The Atlantic - How Trump Could Attempt a Coup

[Celerity]

The Biden team is preparing for the worst. Here are three possible scenarios.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/11/how-trump-could-attempt-coup/616954/



A wretched presidential campaign has played out at last, but Election Day is not how this story ends. Unable to overtake his opponent in the polls, Donald Trump decided months ago to run against the election itself. That race does not conclude when the ballots are counted. Trump has raged against fictional plots to steal his victory, maligning routine procedures such as voting by mail and counting ballots until there are no more to count. His rage will not diminish if he is defeated. Our electoral system was not built to withstand a sustained assault on its legitimacy. We are capable of defending it, but that is a collective enterprise. A healthy start would be to recognize that the assault has yet to begin in earnest. Election Day and the period to follow will be moments of maximum temptation for Trump. Can he find a way to interfere with the tabulation of votes? Impound ballots in the mail? Dispatch armed personnel to quell alleged disturbances in Democratic neighbourhoods?

The battle for American democracy will not be fully joined until the counting starts. That’s when Trump will tell us that his predictions have come true—that the whole procedure is rife with fraud, that the tally is rigged against him, and that no one can be trusted except Trump himself to tell us who won and who lost. The vital questions are whether and how he will try to use his power to subvert the results. Whether, I think, is easy. We have been over this before. Trump will not concede defeat. He will use every means at his disposal to maintain a grip on power. That qualifier, “at his disposal,” is important. It marks a distinction between wishes and commands that Trump can expect to be carried out. We know Trump’s intent. He is indifferent to any interest but his own and ruthless in its pursuit. What we need to know, in self-defence, is his capability. Trump stands atop a vast apparatus of government, ostensibly under his control but not entirely so in fact. To move the government, Trump needs to know where the levers are and how to control them. In practice, this means persuading other people to operate the machinery on his behalf. Some of those people would balk at certain kinds of orders.

The Constitution anoints Trump the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States, but he cannot lock up Joe Biden or disqualify him from the race by executive order, no matter how much he yearns publicly to do so. He is commander in chief of the armed forces, but he cannot declare martial law, delay the election, and expect the troops to go along. The men and women he likes to call “my generals” would not obey. What, then, can Trump do? In public, Biden and his senior advisers profess full confidence in the electoral system to work as it always has. Every vote will be counted, they say, and the winner will be sworn in on January 20—end of story. Behind the scenes, they are preparing for the worst. A special working group of high-powered lawyers led by three former solicitors general—Walter Dellinger; Donald B. Verrilli Jr.; and a recent addition, Seth Waxman—has overseen a massive planning exercise for rapid responses to dozens of scenarios in which Trump tries to interfere with the normal functioning of the election. Thousands of pages of legal analysis, according to an authoritative campaign source, have been boiled down into “template pleadings” for at least 49 predrafted emergency motions in state or federal court. The campaign will be ready on an hour’s notice to file for a temporary restraining order in any case it has thus far been able to anticipate.

“There’s no question that the Biden campaign has worked through every imaginable scenario and is certainly prepared—legally, at least—for any of these possibilities,” says Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional-law professor at NYU. Nothing Trump might do “would surprise the enormous legal team they’ve created to deal with twists and turns in the election. I assure you they’ve thought of more scenarios than the media would ever get to.” The Biden team says it is ready even for scenarios it is sure will “never happen, and we’re not worried about it,” a Biden-campaign lawyer told me. “There have been a couple of lawsuits challenging Kamala Harris’s eligibility to be vice president,” he said. “Do we have stuff on that? Yeah. Do I think we have to worry about it? Absolutely not.” Preparations for other cases feel more urgent, he said. Biden advisers (some of whom requested anonymity so that they could discuss this work) and independent experts I spoke with have gamed out multiple scenarios, with variations of law and circumstance, in which Trump sends forces to seize—or segregate, or intercept—ballots before they can be counted. Some of the scenarios seem far-fetched, others less so. Here are three they have taken seriously, along with reasons to doubt that Trump can pull them off. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

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