Before Donald Trump even knew he had lost the election in 2020, he, Steve Bannon, and Republicans in Congress had a plan. They are now using the same playbook for the 2024 election, but this time they’re going to be better at it.
The 2020 Election Coup Plot
Prior to the election in 2020, Donald Trump began claiming that it would be rigged. There was going to be massive fraud, he said. The Democrats are going to cheat—that’s why they’re using mail-in ballots, he said.
Over the months before the election in 2020, Donald Trump and his allies started talking about how easy it is to cheat with mail-in ballots (it’s not, but being a conman, Trump probably had some ideas). Democrats weren’t using mail-in ballots so they could cheat. They were using them to prevent further infection and spread of a deadly virus during a worldwide pandemic!
An aside: As I am now typing this post, it just hit me that perhaps the entire purpose of their COVID denialism movement was so they could say Democrats are only using it as an excuse to use mail-in ballots so they can cheat more easily. I never thought about a connection between the two before. But I digress..,
Whether they truly thought that COVID was a “hoax by Democrats” or not, the denialism of it being a true danger was already baked into their electorate. It made their claims that there was no other reason to vote by mail more potent, making it appear that it was all a Democratic plan to rig the election against then-president Donald Trump.
The initial part of their coup plot was to have Trump come out and claim victory early, whether he actually won the election or not. With him now the winner, he can claim any votes that are still being counted are fraudulent.
We now know that Trump is not an intelligent man. That’s why my theory at the time—after seeing him explain the cheating going on a few times in interviews—I attributed his “big dumps” comment and his rants about fake ballots being counted to his misunderstanding of election laws in certain states.
For instance, in my state of Pennsylvania, I knew that there were over 3.5 million ballots mailed out to voters who requested them, which means officials had to hand count 3.5 million ballots! Now, I don’t know if this is the case in every state, but here in PA the ballot is placed into what they call a “security envelope” (which is just a yellow envelope with “official election ballot” printed in black all over it). I assume it’s to prevent anyone from seeing the ballot through the envelope, or more likely, it’s a way for the GOP to find fraudulent ballots. Then the ballot, inside the security envelope, sealed shut, is placed into the outer envelope, which is sealed, signed, and dated by the voter, and mailed back—or put into a ballot dropbox if you prefer to save a stamp.
Take into consideration, that election workers who are counting the ballots have to open two envelopes to get to the actual ballot, along with the other issue I’m about to explain. Here is the part I thought maybe Trump wasn’t aware of: The Republican legislature in Pennsylvania, prior to the 2020 election, passed a law stating that election officials can’t even OPEN mail-in ballots before 7 AM on election day, November 5th. The same law exists in Alabama, Mississippi, and North Dakota (as of 2020). That is why the results for Pennsylvania were so delayed. Imagine opening 2 envelopes 3.5 million times before having the ballots ready to begin counting!
So Republicans in my state were responsible for the long delay in having the results. If the workers could have at least opened ballots as they came in, the process of counting the ballots could have started on election day. Instead, they counted the votes for that day first, which we know were majority Trump, making it appear that he was going to win. Once the mail-in ballots were being counted, which we know were majority Biden votes, it looked like Trump was winning, and so “the Democrats started adding votes for Biden willy-nilly, to prevent him from winning.”
After recent reporting, I no longer agree with my former theory that Trump just didn’t understand election law and how it differs in each state. Perhaps that’s still true, but it wasn’t the only reason behind what Trump and allies did after the 2020 election. They planned a coup and they knew they were planning a coup. It didn’t all come together haphazardly after he lost the election.
They claimed victory while it had looked like Trump was the winner in order to make all of the votes that came in after that—fraudulent. At the time, I thought Trump was just pissed that it looked like he had won (after they finished counting the votes cast that day) and then he suddenly started losing his lead (because they were counting the mail-in ballots which lean Democratic).
The next part of their plan was posting about “stop the steal” and “stop the counting!” in the major cities (with majority black populations), and have their paid actors go to counting centers to get the crowd riled up, feed them false information about what they were seeing (through glass windows meant to show transparency in the count, that nothing nefarious was going on), and to start chants like “STOP THE STEAL!” and “STOP THE COUNT!”.
I saw the mobs of angry Trump supporters outside these counting centers and they were going nuts. In states with no license to open carry, you saw men with rifles among the crowd. I was scared at the time, to be honest, not for myself, but for the people inside, doing the counting, because they had to leave the building eventually to go home! I was afraid that one of them would be assaulted—or even killed—with how angry the people in those mobs were.
As the reporter of one of the pieces breaking the news said, he blamed a lack of education, and a trust in what they read on Facebook for all of those people gathering in front of those centers. I agree with him 100% on the lack of education part. He wasn’t saying these people dropped out of high school, he meant that they had no understanding of how elections work and that the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots meant 1) that it wouldn’t be possible to have a result for the election the same day and 2) what the disparity between the person leading in the beginning vs. the actual winner would be.
We, as in people on the left, were aware of how those factors were going to affect the results. Mainstream media explained it several times, as did people I followed online and the independent media I watch. Fox News viewers, on the other hand, probably had no clue how a large number of mail-in ballots would affect the election. All they heard was the demonization of trans people, immigrants, and the “fact” that Democrats were going to cheat. The conspiracies and lies on Facebook didn’t help either. I saw a few posted by folks I graduated high school with. It still ties into the education part, though, because if I hadn’t known ahead of time what was causing the delay, I may not have laughed them off!
