withhold federal funds in the midst of a national public health crisis. Trump was impeached for doing essentially the same thing to Ukraine.
Trump’s psychological, financial, and legal survival depend on him winning re-election in November. The thought of losing terrifies him. Psychologically, he cannot deal with the thought of not being the ultimate “winner.” Financially, his and his family’s businesses have come to depend on milking the presidency for profit. Legally, he and his kids face numerous criminal and civil liabilities as soon as they lose the legal protection of Daddy being president. Donald Trump and his kids have staked everything on their hostile takeover of the U.S. presidency. The Trump family is now among the most despised families in human history. The moment they leave the White House, Donald Trump and his kids are toast. Trump will stop at nothing to win re-election.
Likewise, the Republican Party has staked everything on Donald Trump. Republicans have long sought to restrict voting and undermine democracy in America, and Trump has given them an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these goals. Trump has built a cult of personality around himself among Republican voters like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the United States. The GOP is Trump’s party now. The Trump presidency is a complete disaster, however, and if he goes down a lot of other Republicans are likely to go down with him. They will be as desperate as Trump is to prevent this by any means necessary.
Donald Trump, the Trump family, and the Republican Party can’t afford to lose the election in November. We, on the other hand, can’t afford to let them win. If Trump succeeds in stealing the 2020 election, we may find ourselves crossing a point of no return and hurtling into an authoritarian abyss. A massive effort to protect our votes and to get out the vote for Democrats will be required to stop Trump and the GOP from turning the United States into a dictatorship.