The last US election?

 By Charles Dunaway

When Trump first began making equivocal statements about accepting the upcoming election results, I took it to be the PR musings of an undisciplined and irresponsible con man.  As we inch closer to Election Day, I am taking them very seriously.

Trump’s former campaign manager, Steve Bannon, has outlined a strategy that Trump appears to be ready to follow.  In this scenario, Trump would be ahead on Election Day when the votes of those who appear in person at polling sites are counted.  The mail-in ballots, which Trump continually and incorrectly calls fraudulent, will not be fully counted until many days, or even weeks later.  A recent CNN poll shows 66% of Republicans will vote in person and 53% of Democrats will vote by mail. 

Bannon says Trump should declare himself the winner on Election Night and call on the courts to stop the vote count.  The Supreme Court will have a 6-3 conservative Republican majority by November, and a more balanced court stopped the recounting of votes in Florida in 2000 resulting in George W. Bush becoming the president although he would have lost to Al Gore had the court not intervened.

Following Election Day, the US will be engaged in a battle of the lawyers, with Trump’s attorneys arguing in key states that the vote-counting should end, and Biden’s attorneys arguing that it should continue.  Given that Republicans have packed the Federal court at all levels over the last several years, the outcome of such a legal battle is not in doubt. 

There is no doubt that protests will erupt after the election protesting the coup.  Attorney General Barr is already calling protesters “insurrectionists” and “treasonous” who should be forcibly repressed and jailed.  There can be little doubt that if protests break out and especially if they involve property damage, the government will act decisively to stop them. The history of protest in the US is weak even without violent repression, so I am not optimistic that the protests will continue long or be successful.

If Trump is allowed to continue in office, the only possible Constitutional curb on Trump’s power will be impeachment. The House of Representatives will impeach, but unless Democrats win control of the Senate, they will not convict him. The same legal maneuvering used to secure a Trump win will also hurt Democratic Senate candidates, so a change of majority in the Senate is unlikely.

One can only recoil in horror at the prospect of a second Trump term both for the United States and for the world at large.  It’s likely he will allow neoliberal Republicans to destroy the US economy and continue to listen to Zionist neocons for foreign policy advice.  It’s not as though he has fixed principles or ethics, or even a political ideology of his own.  If the weak and uninspiring Biden were to eke out a win and successfully defend it in court, we might escape, but the best we could hope for is a return to the Obama years which set the stage for Trump’s victory in the first place. Do not envy America.

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Charles Dunaway is an American political commentator in Oregon. He is a retired computer systems consultant who has been producing and hosting a radio program called Wider View for the last 4 years. The program is distributed nationally by the Pacifica Network and is available as a podcast at widerviewradio.podbean.com.  The program focuses on the United States' imperialist role in the world and the political stagnation in the nation that helps maintain that role. 

He recorded this article for Press TV website.