Never Underestimate the Power of a Sitting President
America isn’t getting out of this one so easy.
The result of the 2016 election was one America didn’t see coming. And now, it’s worried about what it can see coming.
America, as Americans know it to be, is in danger.
The American Mussolini has declared war against America’s democracy and the first coup the nation has ever seen is underway.
If it was only a question of another four years, some would have been able to stomach it. But it’s not. Politicians don’t garner votes — their ideologies do. And an America in which a fascist autocracy and racism are enshrined is not an America Americans want to live in.
America now seeks to oust its Mussolini. But the truth is, the American people might get ousted instead.
What we’re seeing is not simply Trump going rogue. This is Trump going rogue with the near-limitless powers of the presidency behind him.
If Trump manages to steal the election, it’s not just because he’s a dictator. It’s because his office gave him the powers to do it and get away with it.
The American presidency is imperial
Although the constitution is near-sacred in America, it is not above the presidency. American presidents have a track-record of gaining and exercising extraconstitutional powers.
Congress hasn’t declared war since 1942 and yet American troops have been engaged in battle across the Middle East. President Obama’s bombing campaign in Libya too was initiated without Congressional approval. He even claimed the right to kill overseas U.S. citizens without giving them a right to a fair trial.
That’s totalitarian levels of power. That is what Arthur Schlessinger called ‘imperial presidency.’
And, like his predecessors, Trump is more emperor than a president. But not the same kind of emperor. Former presidents often used their executive powers to take America to war. Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton, asserts that Donald Trump, on the other hand, has a track record of using them for his own personal gain.
She’s not wrong.
When Trump became the third president in U.S. history to have been impeached by Congress, the abuse of power was withholding $391 million of aid to Ukraine. The reason? Many argue it to be to pressure them into investigating Joe Biden, his now political opponent.
That’s making things personal.
How is this relevant to the November election? Because now, instead of for personal gain, Trump will use his executive powers to effectively kill America’s democracy.
Daylight Robbery
Just as Americans had begun to see the light at the end of the tunnel, Trump has sealed it off.
Coronavirus means that voting is now not carried out the way it used to be. And given worries that Trump is going to enforce a stay-at-home emergency in Democratic cities right before the election, the USPS matters now more than ever.
Mail-in voting is now how millions of Americans will cast, no — attempt to cast, their vote. Because the president has no intentions of letting it count.
Being the president, Trump has full control of America’s Postal Service. And he has sought to discredit it at every turn. And he’s achieved what he wanted to. Republicans are now less likely to cast mail-in votes in comparison to Democrats. And now he wants to make sure those Democrat votes don’t count — so he’s cutting USPS’s funding. This matters even more once you consider that states such as Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin require the votes to be in by Election Day.
The icing on the cake is the appointment of the PostMaster General, who appears to have already hit the ground the running by slowing down the Postal Service’s delivery times.
This is not mere conjecture. This is not mere conspiracy. This is happening. And it’s happening now.
An interview with a mail carrier, conducted by LEVEL, revealed what’s happening on the ground. Trump and his allies are having mailboxes and high-speed sorting machines removed. And, contrary to what many Americans believed, their institutions can’t stand in the way. Because even though their Postal Service is “strictly nonpartisan,” the mail carriers are being forced to comply with measures that they can see to be politically motivated.
This matters. And not just in the context of the upcoming elections. This matters for America’s democracy. Because this is something right out of a corrupt ‘third world’ politician’s playbook.
Yes, the American people are watching their democracy being stabbed in the heart before their very eyes. And the message from the White House is clear — “Yes, I’m doing it. And there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
Call in the states
Some now see voting in numbers like never before to be America’s only hope. But, Jeffrey Davis, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, writing for the Atlantic, states that even voting at all may not be on the table.
What follows below is Jeffrey’s account of how the states would help Trump steal this election — and get away with it.
He says that although many Americans see their right to vote to be the cornerstone of their democracy, it isn’t — because it’s not a right.
He raises the point of how the American people don’t vote for a presidential candidate but vote for the electors who then select that candidate. However, he argues that even that isn't set in stone as Article II of the U.S. Constitution allows unfettered discretion as to the manner in which the selection of those electors takes place. He, therefore, states that all it would take for America’s democracy to be buried alive would be for the states to change how the electors are chosen. And he argues that if they place that power in the hands of the legislature instead, then you can almost guarantee a Trump win.
