The inside game and the outside game: procedure plus a mob
https://www.editorialboard.com/the-inside-game-and-the-outside-game-procedure-plus-a-mob/
No paywall
https://archive.ph/IfWAK
On January 2, Trump lawyer John Eastman called into Steve Bannons War Room podcast to explain how to steal the election. Eastman told Bannon that Vice President Mike Pence could still overturn Bidens victory. The interview was part of an extremely public campaign by Trump and his closest allies to lobby Pence to steal the election during the certification ceremony.
One of Eastmans crackpot theories was that the vice president has the unilateral power to accept or reject electoral votes at his whim, or failing that, to somehow send the election back to Republican-controlled swing state legislatures that would disregard the will of their people and replace Bidens electors with Trumps.
A stolen election would put Biden supporters in the streets where the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers would be waiting for them, prepared to start or escalate violence wherever they could.
Eastman was Trumps master of self-serving constitutional bafflegab. His job was to spin elaborate pseudo-legal theories to justify Trumps assault on democracy. It was Eastman who wrote the notorious memos outlining his fanciful legal arguments for why the vice president has the power to unilaterally reelect himself. Eastman also co-wrote a blueprint for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election. Eastman even spoke at Trumps rally on the Ellipse, making wild allegations of election fraud before Trump set the mob on the Capitol.
To understand January 6, you have to think in terms of an inside game and an outside game. The inside game was to steal the election procedurally. The outside game was to gather a mob to terrorize officials into going along with it. Eastman was a conceptual architect of both the paper coup attempt and of the plan for the political repression that Trumpists expected to follow in the wake of the theft.
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