As most famously chronicled by George Orwell in his novel,1984, one of the more perverse defining characteristics of authoritarian regimes is their reliance on the deliberate distortion of objective reality in order to confuse, disorient, and ultimately subjugate their citizens. They achieve this through carefully honed propaganda designed to create uncertainty, discourage honest inquiry, and foster cynicism and complacency among their populations as a means to retain power. The most common vehicle for these measures is through the manipulation of mass media (think the insular state-controlled TV programming of Russia, for example) to create a useful, alternative “narrative” in the mind of the public, one which works in tandem with the regime’s goals.
Fintan O’Toole is an award-winning author and a professor of Irish letters at Princeton University. His written work regularly appears in the New York Review of Books where he often provides incisive commentary on U.S. political issues. His latest essay, “Dress Rehearsal,” concerning the revelations uncovered by the Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, appears in the latest edition of that publication. In this piece he dissects the strategies considered by Trump administration officials to achieve the overthrow of the 2020 election. He highlights one proposal in particular which—had it been more thoroughly planned and implemented—he believes may have succeeded in realizing Trump’s goal, thanks to the polarization of the American electorate and the presence of a powerful, malleable right-wing media regime.
In fact, he suggests that if another, future coup is attempted to overthrow a lawful election in this country, this is almost certainly how it will unfold.
The idea was first floated to Trump by libertarian businessman, conspiracy theorist, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, in a six-hour meeting held at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020. That meeting, which went long into the night, included seditionist, former lieutenant general, and convicted criminal Michael Flynn as well as Trump lawyer and fellow conspiracy-monger Sidney Powell. While this meeting has been characterized as “unhinged” by former White House chief of staff assistant Cassidy Hutchinson (also in attendance), O’Toole does not dismiss its substance but rather suggests that it actually provided a workable blueprint for an effective coup.
The plan was for Trump to publicly vow to “accept” the 2020 election results assuming no vote discrepancies were found (thus creating the public impression he was abiding by democratic norms), then to seed right-wing media with allegedly irrefutable “evidence” of the fraud, through pseudo-scientific evidence offered by Byrne and others. The key to achieving acceptance of this in the eyes of the public, as O’Toole explains, was to “create a public narrative,” one that would imply foreign interference in the election, then to amplify that narrative by inventing “discrepancies” in the voting results of various key states by means of a public, televised vote count conducted by hand, a process which would be overseen by Flynn pursuant to an edict issued by Trump. Such “discrepancies,” would then be amplified by right-wing media such as Fox News, stoking public doubts about the election results and casting Trump and his minions not as seditionists bent on overturning a lawful election, but rather as noble “defenders” of our democracy. As O’Toole explains:
The idea put forward by Byrne, Flynn, and Powell was that Trump would act on the basis of an executive order signed by Barack Obama empowering the president to take extraordinary measures to protect the integrity of elections in the event of foreign interference. Leaving aside the obvious ironies, the most basic requirement was to create a public narrative in which this foreign power was identified.
Not coincidentally, Byrne’s “cyber-forensics specialist” (whom he had allegedly consulted with) had already identified the number of “discrepancies” that would need to exist in order to reverse the election results in key states so as to hand the election to Trump. O’Toole notes Byrne’s written claim that his consultants had “documented” alleged “vote-flipping in the Problematic 6 states amounting to 299,567 votes, just enough in each state to flip the election.” Byrne attributed this “vote-flipping” in large part (43%) to activity emanating from China.
With these critical components of the plan already in the works, the most important aspect of the scheme was to present it to the American public as a heroic effort by Trump to “find the truth,” so to speak:
Most importantly, there would be a public drama, an elaborate spectacle of “democracy” in action. It is not hard to imagine how Trump’s enablers in the media would sell this show: Why are the Democrats afraid to see what the paper ballots say? The mechanics of this performance remain obscure. How were “discrepancies” to be created? What would the Supreme Court have done? To have a chance of success, the plan would surely have to have been put into effect much earlier—well before the Electoral College met on December 14 to confirm Biden’s victory. Yet Byrne had the germ of the right idea. The best way to steal a presidential election would indeed be through a staged display of democratic process backed by elaborate precooked “evidence” of foreign conspiracy and amplified by Fox News, social media campaigns, and other media. This is the upside-down shape of a successful American coup. Democracy is destroyed by the enactment of its protection. Conspirators succeed by foiling a “conspiracy.”
O’Toole believes that although ultimately thwarted due to insufficient planning, this proposed “dress rehearsal” for effectively challenging a lawful election in the eyes of the public would strongly appeal to any future conspirators seeking to do the same thing.
A coup, in this context, does not mean tanks on the streets, helicopter gunships strafing public buildings, thousands of people rounded up by soldiers, and a junta of generals or colonels addressing the nation on TV. On the contrary, the story that needed to be told by the plotters of 2020–2021 was not the overthrow of democracy, but its defense. Trump, as his chief of staff and co-conspirator Mark Meadows put it in his book The Chief’s Chief, was merely seeking “to uphold the democratic process.” In any conceivable future coup, this will again be the necessary narrative. We won, they are stealing our victory, we need to take extraordinary measures to defend democracy.
As O’Toole notes, “it is not hard to imagine” how the Republican base would react to this type of plan. Already predisposed to believe whatever Fox News tells them, Republicans would immediately view Democratic efforts to stop such a process as a deliberate attempt to “steal” the election. The susceptibility by Republicans to propaganda has already been amply demonstrated by their fealty to Trump’s “Big Lie;” one can easily imagine what their reaction would be to the entire Republican media establishment’s endorsement of such a scheme, complete with public demonstrations of so-called “evidence,” presented in made-for-TV moments. The American electorate would retreat to its default, polarized state with one segment (Republicans) convinced that fraud existed, and the other (Democrats) placed in the position of appearing to oppose “democracy.” O’Toole emphasizes that whatever the actual mechanics of the next coup attempt, this is the manner in which Republicans will sell it to the American public. (And implicitly, to the judicial system which would inevitably be called upon to weigh in on it, but in an even harsher and combustible political environment than existed in 2020.)
O’Toole believes that the only reason Trump failed is “because he could not create the necessary heroic drama—the one in which he was not sullenly subverting the presidential election but selflessly upholding its real results.” Instead, he relied upon the violent and appalling tactic of summoning his followers to physically attack the Capitol, a spectacle which—while in tune with conventional perceptions of what a “coup” looks like—in its actual execution resulted in a poorly planned, ugly, and visually damning attempt to overthrow the government.
The next coup will be far better planned, however. As O’Toole writes, “the plot will be much tighter, the action less outlandish, the logistics much better prepared, the director more competent.” It will marshal all the propaganda weapons of Fox News and the right-wing media universe. And it will be justified by the perpetrators as an effort to defend—rather than subvert—our democracy.
