The Coup That Wasn’t

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

 

Donald Trump is not done challenging the results of the 2020 election in court, and he is by no means done complaining. But there will be no “coup.” Any prospect of Trump remaining in office without a legal process that declares him the recipient of more legal votes in the decisive states has now evaporated. All that remains is a host of extremely long-shot court challenges — each of which is short on evidence. This was always the likely outcome.

 

Sure, we heard lots of overheated charges about how Trump was trying to stage a “coup” or “steal” the election. We have heard for years alarmist claims that Trump would not leave office peacefully. Trump, as usual, brought some of that on himself by his irresponsible rhetoric, his promotion of bomb-throwing lawyers into the spotlight, his general disregard for legal and democratic norms, and his inability to ever admit a fair defeat. From my own perspective, Trump’s behavior throughout this latest episode has underlined why he has always been unfit for the presidency as a matter of character. But there has been a disconnect — as there has been throughout Trump’s presidency — between what Trump might realistically do and what his opponents claimed he would do. That disconnect arises partly from their hysteria, but also from the limits on Trump’s power to act alone.

 

A trend that we have seen fairly consistently throughout Trump’s presidency, going back to 2017 and 2018, is that Republican politicians are most afraid to publicly cross Trump when he is running his mouth or using the unilateral powers of the presidency, and most effective in restraining Trump when they can — privately when possible, publicly when necessary — let him know that he needs help and that it is not coming. So, Trump is at his most unconstrained on Twitter or when acting entirely alone, as when he is using the presidential pardon power. Republicans know that criticism alone will bring them grief while doing nothing to stop him. The same mostly applies to the Trump White House or to other aspects of the government or the party that are under his sole control. Trump’s lawsuits are restrained only by how responsible his lawyers are, which is why it was so counterproductive to bring public-pressure campaigns against his original legal team and encourage him to rely instead on Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Lin Wood.

 

By contrast, when Trump actually requires the active assistance of Republican-elected officials, he has to avoid putting them in positions that require them to personally take steps that break with institutional or legal norms — not just shrug at Trump doing so. This is why Trump’s legislative record, his judicial nominees, and the behavior of most of his executive agencies (outside of the immigration area) all look a lot more like those of a traditional Republican presidency.

 

So, Trump tweeted, and a lot of Republican-elected officials looked the other way. He filed lawsuits and demanded recounts, but these are normal steps, even if ones that most politicians don’t take without a closer margin and a better set of arguments. Again, most Republican politicians were willing to let the process play out, recognizing that this was what a lot of their voters wanted. And several Republican-appointed judges have heard Trump’s legal claims and turned them away. Matthew Brann, the Middle District of Pennsylvania judge who wrote a scathing rejection of the most recent high-profile Trump suit, was an Obama appointee but had been active in Republican politics, the Federalist Society, and the National Rifle Association before taking the bench. As the losses in court have piled up, even conservatives committed to Trump’s cause have started publicly complaining that Trump’s lawyers have not been backing up their theories with evidence. On Monday, Rush Limbaugh went after Powell for this.

 

What happened when talk turned to whether Trump would pressure state legislators to appoint slates of electors who disregarded the popular vote in their states? As I noted on Friday, the obvious trouble sign for the plan was that even Trump and his campaign were unwilling to openly make the case for it. Was that because Trump was being responsible with his words? Unlikely. Much more likely, he was getting enough negative feedback to recognize that the plan was a non-starter with the Republican legislative caucuses he needed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. The White House meeting with the Republican heads of Michigan’s two legislative chambers ended with them publicly affirming that the election results would follow the state’s popular vote. Michigan then went ahead and certified a Biden victory, with a decisive vote by Republican canvasser Aaron Van Langevelde, who concluded, “We have a clear legal duty to certify the results of the elections. We cannot and should not go beyond that.”

 

In Georgia, the Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger has bent over backwards to provide a hand recount of the state; but he’s also spoken out vigorously in defense of the integrity of the voting process he oversaw. So has Al Schmidt, a Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia. There has been no significant groundswell of Republican state legislators publicly volunteering to vote in pro-Trump electors in states where Trump lost the vote. Republican governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Doug Ducey of Arizona have not pushed for any such plans.

 

Over the past week, multiple Senate Republicans have piped up to object to Trump’s scorched-earth approach in various ways. Joni Ernst told Guy Benson that it was “outrageous” and “offensive” for Powell to claim that Republican and Democratic candidates had paid to have their elections rigged. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse criticized Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome in Michigan, where Trump lost by over 150,000 votes, and Romney called the appointed-electors scheme “undemocratic.” Lamar Alexander, Shelley Moore Capito, and Bill Cassidy all called for Trump to authorize the General Services Administration to make presidential-transition funds and services available to Biden, while John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, and James Lankford all called for Biden to receive intelligence briefings. A variety of other statements pushing towards a transition and away from claims of a stolen election came from Susan Collins, Rob Portman, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski in the Senate, from Liz Cheney, Don Young, Francis Rooney, Adam Kinzinger, John Shimkus, Paul Mitchell, Don Bacon, Will Hurd, Tom Reed, John Curtis, and Denver Riggelman in the House, and from Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland.

 

Finally, on Monday evening, the Trump-appointed head of the GSA, Emily Murphy, gave the go-ahead to the Biden transition and briefings — earlier than had been done for George W. Bush in 2000 — with Trump’s express approval:

 

I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

 

Biden will receive, with the signoff of the Trump White House, the president’s daily briefing.

 

Efforts to pressure Republicans to take drastic steps have fared no better. Lin Wood called on Georgia Republicans to boycott the special Senate election on January 5 as a way of pushing Kemp to “order a special session of the legislature,” a preliminary step to appointing electors:

 

Let’s speak truth about @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue. Why are they doing little or nothing to support efforts by GA citizens to address unlawful election & need for @BrianKempGA

 to order special session of legislature? If not fixed, I will NOT vote in GA runoff. Will you?

 

Politicians love votes & money (not necessarily in that order). Want to get @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue out of their basements to demand that action must be taken to fix steal of the 11/3 GA election? Threaten to withhold your votes & money. Demand that they represent you.

 

But Donald Trump Jr. blasted the notion:

 

I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for @KLoeffler and @PerdueSenate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people. We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.

 

Presumably, the president’s son would not have brushed back the president’s lawyer so publicly if he thought the appointed-electors scheme was going anywhere.

 

At the end of the day, it would have required a lot of Republican assistance for Donald Trump to even contemplate taking the election out of the hands of the voters, the vote-counters, and the vote-counter-reviewing courts. It was the absence of that assistance, not the typically overwrought garment-rending by media Resistance figures, that resulted in the plan never getting off the ground. The Republicans who dug in and did their jobs, and those who spoke out, made a difference; so, too, did those who remained silent instead of leaping to the president’s aid.

 

None of this excuses Trump’s own words and deeds. Nor is it proof of any particularly exceptional virtue on the part of Republicans. What it does show is two things. One, the rest of the Republican Party was never the vast conspiracy of Resistance fever dreams. And two, the American system still works. Even among a defeated party with much suspicion of electoral misconduct afoot and a sitting president spinning wild ideas, the norms supporting a peaceful transition of power and acceptance of the verdict of the voters remain a strong pillar of our constitutional republic.