As much of the political world raged over Donald Trump, hovering over the idea of delaying the November election, within the President’s orbit, his Thursday morning tweet suggests that that was seen as much narrower and more strategically focused.
The president is not Really trying to delay the vote. He is trying to preventively delegitimize the probable results.
Two administration officials and another person close to the president say what they saw Thursday morning was the most recent tantrum (“frustration,” as one of the officials said) by a president looking for a scapegoat in case of to be denied a second term. . Neither of these sources said they were aware of any serious effort to trample on clear constitutional guidelines and delay a presidential election.
“He’s terrified of losing this one,” said the person close to Trump. “I’ve heard him say more times than I can count how crazy it would be to live in a country where people might prefer this guy, Joe Biden, to [the president] and he thinks this jester could be a better leader than Trump. “
When asked in his press conference Thursday about the tweet, Trump said he “doesn’t need much of an explanation” before launching a lengthy assertion of claims that there would be widespread fraud in the election due to the use of mail ballots, relying largely on reports of delays and irregularities in the New York City primaries.
“I just feel like I don’t want to be late, I want to have the elections. But I also don’t want to have to wait three months and then discover that the ballots are missing and that the elections don’t mean anything, ”said the president. “That’s what’s going to happen … smart people know it. Stupid people may not know it.”
“Do I want to see a change? No, “Trump said, when asked if he really intended to change the election date or if he intended to cast doubt on the outcome.” I don’t want to see a corrupt election. “
Even if Trump’s tweet about delaying an election, an act for which an army of legal scholars noted that Trump lacks authority, was just a bluff, underscoring a reality that is not much more reassuring: the president and his allies. They have been busy for months casting doubt on the credibility of an outcome in which Trump is not the winner. And they have done so through increasingly unfounded and selfish means, including directing tens of millions of dollars in advertising, multiple legal actions and nonstop messages, to attack the practice of voting by mail.
On Thursday, after the president’s morning tweets, Trump’s lieutenants made it clear that that It was the Trump team’s primary concern: turning mail voting, a well-established and fairly common practice in American elections, into a convenient bag man.
“The president only raises a question about the chaos Democrats have created with his insistence on all mail ballots,” said Hogan Gidley, national press secretary for the Trump campaign. “They are using the coronavirus as their means of trying to institute universal postal voting, which means sending every registered voter a ballot, whether they have requested it or not.”
Across town on Capitol Hill, the president pushed the send button on Thursday’s tweet and sparked a traditional backlash: Republicans ducked and claimed they didn’t see it. For those who couldn’t look, almost everyone pointed out that Trump lacked the authority to follow through on his alleged threat. Others suggested that he was simply joking.
“I don’t know how to interpret it,” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) told The Daily Beast. “All of you in the press, your heads will explode and write about it.”
But on the question of whether Trump’s words served to sow discord over the reliability of the election, a family split developed, with lawmakers close to the president who validated his concerns expressed about mail ballots, and his critics expressed fear of that Trump’s tweet be seriously published.
When asked if she was concerned that Trump’s tweet would undermine public confidence in the election, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) quickly said yes. “I think we should all be working to shore up faith in our electoral system,” said Murkowski.
And Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which formally warned against undermining confidence in the U.S. election, told The Daily Beast that he wished Trump had not said what he did.
“You can suggest whatever you want,” added Rubio. “We are going to have a choice, it will be legitimate, it will be credible.”
Even a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society expressed horror at Trump’s tweet.
“Until recently, I had taken Democrats’ claim that President Trump is a fascist as political hyperbole. But this latest tweet is fascist and is itself a reason for the immediate removal of the president from the House of Representatives and his removal from the Senate, “wrote Steven Calabresi in an opinion piece for The New York Times.
Many Republicans were content to avoid questions about the impact of Trump’s words on public confidence in the election. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded by saying that Trump was raising legitimate concerns about voting by mail. But he also expressed his confidence in the electoral process. “I feel like we will be ready to go in November and we will have free and fair elections,” Graham said.
While Trump’s main objective may have been to cast doubt on the outcome of the election, the fact that he expressed it shows the erosion of the bulwarks against authoritarianism, according to lawyers and academics. They cautioned that those safeguards depend largely on Republican condemnation. The fact that they weren’t, said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, represents an urgent threat to US political stability, particularly when Trump “attacks” federal agents in what he describes as cities controlled by Democrats against protesters combining with terrorists.
“Republican leaders have to denounce this. Trump is testing the waters, as he always does, ”said Stanley. “The concern is that after multiple presidential elections in which the minority party won and governed independently of its electoral support, American democracy is seriously challenged.”
Legal scholars agree that the law does not give the president authority to delay an election, but leaves that power in the hands of Congress. In 2014, a report by the Congressional Investigation Service evaluated the possibility of delaying an election due to a “sufficiently dire” terror attack. He concluded that while the Executive Branch had “significant delegated authority with respect to some aspects of the electoral law, this authority does not currently extend to establishing or changing the timing of elections.”
But the Trump years have provided routine lessons about the fragility of American institutions as bulwarks against authoritarianism. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that beyond the illegality of delaying the election, it was significant that Trump believed he possessed the power to delay it.
“There is a difference between saying ‘You are not allowed to do this’ and saying ‘You will not do it,'” Jaffer said. “That is the most disturbing thing here, not the possibility of them presenting a colorable argument, but that the president will act despite the absence of any colorable legal argument.”
A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a query about any recent guidance its Legal Counsel Office has offered on the matter. During Tuesday’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr said he “had never investigated” whether the president could override the statutes that set the date for the presidential election. Barr also objected when asked if he had committed the department not to interfere with a contested election result, simply saying, “I will follow the law.”
Several prominent Trump allies, including some of his clumsier advisers and tougher legal advocates, rejected the idea that he could or would delay the election. In a brief phone conversation, celebrity lawyer and Harvard Law figure Alan Dershowitz, a member of the defense team during Trump’s impeachment trial, said: “The answer is clear: only Congress can change the election date. . A president does not have the authority … Of course, any citizen has the right to ask Congress to make a change, but I cannot imagine that they will. “
But others close to the president kept the door open open. Testifying Thursday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an attorney, said of the presidential authority to delay an election: “In the end, the Justice Department, others will make that determination.”
Stanley, author of the book. How fascism worksHe said the presence of federal law enforcement in American cities made it “a dangerous time” for Trump to “raise doubts about the elections should he lose.” He noted that in Portland, Justice Department and Homeland Security agents “went and did what Trump wanted them to do” while using the language of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to justify the crackdown on protesters.
Vigilante violence linked to the elections is also possible in the event that Trump challenges the result. Rapidly armed elements like the Boogaloo Bois, a meme movement turned militant, are seeking a civil war or a racial war. In Louisville over the weekend, opposition armed militias gathered at a rally for Breonna Taylor but avoided violence.
Historically, “it is very familiar when you have a militarized force used to chasing foreign enemies and then you are allowed to operate internally to separate citizens from non-citizens, and now the concern is that they will be sent against protesters and protesters, and all of this it’s troubling before the election, “Stanley said. “Unfortunately, this is in the Republican Party, and unfortunately, the Republican Party has not been acting as a party in a democracy for quite some time.”
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