October 18, 2020
it’s a given that Trump will resist a “peaceful transfer of power” when he loses the election by a landslide to Joe Biden. But Democrats – and most others looking on in horror at the continued unfolding of our national political nightmare – are banking on a decisive Biden victory at the polls to make it undeniably clear that Trump must go, no matter how he tries to resist vacating the Oval Office.
But will it be enough? Frighteningly, I think not. Trump has put a number of pieces in place designed expressly to undercut the “decisiveness” of his loss at the polls (clearly already underway with the avalanche of early voting) and establish a basis for his remaining in office. These include:
- Voter suppression in pivotal so-called “battleground” states, where Trump is failing but the match-up is close enough to call into question polls that show Biden in the lead. Augmenting a range of dirty tricks (e.g. phony collection boxes in Democratic enclaves) is Trump’s shout-out to armed “poll-watchers” to intimidate likely Biden voters (notably black voters).
- Endless attacks on mail-in ballots, deemed “riddled with fraud” by the Fraudster-in-Chief. It doesn’t matter how many state secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, or how many carefully conducted studies, declare with complete confidence the legitimacy of the various systems of postal voting.
- Mustering a battalion of lawyers to challenge ballots in any state with a thin margin of victory for Biden, counting on a partisan federal judiciary to side with the Republican challengers. Even if they lose in court, this legal juggernaut will have succeeded in delaying the final outcome, allowing time for the Trumpublicans to pump out more delegitimizing conspiratorial blather.
- Dog-whistling violent paramilitary, self-proclaimed “patriots” to intimidate and attack the hundreds of thousands of protesting citizens who will take to the streets when Trump’s efforts to steal the election become obvious to everyone. Fascist goon squads will deliberately provoke confrontations, riot, destroy property, and quite possibly kill, in order to create an illusion of “antifa mayhem” that will set up the final move of a losing Orange Ogre, i.e.:
- Preparing, with backing from Attorney General Barr and a 6-3 rightist Supreme Court majority, to accuse anti-Trump protesters of sedition, declare martial law, and order not the military, which may well resist such illegal orders from a coup-instigating president, but paramilitary troops that are part the Department of Homeland Security, to restore “law and order” to America’s streets.
Faced with a lawless president and a lawless system of authoritarian government, will the people have no choice but to become ungovernable?
The Southern Miss School of Social Work 