Donald Trump's failed coup
POINT OF VIEW / The Americans got a narrow escape. For the maneuvers by which Donald Trump has sought in recent weeks to turn his electoral defeat into victory, if they had succeeded, would have amounted to nothing less than a coup d'etat.
The result of the November 3 ballot is unequivocal: Joe Biden won 306 votes in the electoral college and Trump 232. Elected by an identical margin four years ago, Trump called his score a landslide, a tidal wave. tide, even if it lagged behind by 2.8 million votes in the popular vote. Biden’s victory, on the other hand, rests on a lead of more than 6 million votes in the electorate, with a record turnout.
Faced with such a repudiation, any sane politician would have thrown in the towel without complaining.
Not Donald Trump. Because he is above all standards. In his mental world, grammar and spelling are for shorthand typists. Factual accuracy is only required of journalists and academics. As for the moral obligation for a candidate to accept electoral defeat, this applies only to other candidates. He had had the audacity to put it out there in 2016, and to repeat it this year: he would accept no other result than his own victory.
So much arrogance has led his minions to devise the following scenario.
The first step was to delegitimize the popular vote by immediately calling for fraud, "massive" of course. However, given the pandemic hitting the country, everything suggested that a higher number of Americans would vote by post, and that the Democrats would take advantage of this basic health precaution in greater numbers than the Republicans, for whom the COVID-19 was an invention of the media. We know that the counting of the postal ballot is slower and more laborious than that of the vote in person, precisely because of the precautions designed to prevent fraud. That’s why Biden’s winning margin grew stronger day by day as the count was completed. To satisfy Trump's ego, it would have been necessary to stop counting the votes just when his victory seemed possible. "Stop the count!" The whole man is summed up in this grotesque tweet, which deserves to be made history.
The second part was to prevent the officialization of the ballot in a number of key states by shaking things up, so that the votes of all voters were thrown in the basket.
The third step was to use the lack of formalization of the election results as a pretext to replace the voters chosen by the people with those they had rejected. The plan was based on a federal law of 1876, which stipulated that if a state's results are not certified within a certain time frame, the state legislature can substitute for its own electorate and appoint the voters itself. Efforts focused on a few pivotal states where Biden was ahead, but whose state legislature was dominated by Republicans: 16 more votes for Trump (and less for Biden) in Michigan, 20 in Pennsylvania, 16 others in Georgia. In the end, Biden would have fallen from 306 to 254, Trump would have climbed from 232 to 284, and presto, Bingo! Biden reportedly lost the election despite scoring 51% of the vote. Crisp detail: in the assemblies of Pennsylvania and Michigan, Republican lawmakers, who were counted on to legitimize the scheme, were themselves elected in 2018, gerrymander obliges, with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.
The plan was monstrous. Thank goodness he was based on lies and was executed by puppets. He has met firm resistance from the institutions Trump has tirelessly sought for four years to enslave for his purposes. We managed to convince the majority of Republicans that there was fraud. That’s all so far.
The judiciary has risen to the demands of the moment. Shouted repeatedly by the trash media subservient to the regime, the allegations of fraud, once collected in court documents poorly argued and supported, have been withdrawn or rejected one by one by the courts. Trump hoped these would help him win the popular mandate voters denied him. In response to an exorbitant demand to strike down the seven million votes cast in Pennsylvania, Judge Brann wrote last Saturday:
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption. That has not happened. (…) Instead, this court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations… unsupported by the evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. ”
The non-White House media, and for once Twitter itself, gave this desperate attempt the treatment it deserved.
Despite the pressure they were subjected to, several Republicans resisted partisan tribalism and refused to participate in a dangerous game that could have brought the country to the brink of civil war.
Finally, the practical ineptitude and crass incompetence that Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated, both in court and in the media spotlight, suggests that he may not have been worth the $ 20,000 a day that public rumor lends him to have claimed for his exploits.
An admirer of foreign autocrats, Donald Trump dreamed of being the American Putin. He will have to find a reason. The profession of dictator requires a personal discipline of which he is psychologically incapable. It’s not Putin who wants it.
