[We must lay the groundwork now for the kind of mass action that
defends democracy and evicts this despicable, racist, wannabe
authoritarian from the White House.] [[link removed]]

WHAT IF TRUMP WON’T LEAVE?  
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Frances Fox Piven and Deepak Bhargava
August 11, 2020
The Intercept
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_ We must lay the groundwork now for the kind of mass action that
defends democracy and evicts this despicable, racist, wannabe
authoritarian from the White House. _

, Illustration: Daniel Greenfeld for The Intercept

 

EVENTS IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, Lafayette Square
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and Portland
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shown the country that President Donald Trump is prepared to do
whatever it takes to keep power, including embracing militant white
supremacists and using federal troops to tear gas and arrest peaceful
protesters. His noxious proposal
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postpone the elections is not the real threat to democracy. He has
openly declared that he may not abide by the election results in a
nationally televised interview on Fox News. Trump has a lot of tools
at his disposal to steal the election if he loses, many of which
he’s already putting into motion. Can he be stopped? We believe that
he can be, but only if most Americans are willing to put their trust
in people power — rather than courts, norms, and elites — to save
democracy.

The evidence of the risk we face is impossible to ignore. Trump is
questioning the legitimacy of an election that will rely on mail-in
ballots, even though he himself has often voted absentee
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has threatened to withhold funding 
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states that are trying to make it easier for people to vote, and he
is undermining
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U.S. Postal Service, both of which are essential, especially in a
pandemic. His Republican allies around the country have been passing
voter ID laws, purging
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rolls, and cutting
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number of polling places in urban areas, forcing people to stand in
line for hours to exercise their right to vote. This is a war on
voters who lean Democratic, specifically Black people, Latinos, Asian
Americans, Native Americans, naturalized immigrants, poor people, and
young people. We’ve already seen in Georgia
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these tactics play out on Election Day.

Trump’s administration has downplayed foreign interference in the
elections that benefit him. He has given succor to white nationalist
groups, and the Republican Party has deputized 50,000 “poll
watchers” to intimidate
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voters on Election Day. This will be the first election since 1980
during which the Republican National Committee will not be bound by a
federal consent decree that prohibited “ballot security” efforts
whose real purpose was to intimidate and disenfranchise minority
voters. Let’s be clear: Trump and the Republicans
are _already_ trying to steal the election.

Trump is already crying fraud with absolutely no proof and could use
the days after the election to stoke hysteria, rage, and violence
among his supporters.

If all that chicanery fails and Trump still loses, most people assume
that his only option is to concede defeat and leave — especially if
he loses by a big margin. But let’s picture what things could look
like after Election Day. The new voting procedures implemented in
response to Covid-19 will make this election feel different to many
voters, and will also delay the counting of ballots well past November
3. New York was _still _counting ballots over a month after its June
23 primary election. Most people expect a “blue shift” — meaning
that Trump may be ahead in the count of votes cast on Election Day
ballots but that mailed ballots will skew Democratic. Trump is already
crying fraud with absolutely no proof and could use the days after the
election to stoke hysteria, rage, and violence among his supporters.

To steal the election, we suspect he will adapt the standard playbook
of authoritarians everywhere: cast doubt on the election results by
filing numerous lawsuits and launching coordinated federal and state
investigations, including into foreign interference; call on militia
groups to intimidate election officials and instigate violence; rely
on fringe social media to generate untraceable rumors, and on Fox News
to amplify these messages as fact; and create a climate of confusion
and chaos. He might ask the Justice Department and the Department of
Homeland Security — which he has now weaponized against democracy
— to deploy to big cities in swing states to stop the vote count or
seize ballots. If he does all this right, he’ll be able to put
soldiers on the streets, inflame his base, and convince millions of
people that the election is being stolen from _him_. This would
create the predicate for overturning the will of the voters.

