Trump's call to delay election is the opening act of a coup
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By C.J. Atkins

Donald Trump's proposal to postpone the 2020 election is nothing less than the opening act of a coup. The aim is not to actually delay the vote, as only Congress has that authority. Rather, this move is aimed at undermining confidence in the legitimacy of the results should Trump lose on November 3rd and, further, to sabotage efforts to expand vote-by-mail. This is a full-frontal assault on American democracy which must be blocked by a landslide vote against the Republican Party on Election Day.

In a tweet riddled with lies and falsehoods Thursday morning, Trump floated the idea of postponing the election to some unspecified future date. Repeating his worn-out line that allowing to people send in their ballots via the U.S. Postal Service will lead to an "INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT" outcome, he questioned whether the election should be pushed back until everyone can "safely" vote in person (even as he continues to insist it's safe to force students and educators back into classrooms).

Extensive research has proven that there is no such thing as widespread vote-by-mail fraud. There's simply no evidence to support the president's claim. To use his own words, that's fake news. Like restrictive voter ID laws, voter roll purges, polling place closures, artificial voting machine shortages in minority districts, and other suppression tactics, the effort to sabotage vote-by-mail is another part of the GOP scheme to shrink the number of people casting ballots-especially among communities of color, immigrants, and young people.

Trump timed his dictatorial trial balloon to distract attention from disastrous data released Thursday that showed the U.S. economy shrank by 32.9% in the April-June quarter. He took to Twitter to discuss supposed election fraud just 15 minutes after news broke of this worst-ever-recorded result was posted. Millions of workers are going to be jobless for a long time to come thanks to his administration's shameful management of the COVID-19 crisis, and there's nothing Trump can do to distract people from the crushing circumstances he's brought on them.

The president also knows he can't actually postpone or cancel the election unless he's willing to engineer an actual armed takeover. Only Congress has the authority to alter the date of balloting, and the Constitution says that Trump and Pence's term ends on January 20, 2021, no matter what. So he's not really serious about moving the election date....

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