How? He points to the political reality of how the Republican Party controls 30 state legislatures in comparison to the Democrat’s 19. In real terms, Jeffrey states this would mean that Republican states account for 305 electoral votes — and Trump only needs 270. Rather more worryingly, he points out that there won’t be a veto to stop this from happening. Because out of those 30 states, 22 also have Republican governors who, he thinks it’s safe to say, won’t be vetoing against their own presidential candidate. So, what does that translate to? Jeffrey claims that if none of the 22 governors exercises their veto powers, Trump ends up with 219 electoral votes — and that at that point, he’s on the home stretch.
If that wasn’t worrying enough, Jeffrey argues this is legal. He cites the Supreme Court, in Bush v Gore, which had held that changing how the electors were chosen was well within the power of the states.
He then answers the question of why the states would even do this in the first place.
He argues that since Trump is popular in 24 out of the Republican-controlled 30 states, it’s not difficult to imagine those 24 would agree if he proposed that they took control. His answer is, arguably, rooted in logic.
However, he does point out that it is not all rain and no sunshine. He points to the U.S. Supreme Court which had held, in 1964, that ‘diluting the rights of voters’ was unconstitutional. With reference to the upcoming election, he says this means voters can argue that, if states gave control to the legislature, they would have only indirectly elected their president.
And yes, I’m aware that what Jeffrey is writing about amounts to a ‘loophole’ to somehow getting Trump out of office. But, even so, this is America’s democracy we’re talking about. If the people have to go to court to argue that an election was unconstitutional, then know that American democracy has become the Titanic. No, not the Titanic that had just set sail but the Titanic that has started to sink.
But, what if he loses?
Say Trump’s plans to have millions of votes excluded fails. Those votes are counted and he ends up on the losing side. Surely, that must be the end of it, right?
Not exactly.
Eric Lach, writing for The New Yorker, argues that, should Trump lose, there’s a chance he can still fight the result and get away with it — because elections results have been disputed and overturned before.
Eric cites the 1876 presidential election between Hayes and Tilden. In that election, there was a dispute as to who the victor was. Tilden was in the lead, albeit marginally. But he lost that lead. Why? Fraud. There was a direct manipulation of the vote count. Sound familiar? And despite it, Hayes’s vote was still held to be valid.
The resulting dispute went on for months and it only ended with Tilden, the man who should have won, conceding the presidency.
When people say America’s democracy is on the line, that’s because it really is.
But, would Trump do the same?
Eric argues that there are reasons to believe it. Firstly, the man even disputed the result of the 2016 election — which he won. And secondly, he’s now embarked on a campaign to undermine the efficiency of the USPS. This, Eric claims, has substantially increased the chances of a dispute.
But the truth is, Trump has gone a step further than merely sabotaging the efficiency of the USPS. He’s decided to blame the Democrats for it. In an interview with Fox News, the president had the following to say:
“They are talking about sending 51 million ballots out to anybody who, you know, nobody knows who is going to get them.”
“It’s a horrible thing. It’s a fraudulent election. Everybody knows it, you don’t even have to know politics to know it.”
What Trump is doing is arguably a move of sheer political genius. Because not only has the confusion surrounding the Postal Service increased the chances for a dispute, as Eric had claimed, but the fact that if America came out and voted in numbers far greater than before, Trump couldn’t have asked for better conditions to dispute in.
Why? Absentee ballots are usually counted once the election is over — especially iffy in states like Wisconsin, Florida and Michigan which require the votes to be in by Election Day. More to the point, many absentee ballots are disqualified in ‘normal’ elections anyways.
A mess of epic proportions looms on the horizon — one that is going to leave American democracy unrecognisable. And Trump is going to use the confusion to stay in power.
Will he even leave the White House?
The House Majority Whip told CNN that, should he lose, Trump may initiate a period of emergency keeping him inside the White House.
If he’s going to dispute a result, the idea of him initiating said emergency to give ‘America stability’ whilst the ‘true president’ is declared is not beyond my imagination. And doing it is something that is well within the powers of a sitting president.
Conclusion
America’s future is uncertain. The country’s presently at a point where a president can simply decide that he (yes, sadly that is still the case) doesn’t want to leave office and what the people have to say about it doesn’t matter.
This screams dictatorship and fascism.
The American people have built the presidency into a Goliath and now they can’t stop the monster they have created.
And make no mistake, this is bigger than one orange monster. Because on his own, he’s nothing. In the Oval Office, he’s everything.
And this begs the question — what about the president who comes after him?
Because even if America wins today, will it tomorrow?
