Reelecting the thief-in-chief
US elections ... Republican plots to steal the outcome ... Supreme Court in the wings ... Declaration of an election "emergency" ... Prospects of state and federal criminal indictments ... Fictions at the Republican National Convention ... Long-term Washington hand Roger Fitch reports
With eight weeks to go, America is lurching towards electoral disaster. In 15 years covering Washington, Fitch has seen a lot, but the extraordinary crimes of Donald Trump, the institutional damage he has inflicted, go far beyond George Bush's criminal mischief. They threaten the republic itself, at least the part that survived Bush v Gore, the supreme court's notorious intervention in the 2000 election: partisan meddling that could happen again.
In the light of Bush v Gore, maybe the eighteenth century republic never made it into the twenty-first: in either one, Trump qualifies as the worst, most dishonest president in American history. Even petty grifts are assiduously pursued. What else can one expect? He assumes everyone is as venal as himself, including political appointees and government hires. As New York Magazine observed in 2018:
"It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration's ranks. Trump's ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out ... Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him."
AG William Barr and his politically-compromised Justice Department aggressively assist and defend the president, so it is civil litigants who must try to constrain President Trump's lawless acts and omissions, in actions launched by CREW, cases filed by states (especially California), and the 400 lawsuits of the ACLU.
The ring is closing on Trump's personal tax and financial affairs: in theory, New York State could bring down criminal indictments before the election. There's also talk of federal prosecutions after Trump leaves office, for crimes committed while president. Will he go from the White House to the Big House? Protection from federal prosecution is only possible while he's in office, and limitations run. Is he plotting to avoid jail, through an election concession deal with Biden?
Trump has never had majority support, and should be on course to lose his re-election bid. Yet, many foreign observers, with a touch of premature Schadenfreude, profess a belief he can't lose: not because Republicans will steal the election, but because (as they think) a majority of Americans somehow prefer him to win. Only a few (e.g. the Guardian, and the Canberra Times) address the dire, democracy-ending consequences a Trump victory could bring.
President Trump can only win re-election by cheating. As in Brazil, Turkey or a dozen other corrupted former democracies, the leader openly opposes uncongenial votes being counted. The question, then, is not whether Trump will attempt to steal the election, but how he will do so. The goal: forestalling, interdicting and/or destroying votes for the opposition.
Some of these methods have already been tested in the party primaries, with 550,000 ballots rejected. Such feints have been furthered by the shadow docket of the supreme court, which previously gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v Holder.
Practices of Republican states and the US Post may include:
• caging (purging) suspect voters from existing voter rolls, a project upheld by a Trump-packed supreme court, despite clear language in a federal statute that prohibits purges for non-voting;
• flouting federal voter registration law, as well as inhibiting voter enrolment by restricting time, manner and/or location of registration, while manipulating postal service and timeliness;
• closing polling places, reducing the opportunity to vote in person;
• intimidating voters at the polls on November 3rd, a violation of federal law (the American Bar Association is organising legally-trained poll workers);
• opposing universal mail-outs of absentee ballots by Democrat jurisdictions;
• forbidding witnessing of voter signatures on absentee votes by postal workers, as is customary, while slowing the post to hinder timely delivery;
• restricting or blocking drop boxes;
• limiting personnel and equipment necessary to sort postal ballots, e.g, forbidding overtime and obstructing pick-up, same-day sorting and delivery;
• failing to provide clearly-dated postmarks.
Just Security has a timeline of Trump's USPS dismantling, now being orchestrated by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. DeJoy, a party mega-donor with serious conflicts of interest, is being sued by 21 states; his "equipment reductions" and staffing changes arguably violate 18 US Code 1701 (Obstruction of Mails).
Postmaster-General DeJoy: at the heart of the sleazy inner-circle
Interestingly, it's lame-duck Republican legislation that saddled the Post Office with the unnecessary and unusual debt that set off the chaos.
There's still the 12th Amendment nightmare, a disputed election where uncounted ballots are destroyed and a state names its own electors. Also frightening: Trump might declare a sham "election emergency".
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The US Senate has released the final instalment of a report on Donald Trump's 2016 Russian canoodling, and it goes beyond Robert Mueller's findings.
The report - with critical analysis by Trump's own party - was a surprise, but a lot of Republican senators are on record as to what they really think of Donald Trump.
Even so, in the alternative universe that is today's Republican Party, the ceremonial re-endorsement of the thief-in-chief went ahead. The dog-whistling racist Republican National Convention turned out to be a cynical exercise in science fiction, in which Trump was imbued with such mythical qualities as empathy and competence, thus intentionally trolling the press.
For all practical purposes, Trump's 20,000 lies were incorporated as party policy, while Democrats were collectively portrayed as violent anarchists, even as Donald Trump seemed to be fomenting race war.
By contrast, the 2020 Democratic National Convention was more upbeat, with a relatively restrained party platform. For a stronger one, the Democrats could have recycled the platform from their 1928 National Convention:
"Never in the entire history of the country has there occurred ... such a spectacle of sordid corruption and unabashed rascality as that which has characterized the administration of federal affairs under ... Republican rule. Not the revels of reconstruction, nor all the compounded frauds succeeding that evil era, have approached in sheer audacity the shocking thieveries and startling depravities of officials high and low in the public service at Washington. From cabinet ministers, with their treasonable crimes, to the cheap vendors of official patronage, from the purchasers of seats in the United States Senate to the vulgar grafters upon alien trust funds ... from the givers and receivers of stolen funds for Republican campaign purposes to the public men who sat by silently consenting and never ... uttering a word in condemnation, the whole official organization under Republican rule has become saturated with dishonesty defiant of public opinion and actuated only by a partisan desire to perpetuate its control of the government."
