I’m afraid, yes, it’s coming. America has never had a coup attempt. We’ve always had peaceful transfers of power after an election. The people’s vote was sacrosanct. Some who were voted out of power didn’t like it, but they accepted it. Now there is Trump, a kind of caustic rust who is continually wearing away our Democracy in the torrent of his lies. But Trump is a madman. That is obvious to many of us. To him, it’s all about himself. He cares little for anyone else. He would throw his wife under the bus if she uttered one word he deemed oppositional to him.
But the real impetus of a coup lies with the senators and representatives who want to reverse a legal, true, fair, and accurate election–one of the most observed and accurate in American history. They and possibly Pence think they can defy the Constitution and reverse the vote in battleground states that went for Trump. They think they have the power to do that despite the fact that just about all the courts, including the Supreme Court, ruled against Republican challenges to election results. So they are bypassing the judicial branch of our government to get their way. And they are opposing our Constitution that is the glue that holds the three branches of our government together. That is sedition, anyway you look at it. And for those who don’t know exactly what that word means, it’s treason.
If they, God forbid, succeed, we will have a country not unlike what my wife experienced in her native Brazil in the mid 60s, a coup that led to an end of freedom of the press, an end to freedom of speech and creative expression, an end to habeas corpus and due process leading to imprisonments, torture, and a demand of names of so called enemies of the state as McCarthy did here in the 50s with his House of unAmerican Activities Committee. My wife’s father, a university professor, was duly rounded up, questioned and threatened as described. Brazil did not emerge from this fascist state until the late 80s,and after a period of democracy, is now still plagued by a President who, like Trump, threatens an end to their democracy and a return to a fascist state where voting is a sham and democracy a flimsy word bandied about like a balloon.
Now, I do not think this coup will succeed. Joe Biden will be installed as President on January 20, 2021. But the seed of doubt and fraud around our election will have been planted. And if the Republicans retain their control of the Senate, they will conduct continual investigations and hearings on election fraud ala Benghazi and what they did to Obama and Hillary via unproven allegations and unfounded charges. That will affect the coming elections of 2022 and 2024, driving suspicious voters towards Trump Republicans.
Whether Trump himself is a factor in those elections remains to be seen and really impossible to predict. But just as Reagan was a factor in the GOP long after his death, so Trump could be as well. And the result, in all probability, is a drastic move toward more rabid authoritarianism and fascism.
After the 2000 election and the Supreme Court’s decision to hand the victory to George W. Bush by ending a recount of the disputed Florida vote, I felt then we were witnessing the beginning of the end of American democracy. Now we are seeing another piece of that scenario come true in this era of Donald Trump. The country made a deal with the Devil by electing him, and a deal with the Devil is never a safe or good thing. It’s a downright dangerous thing.
I pray we can protect our democracy from the hands of these traitors. How will that happen? I will deal more with our salvation in my next post. It has to do with our tiniest supposed adversary: the novel coronavirus–an adversary that rescued us from the fascist hands of Donald J. Trump.
Leave a Reply