November 2020

Not linking, but you can buy these little God-Emperor guys from Amazon. I like how his left hand in particular looks bigger than his head.

After Michael Cohen's testimony last week repeated the story that Trump didn't expect to or want to win the 2016 election, various people raised an issue they hadn't particularly raised the first time evidence of that was brought out, in Michael Wolfe's book, as here in The Hill, where it's used to suggest that Trump must be innocent in the Russian conspiracy:

On Russia: Cohen wouldn’t even venture to say that Trump “colluded” with Russia and said he was unaware of evidence that would prove such a thing occurred. Cohen claimed that Trump didn’t want to win the presidency, and didn’t think he would win. That undercuts the notion that Trump would have also conspired with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win.

Well, sure, except if that wasn't the conspiracy—if the conspiracy from Trump's point of view, at least initially, was rather, as some of us have been saying, and as Cohen's testimony completely reinforces (see Emptywheel), for Trump to follow Putin's playbook in contributing maximum publicity to the debate over Ukraine and sanctions, in return for which he'd get that Trump Tower Moscow built at last. He wasn't supposed to get elected in that scenario, but he was still Trump, and he'd still need desperately to look good. He can't bear to be laughed at. He constantly courts humiliation and dreads it more than anything, at the same time. I'm sure he wanted to come close to winning. Ideally, there'd be an outcome where he and his adoring following would feel he'd won, but he wouldn't have to move to Washington and go to all those meetings and be president in those horrible respects.

So what occurred to me then is that that explains all the talk toward the end of the campaign about how the election was going to be rigged in Clinton's favor, as his fabulation on Election Day itself, in a Fox interview:

"It's largely a rigged system. And you see it at the polling booths, too," he said. "There are reports that when people vote for Republicans the entire ticket switches over to Democrats. You've seen that. It's happening at various places today. It's been reported. In other words, the machines, you put down a Republican and it registers as a Democrat. They've had a lot of complaints about that today."

Some have said Trump was laying the ground for some kind of revolutionary mass movement that would seek to overthrow Clinton and install Trump in her place. I don't think so, now more than ever: I think he was planning to dust off his hands and get away to the Moscow project—but looking like a winner who would have won but for the underhanded wickedness of his enemies, at least to the faithful and to his future Russian and Azeri and Uzbek and whatever customers. It would have been the best of both worlds—he'd be feeling like the most famous winner in the world and he wouldn't have to be president.

I bring this up because Trump has started talking about rigging again, according to the seraphic Chris Cillizza of CNN, as I learned over at Steve's place, and to Mehdi Hasan of The Intercept, who takes it all the way to imagining the whole African Big Man scenario, where Trump acts like Mugabe or Kabila and refuses to accept that he's been voted out:

Consider this scenario: On the morning of November 3, 2020, it becomes clear that Trump has lost both the electoral college and the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, whoever they may be. The president, however, rather than calling his Democratic opponent to concede, holds a rally with his supporters at which he declares himself the winner, tells the crowd “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” slams the “fake news” media, and claims “millions and millions” of people voted illegally for the Democrats. He denounces a “deep state” coup and warns of “violence.”

Do you really think this isn’t possible? That this potential scenario shouldn’t make us all very afraid?

I would expect him to do that, certainly. But it doesn't exactly make me afraid. It's what he would have done in 2016 too, and was likely half-planning to do, at a time when he was a lot less unpopular than he is now and hadn't alienated the entire military and national intelligence agencies. Not to seize power but to save face. To keep looking like a winner in the eyes of the Fox audience, including his own. That's why Steve is right not to worry about Trump's reaction to a loss in 2020, but I think he's worrying too much about the other consequences of the election.

What else could happen in such an event? What could a less passive Trump do? Another emergency declaration, more violently unconstitutional than the mini-coup he's trying and failing to mount over the Wall? A move by the armed forces switching their allegiance from the Constitution to the Big Man who's insulted them and failed to address their problems for the past four years? South Carolina seceding? A mass movement of septuagenarians in their Tea Party regalia carrying handguns where, exactly?

I doubt it; I doubt a seizure of power can be organized by these people. More like a Nazi march somewhere in the Southeast, more Trump rallies, an explosion of small-scale racial hate crimes across the country, talk on Fox News about all those "illegals" who manage to vote in California, inability on the part of the news media proper to challenge that story without making it sound plausible. Really, a lot like what actually did happen from the end of 2016 through that summer. Except that Trump won't be president, and that kind of makes it all worth while.