The Theft of the Presidency: Phase II

A tedious refrain in these pages, going all the way back to 2017, has been the notion that Trump will challenge the results of the 2020 election and precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to leave office.

The details are fungible. I am less concerned about a military coup (though not entirely unconcerned) than I am that he will create some flimsy but sufficiently dangerous quasi-legal pretext to throw the country into chaos in order to retain power. Not much better.

The good news is that this scenario has migrated from the “alarmism” of the far left to a steady drumbeat in the mainstream media, which has belatedly woken the fuck up and started spreading the word. And rightly so: Trump has been so obvious about all this that it would have been journalistic malpractice not to take note.

Raising the alarm about this shameful scheme may be our best defense against it, or at least a first step, but it’s far from a guarantee. Trump has all the levers of federal power at his disposal and you may have noticed that he is not shy about using and abusing them.

This week he took another Coltrane-sized giant step in that direction by publicly raising the idea that the election should be postponed because of the coronavirus. (But schools should open.)