Trump is Smarter Than He Seems

A plodding dunderhead can succeed, given enough time and the help of their supporters

If you truly want to win an election in the US, you don’t need the most votes, all you need is to have the right people in place at the right time.

If you own the people who count the votes, the people who validate the votes, and the people who declare the winner of the electoral college, then you can become the next president.

It’s clear that the Republican party and Trump are aware of this. They’re taking concrete steps to make sure they control the results of the next election.

Trump has managed to persuade Republicans that he’s the one to follow. He’s built a following that is willing to go to any lengths to regain their beloved White House and the power that goes with it.

The Stop The Steal rally was the end of the plan, not the beginning

The Democrats are hoping that the investigation into the January 6 insurrection will result in criminal charges against Trump. They’re hoping that the lawsuits currently filed against him will be his undoing.

That’s very unlikely. This is a president who was impeached and still managed to stay in office.

It’s unlikely that another Republican will break his hold over the party. I would be surprised if anyone tries because it would be their death knell.

The violence of January 6th was just a single day in a much larger plan to steal the 2020 election. Some say it’s a plan that they’ve been working on since he was first elected in 2016.

Trump won the electoral college count, but he didn’t win the popular vote and that failure ate at his insides. It drove him buggy. He kept repeating the lie that he won the popular vote. He declared that millions of illegal votes should have been thrown out and that he would have won.

It was a detail that his ego couldn’t handle.

Since the 2016 election, Trump kept raising concerns about bogus ballots, fraudulent voters and insisted that mail-in ballots were illegal.

He encouraged his followers to vote in person, making election night results skew in his direction. That allowed him to declare a win before the mail-in votes were counted.

Every step was a calculated move to reinforce the idea that the election was stolen.

If at first, you don’t succeed

It almost worked the first time. The 2020 election might have been overturned, except for a few weak points. Those weak points allowed the winner of the election to be declared president-elect.

In Republican states, members of that party are working to shore up the weak points. They’re passing statutes to allow them to be the ones that decide which ballots will be counted and which ones will be discarded.

They are taking steps to make it hard for minorities to vote. They’re eliminating mail-in ballots and reducing access to polling stations. Anywhere they can, they’re blocking access.

“This is precisely what populists who no longer believe in Democracy, or the legal system, do.” Nadin Brzezinski

Republicans know the people who refused to go along with them in 2020 and they’re removing them from positions of power. They’ve been challenged for office, stripped of power, and censured by the Republication party.

Rick Hasen, NY Times contributor, and a freelance reporter recently wrote:

“The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”

Democrats are trying to protect voting rights

The new Voting Rights Act combined two bills in an attempt to get them passed by the Senate. The two bills are the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.

They passed the bills in the House and brought them to the Senate but the vote failed and the bills weren’t advanced. The fight to protect voting rights for all Americans suffered a blow but many have vowed to continue.

It’s not a bloody coup, it’s a slow, determined power grab that’s likely to succeed. Americans need to protect the democratic process in each state.

And they have to do it now.

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Sources: The Atlantic, Rick Hasen, NYMag, CNN