It Can Now Be Plainly Said:

Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État

During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off.

Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy.

We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric.

But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make
because it was hypothetical.

Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals,
or at least vague ones.

And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague,
so if she or any Democrat tried to say,
for example,
that there was a very real threat that once in office,
Trump might try to cancel elections,
most people kind of tuned that out.

Well, we’re now beginning to see it.

Let’s start with elections.

The Washington Post
—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there
—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists”
(a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think)
who say they’re working with the Trump administration
🔥“are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”

The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting,
and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying,
is a total lie.

China did not interfere in the 2020 election.

Trump and his people often said so,
the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter,
whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true.

Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China,
but nothing that reached his father.

The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election,
and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China
“considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found
—and isn’t this a surprise?
—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia,
trying to help Trump:

“The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative
—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014
—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden,
his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

⚠️ But Trump administration officials
—including Attorney General Bill Barr
—pushed the China lie aggressively.

💥So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again
and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.
https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Threads