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Here’s a question Americans should be considering carefully: at what point can a president repudiate the results of an election?
Or getting down to cases, how much skullduggery do Democrats and their proxies have to pull before President Trump can rightfully announce: “This wasn’t an authentic election, and I am duty-bound to reject it and call for another”?
This is not idle speculation but a very real and pressing concern. This morning, President Trump tweeted:
As innocuous as the president’s tweet may seem at first glance, this is a stunning pronouncement. President Trump appears to be prepping for one of two scenarios: (1) the president is laying the groundwork for postponing the election; or far more likely (2) he is laying the groundwork for rejecting the November election results because of widespread fraud and voter intimidation.
It’s not hard to guess the president’s meaning when he says “securely and safely vote.” Using the pretext of the China virus, Democrats are pushing for universal mail-in voting (as distinct from the rigorous absentee-ballot procedure), a scheme that begs for widespread voter fraud.
Check out this Mail-In Voting experiment by a local news station! https://twitter.com/i/status/1288616496638255105— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Less discussed but even more troubling is the rioting and mob intimidation that have grown into daily or weekly events in metropolises across the country.
There is no reason to think Democrats and their proxy fighters such as BLM and Antifa won’t arrange to have “protests” in full swing come election day-organized gatherings with armed, masked, black-clad goons distributed around polls in places like Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Atlanta.Will the police in these metropolises disperse the mobs so citizens feel safe to vote?
Of course not. Liberal mayors will mumble about “peaceful protests” and “a historic moment,” then let the goon squads do whatever they want–including manipulate access to voting locations. Remember when BLM/Antifa set up armed checkpoints at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle? What’s to keep similar tactics from unfolding on election day around polls?
City neighborhoods known to be conservative leaning–for example Burbank and Pasadena in the greater Los Angeles area–could wake up to find protesters choking their streets and threatening anyone who matches a conservative profile:
“Only marginalized people get to vote this year, and you don’t look marginalized to us; so you’d better turn around and go home if you know what’s good for you.”
Rioters have shown no hesitation torching police stations and sacking federal courthouses. There’s no reason to think they will treat polling locations with any more sanctity. Should exit polls point to specific areas swinging toward President Trump on election day, goon squads could easily seize voting locations and burn ballots in the street, just as they have burned American flags and police cruisers–all under the aegis of “peaceful protest.”
If these scenarios seem far fetched, I would encourage you to go back through the last four years and count the number of events that seemed far fetched and unprecedented prior to their actually unfolding.
These days, the strategy of the Democrats is not “civil war”–the term preferred by so many conservative commentators–but insurgency.
Democrat leaders know better than to threaten direct, state-enforced voter suppression and open rebellion at the municipal or state level.
Rather, they are taking a permissive, hands-off attitude to loosely affiliated proxy fighters, who do the intimidation and insurrection for them outside of any official sanction.
An insurgent approach grants liberal mayors and governors deniability and prevents direct federal retaliation against them.
If/when the goon squads burn inconvenient ballots or block voters from the polls, liberal politicians will announce that the outrages were perpetrated by a few trouble makers (who were really far-right agitators, doncha know) and move blithely forward to certify victories for Basement Joe Biden and Democrats on down the ticket.
That is, unless some of the results still go against Democrats, in which case the interference by their own proxies will be used as an excuse for a do-over.
“Constitutional crisis” doesn’t even begin to describe what unfolds thereafter. We could see the president, joined by Republican governors and congresspersons, repudiating the election on one side; and Democrat governors and congresspersons demanding acceptance of the dubious results on the other side, lamenting that the country might otherwise fall into instability and paralysis.
In such an emergency, the whole tangle of disputes would probably get tossed to federal courts for adjudication. What happens there is anyone’s guess. (If you have wondered why President Trump made such a priority of confirming conservative justices to the federal bench over the last four years, consider that the president saw this scenario building ages ago and prepared for it.)
A sullied and compromised election seems almost certain–think of the 2000 Bush-Gore Florida recount debacle, but played out in a dozen states at once, with the addition of coercive and destructive mobs ratcheting up the pressure.
It seems like an excellent time to take Kurt Schlichter’s oft-repeated advice: get expert training in the use of a firearm and buy one, in that order. Maybe everything will unfold in an orderly and peaceful manner; but if it doesn’t, ordinary people are going to have no other fallback when the party starts.
