Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History
The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get
legislators to override voters’ will eclipses even the bitter 1876
election as an audacious use of brute political force.
President Trump’s strategy has become clear over two days of
increasingly frenetic action by an executive who is 62 days from losing
power.
President Trump’s strategy has become clear over two days of
increasingly frenetic action by an executive who is 62 days from losing
power.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
David E. Sanger <https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-e-sanger>
ByDavid E. Sanger <https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-e-sanger>
* NYT, Nov. 19, 2020
*
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WASHINGTON — President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election
are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of
brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave
Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.
Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and
impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph
R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as
well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is
even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.
“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news
conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just
outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s
behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging
messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy
functions.”
Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the
states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify
their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their
ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.
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Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there
are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply
bend to the president’s will.
The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the
State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of
victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of
state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to
ignore the popular vote outcome.
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“That’s not going to happen,”
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/mike-shirkey-a-michigan-republican-who-will-meet-with-trump-said-this-week-he-would-not-override-bidens-victory.html>Mike
Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on
Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”
Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could
send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote,
arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would
create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that
the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested
in modern times.
Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election,
provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done.
Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio
State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider
all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”
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But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need
at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely
candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in
2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.
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Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election
results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a handrecount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s
victory
<https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/19/us/joe-biden-trump-updates#georgia-completes-its-full-recount-reaffirming-bidens-victory>on
Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.
Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild
conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy,
if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly
frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.
In just that time, Mr. Trump hasfired the federal election official
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/us/politics/trump-fires-christopher-krebs.html>who
has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the
vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an
overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is
misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16
electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.
In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in
1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the
United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by
wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His
Fraudulency.”
“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential
historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both
sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute.
In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that
Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”
“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge
powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him
for re-election.”
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He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters
at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the
polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th
Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the
president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans,
even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)
“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go
back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to
Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”
Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an
improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by
invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the
president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide
evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or
that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting
Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.
Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W.
Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of
his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected
arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The
arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to
fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had
vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the
philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of
television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired
Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland
Security,tweeted Thursday afternoon
<https://twitter.com/C_C_Krebs/status/1329521812951142400>.
“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m
talking about, you’re lucky.”
Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system
is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have
abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic
argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s
no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national
security adviser, whowas ousted last year
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/us/politics/john-bolton-national-security-adviser-trump.html>.
“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled
this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them
at the C.I.A.”
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