I will now skim over the final steps of their 2020 election coup plot.
They had fake electors in the battleground States sign fake certificates and the certificates were then hand-delivered to Kenneth Chesboro in a hotel lobby. He then delivered them to the point person in Congress, Jim (gym) Jordan (We know these details thanks to evidence obtained by Jack Smith). He would put them in with the real certificates so Mike Pence could act like he didn’t know which ones were real and they’d have to be sent back to the states for clarification. Eventually it would end up in the House of Representatives where, at the time, there was a majority of Republican votes.
2020-2021 coup complete! Trump remains in the White House!
Coup Plot For the 2024 Election
From The Washington Spectator:
”In Phase One, state and local officials loyal to Trump—aided and abetted by outside pressure groups and lawyers—erect obstacles designed to suppress votes for Harris, Walz, and Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. The Brennan Center has documented the systemic enactment of laws designed to make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or vote. These Republican schemes were enabled by the Supreme Court’s shameful decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in which the conservative majority voted 5-4 to narrow the Voting Rights Act.
That opinion, written in 2013 by Chief Justice Roberts (a Republican appointee and life-long crusader against voting rights), led 29 states, including the entirety of the former Confederate States other than Virginia, to enact at least 94 voter suppression laws over the following decade. Those laws recurrently limit absentee voting, permit partisan interference in elections, and threaten the people and processes that make elections work.
Trump’s Phase One strategy now includes massive purges of the voter rolls in key states like Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It also extends to Republican strongholds such as Florida, which has removed at least one million registered voters since 2022, of whom 90% are reported to be Democrats or unaffiliated; and in Texas as well, where Governor Greg Abbott has trumpeted that state’s removal of another million registered voters—all in the name of election integrity.
2024 Coup: Phase Two
Phase Two involves multiple initiatives. First, Trump and his team are sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt about the validity of the elections, with the goal of weakening public confidence in the process and the results, and laying the groundwork for challenges to election outcomes in key jurisdictions that the Trump/Vance ticket actually loses.
Trump supporters have already promised they will challenge electoral count certifications in any swing state in which election officials have found that Trump lost. They are enacting laws that have the goal of enabling them to shut down vote counting and vote certification, such as the new Georgia law that gives power to a new MAGA-controlled Georgia election board to delay and potentially prevent certifications that are adverse to Trump.
There is also the risk of direct action by Trump supporters seeking to physically block electors in states narrowly won by Harris from meeting in compliance with state law to cast, sign, seal up and certify their electoral votes on December 17. Such illegal and potentially violent interventions would be aimed at preventing the state from submitting its electoral votes in the time and manner required by the ECRA.
In a recently released report, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) identified 239 election deniers in eight swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). 50 are Republicans running for the House or Senate, 6 are Republicans running for state executive office, 102 are sitting state and county election officials, and 81 are leaders of state and county Republican organizations.
While the strategic positioning and overtly anti-democratic views of some of these individuals have gained serious mainstream attention in major media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, the same level of focus has not been afforded Phase Three, the MAGA team’s post-election endgame.
2024 Coup: Phase Three
Phase Three would be activated should the Harris/Walz electors certified by the states constitute a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Phase Three has three minimum prerequisites. First, MAGA forces must achieve control over at least one house of Congress – and preferably both. Second, they must be united in their determination to overturn the election by decertifying the electoral votes for Harris/Walz in one or more states in which the state executives have certified the Democratic ticket has won. Third, the MAGA-leaning majority of the Supreme Court would have to find that Congress has the power to throw out electoral votes that the Congressional majority doesn’t like.
Let’s look at how the Team Trump would get there.
Using Control of Congress to Control the Presidential Result
The easiest pathway for the MAGA forces to overturn a Harris victory would be for Republican members of Congress to secure a majority in both houses in the November elections, and then award the presidency to Donald Trump in the upcoming Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2025.
Following the requirements of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), the bi-partisan bill enacted in 2022 in response to pervasive election denialism in 2020 and Trump’s orchestration of the January 6 insurrection, at least 20 Senators and 87 Members of the House would first need to notify the Joint Session that they object to the counting of electoral votes in just enough states won by Harris to leave Trump with a majority of the remaining electoral votes.
The objections would presumably cover both of the grounds for rejection as authorized under the ECRA: Republicans would argue that electoral votes were not lawfully certified in the given state or states under the laws of those state(s), and they would contend that votes were not “regularly given,” on the basis of unproven claims of mass voting fraud or other asserted election failures.
Under the ECRA (as with its 1887 predecessor, the Electoral Count Act [ECA]), the two houses of Congress would then meet separately and vote on whether to accept or reject the certification in those selected states. The risk for Trump is that some Republican members would be unwilling to go along with this strategy. But in practice, that risk is primarily in the Senate, as he has effectively purged non-MAGA Republicans in the House.
If Trump can get a MAGA majority in both houses, that partisan majority could reject certifications of just enough states to take away a Harris win in the Electoral College, thereby granting Trump an outright majority of the remaining votes that were certified. Once Trump’s Congressional supporters threw out the electoral votes of the disputed states, Trump would become President.”
There you have it. A complete picture of the coup Donald Trump attempted in 2020 and an upcoming attempt at another coup in 2024. Now that he and his allies have had a practice run, and know what will and will not work, a coup in 2024 will be far more dangerous.
