Comment by montagg
5 years ago
I'd love to live in this world, but it is not one I think anyone can afford to live in. This man is a true narcissist who has very little respect for the office, the institutions he's responsible for, or more than half the country. All sorts of things that were very far from reality are no longer.
But I would love to be able to agree with you. That would be a better world. But the world we live in is where the President says "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," a racist dog whistle to the 1960s, who "jokes" about staying past any term limits, where enablers in Congress and in the media allow him to toe the line of criminal behavior with no accountability as long as it benefits them. That's reality. I wish it were different, but I cannot take your position and reconcile it with what's in front of us today.
It's not about what Trump does. It's about what everyone else does. He's very good at getting attention with stunts that have no practical or legal effect. This includes signing executive orders, which sounds like doing something but it's not necessarily so.
So you need to look at scenarios where other people do stuff, and why it happens. Are there orders he can give and will people follow them? If not directly due to an order, how does it happen?
Trump barely has support now, nothing close to the widespread popularity he’d need to refuse to leave office. There’s about a 0% chance the Supreme Court goes along with it, and without an election the Presidency automatically transfers.
He’d also have to be astoundingly popular among the Secret Service for them to betray their oaths. His military support would tank, and him, his family, and administration would be in constant fear for their lives. IMO, he’s just not that insane, stupid, or popular enough to even try.
I think you're basically making an "it can't happen here" argument, and I wholly disagree. I worry this kind of thinking effectively guarantees it will happen here eventually, because it relies on dynamics that govern legitimacy remaining the same as they have been in the past. The way it would happen is specifically if the dynamics of loyalty and who has legitimate authority change, and we've seen over the last four years that that's 100% happening. The only question is how deep the distrust of institution goes and how far the people in key positions will go to defend a President they are loyal to. If you can convince enough people to distrust the process of picking the President, you can create enough chaos to break apart the forces that would normally counter that kind of thing.
Look at any nation that underwent major coups; factions form, and it tears the organizations you've listed apart at the seams. Because a conflict of legitimacy exposes those seams, and those seams are absolutely present today. A Secret Service agent, an army colonel, armed militia, border patrol agents—if they can be made to believe the results of the election are illegitimate, they may consider the best way to fulfill their oaths to be stopping the "illegitimate" president from taking office. They will think of themselves as the ones stopping the coup.
I'd love to believe that all of those dynamics you're describing are the same as they were 20 years ago. I'd also make your argument then. But they aren't anymore. It can happen here.
I won’t claim it could never happen here, societies change and we could certainly drift to a place it could. The Dem candidates that advocated packing the Supreme Court scared me for this reason, that’s part of how Maduro seized complete power.
Trump now though? Nobody fears him, the majority disrespect him, government bureaucracy openly defies him. He doesn’t even have the House, nor enough Republican support to pass laws to enable a power grab, nor a Supreme Court loyal to him before the constitution.
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Not going to weigh in more generally - but he seems to be doing pretty fine according to recent polls
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Well enough to pass some policy, but not enough to seize power through popularity. He’d undoubtedly lose significant (I’d wager most) Republican voters, and all semblance of a mandate.
The idea drives a lot of clicks and ad views though, so I’m sure we’ll see many more speculative articles before the election.
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> without an election the Presidency automatically transfers.
Says who? You've never had a President try to suspend or tamper with an election.
Primarily the Constitution and the Presidential Succession Act. While there are some ambiguities that need to be resolved there is definitely no scenario in which the sitting President continues.
In order for trump to make a military coup and disband elections, he need more than the title of office. Even for something like sending in the military in order to push demonstrators, you need the direct support of the military. Is there any evidence that he as that kind of support?
Without such support, all the can do is push peoples buttons. He can ask the national guard to go to the location, which the national guard will likely accept in order to look helpful and useful. He might be able to impose a curfew, through the courts will fight him there. He might even be able to impose rules against large gatherings, which again the courts would fight him over. But I don't see how officers and generals would accept an order to start shooting civilians. Even if we disregard the moral question, just the liability risk from "just following orders" makes me question how much control a president have over the military to do acts which the law and common understanding of the law says are illegal. Intentionally killing your own civilians is a pretty major step for any nations military.
Sending in the national guard is naturally still a terrible idea as someone is likely to get shot accidentally. There was a good reason why the 9/11 military posted at airports wielded guns with empty magazines. Trump has likely the ability to cause accidentally shooting when the looting starts by placing the wrong people at the wrong location with the wrong training and wrong gear. He has a much harder time to accidentally cause a military coup and disband elections.