Masha Gessen: Every coup begins as an attempted fraud

Attempts to predict the outcome of the presidential elections began in earnest in August 2020. Thoughts and media companies assembled panels that would analyze possible scenarios in this unprecedented election: an election that would take place in the middle of a pandemic, an election in which one of the candidates, despite being in his fourth year as president, campaigned against the political system itself. Donald Trump had made it clear that he did not intend to admit a Joe Biden victory. Where would this lead?

Political scientists predicted that if TV stations were to focus on votes cast at the polls on Election Day, which is the way Americans normally vote, the election would appear to go Trump’s way because he knew a part significant electorate would vote by mail. Forecasters called this scenario “the red mirage,” because of the color that denotes the Republican Party in American politics.

The red mirage then perhaps followed by a “blue twist” when mail-in votes were counted, votes known to have largely come from Democratic voters. Trump would refuse to acknowledge such an outcome, especially if it were preceded by a red mirage. You could incite violence and try to find excuses to use force. The country could perhaps slip into armed conflict and civil war, and eventually split. That’s how some of the forecasts sounded.

It can be said that the United States, with the concept of the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, was on the brink of a breakthrough for autocracy; Whether Trump won the election or kidnapped them toying with a second term, despite losing the number of votes, we would end up in a situation where a path back from autocracy by peaceful means would no longer be possible. The 2020 elections were the United States’ last chance to repel Trump’s autocratic attacks.

The red mirage arrived as expected. On the night of Tuesday, November 3, many Americans went to bed convinced that Trump would be re-elected. Therapists discussed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress caused by memories of the 2016 election. The blue twist, however, followed. And shortly after eleven o’clock in the morning on Saturday, November 7, after CNN declared Biden the winner of the election, a spontaneous celebration broke out in the great cities of the United States, which voted democratically. There was dancing in the streets.

Trump refused to admit defeated. He launched a series of unfounded lawsuits, not so much to achieve specific results as to cast doubt on the election. He fired the defense minister and several high-ranking military personnel, as well as the cybersecurity chief, who had to leave because he said the election was safe. Trump’s staff refused to allow Biden to participate in security briefings and other matters that had previously been the rule in the transfer of power in the United States.

The electorate, which is the one that formally elects the president, had not yet voted, and Trump used all possible and impossible forms of pressure to try to get a different result in the Electoral College. He tweeted over and over that he had won the election. In other words, he was trying to organize an autocratic breakthrough.

Now experts and journalists wondered if it was “a coup or a scam” and convinced themselves and their readers that it was the latter. But it was a false dichotomy. A coup is an illegitimate claim to power, often, but not always, carried out by force, sometimes illegally, but sometimes within the framework of the constitution. Fraud is a darker concept: it can be a criminal act, but also an unethical act, perhaps simply deceptive and manipulative. In other words, fraud is an illegitimate way of persuading someone. A hit always starts with a scam. If the fraud is successful, if the claim to power is convincing, it is a blow.

While foreign leaders, with Vladimir Putin the great exception, congratulated Biden on the victory, an overwhelming majority of Republican congressmen did not. Some explicitly supported Trump in his claim to have won, while others appeared to keep a low profile to avoid a Twitter showdown with the impulsive president, pending the electoral process. In other words, Trump seemed to have convinced them, at least to some degree. He had also convinced a large number of the more than 70 million Americans who voted for him.

On the usual Trumperan news tricks He missed a strange fact about this unusual choice, namely that it was somehow nothing unusual. In terms of the percentage of votes the candidates received and the number of states that won, it did not differ from most other presidential elections. In the last half century, there have been some very uneven election results, but this was not one of them. On paper, it seemed like a completely normal election and well reflected that the country was roughly divided in half.

Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, vowed to heal and renew America. In his victory speech, Biden declared that he would “restore the American soul.” As the perfect politician that he is, he had the vision to realize a certain notion of Washington, a Washington where representatives of both parties respected and even loved each other and worked to move the country forward. He said it at the same time that his former colleagues in the Senate refused to recognize him as a winner.

Biden’s American politicians highly value, even adore, the ability to move forward and not give in to demands for revenge, as Gerald Ford did when he pardoned Richard Nixon, or Barack Obama when he refused to investigate the illegal arrests and torture that occurred. under George W. Bush. However, if Trump’s fraud does not escalate into a coup and Biden can assume the presidency, Biden cannot afford to continue this tradition.

He will have to initiate a reckoning and conversation with the entire nation about what happened: about how we were able to stay and watch when more than two hundred thousand died in covid-19 while the president was playing golf, or when the authorities took children. It will also have to show us the way to reinvent ourselves and rethink the systems and structures that made Trump possible, if not inevitable: the privately funded election campaigns, the political parties with only two parties, the unbridled and lucrative media. that make up almost all of our public, the electoral system where the winner takes everything, and a political system that practically demands a monopoly of political power so that the president can act through legislation. Without such a reckoning, and without us reinventing ourselves, the threat of autocracy will not stop, it will only be postponed.

The text is a preface, written in November 2020, of Masha Gessen’s new book “To Survive Autocracy” (translated by Peter Samuelsson) that will be published in January by Bromberg’s book publisher.