A Coup in Search of a Legal Theory
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This story outlines how just two days after voting in the 2020 presidential election was completed, Donald Trump’s large adult failson was already conspiring with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to pursue the precise legal, or pseudo-legal, strategies that the Trump people would employ to try to overturn the election results, in the two months leading up to the January 6, 2021, coup attempt.
(This is your intermittent reminder that for the past four months Congress has been trying to indict Meadows for refusing to testify before it regarding these rather important matters, and that Merrick Garland can’t seem to quite get around to doing that. Apparently he’s still gathering evidence. This is like the tortoise and the hare, except the hare is an armed fascist, and the tortoise listens to NPR a lot).
In the text, which has not been previously reported, Donald Trump Jr. lays out ideas for keeping his father in power by subverting the Electoral College process, according to the message reviewed by CNN. The text is among records obtained by the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021.”It’s very simple,” Trump Jr. texted to Meadows on November 5, adding later in the same missive: “We have multiple paths We control them all.”
In a statement to CNN, Trump Jr.’s lawyer Alan S. Futerfas said, “After the election, Don received numerous messages from supporters and others. Given the date, this message likely originated from someone else and was forwarded.”
Immediately before his text to Meadows describing multiple paths for challenging the election, Trump Jr. texted Meadows the following: “This is what we need to do please read it and please get it to everyone that needs to see it because I’m not sure we’re doing it.”
An amusing sidelight to all this is that Junior’s lawyer’s defense of his client’s behavior consists of saying in effect, “Do you actually think this moron could have come up with any of this himself? He was just forwarding somebody else’s email! [cough, John Eastman, cough].
A not so amusing aspect is that, nearly a year and a half after the coup attempt – which as you may recall was largely if not wholly attempted right out in the open for two-plus months – nobody of any significance has been charged with anything, while the people who planned and executed it are planning, again right out in the open, to steal the next presidential election two and half years from now (Accusation, confession, etc.).
Of course there’s a very significant election coming up just seven months from now, and they’re going to be doing everything they can to steal that one, too. The problem with pointing that out is that it just shows that Both Sides are now trying to delegitimate elections, by claiming the other side is engaged in an ongoing comprehensive conspiracy to undermine the democratic process.
If you think that’s a parody, you haven’t been getting out much lately.
As to what to do about all this, the first step in combating what’s actually going on is to recognize it for what it is. Then you can fight it without the disadvantages of the eyes wide shut predilections that plague our institutionalist guardians of the increasingly imaginary guardrails of our liberal democracy.