What’s his end game? Under the Constitution, state legislatures
decide how to appoint electors. They have all chosen to rely on the
popular vote. But could they create a false justification to claw back
this power? The legislatures in all of the closely contested states
this fall — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and
North Carolina — are controlled by Republicans. Trump could argue
that mail-in ballots should not be counted and ask state legislatures
to appoint electors different than the ones chosen by voters. This
would be undemocratic and illegal; it’s hard to conceive how you
justify changing the rules for appointing electors after the election.
But they have contemplated it before: Florida’s Republican
legislature seriously considered doing just that in 2000 before the
Supreme Court ultimately stepped in.

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All this orchestrated chaos could prevent the electors from casting
their ballots as required on December 14 or allow Trump to get a
competing slate of electors sent to Congress from the states. Either
way, he will have pushed our election into January when the new
Congress meets to decide the outcome. At this point, the rules about
how to resolve disputes are unclear, and could be governed by a badly
worded law passed in 1887. If neither candidate receives a majority of
the Electoral College votes, the Constitution’s 12th Amendment
allows the House of Representatives to choose the president. You
might think that’s good news — but the rules in this case give
each state delegation one vote, so the lone Republican congresswoman
from Wyoming has the same power as the 52 members of the
overwhelmingly Democratic California delegation. Right now,
Republicans control a majority of the state delegations even though
the Democrats control the chamber.

This is far from an exhaustive list of what could go wrong in the 78
fraught days between Election Day and inauguration. Experts
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considered the mechanisms in our rickety constitutional order that a
would-be autocrat could use to defy the will of the people and the
provisions that might restrain the usurpation. It turns out that our
democracy rests on a set of shaky norms more than on ironclad rules.
The possibilities for malign mischief are legion.

We will be urged not to “politicize” the process, to wait
patiently and to not “prejudge the results.” We need to ignore
such advice and take to the streets.

What must we be prepared to do if Trump questions the legitimacy of
the electoral results and won’t concede defeat? We can learn
what _not _to do from the disastrous 2000 election in which George
W. Bush lost Florida and therefore the election to Al Gore but ended
up taking the White House anyway. Republicans famously mobilized a
“Brooks Brothers riot” of young white male campaign staffers, many
flown in from D.C., to protest the recount and create an atmosphere of
intimidation and chaos. Democrats dithered, mobilized no one, and
played by Marquess of Queensberry rules. They naively relied on the
courts and local election officials to validate Gore’s victory. The
ultimate result of this pathetic Democratic strategy was not only a
Bush victory but the Iraq War, the racist and inept response to
Hurricane Katrina, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the rich.

Exactly the same dilemma will face us this time if Trump won’t
accept defeat. Joe Biden’s campaign is recruiting lawyers, not
organizers, and Biden himself has expressed misplaced confidence that
the military “will escort [Trump] from the White House with great
dispatch” on Inauguration Day. Democratic Party operatives,
good-government types, an army of constitutional lawyers, and other
self-appointed experts will urge us not to “politicize” the
process, to wait patiently and talk about the “rule of law,” to
not “prejudge the results” — to trust the process and the
courts, to stay home and let the smart boys in D.C. work things out on
our behalf.

We need to ignore such advice and take to the streets. We have been
through four horrendous years in which our vaunted institutions have
failed to hold Trump to account — most notably with the failure to
convict him in the Senate after the House impeached him. The
Republican Party and Fox News have divorced themselves from both the
formal rules and the unwritten norms that constrained unaccountable
executive behavior. During the public health crisis, the president and
many Republican leaders have shown contempt
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a willingness
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fan the flames of outlandish
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There’s no reason to believe that there are any norms that will
constrain this president, who likely faces criminal prosecution when
he leaves office. His fellow Republicans have had four years to reign
him in and have chosen not to. And if you think John Roberts’s
Supreme Court will save us, think again: For all the attention given
to a few unexpected victories for liberals, the Court ruled four
separate times this term against voting rights.

While institutions, norms, and elites have failed us, there is
abundant evidence that mass protest produces change. We are living in
a golden age of social movements. Most recently, the Movement for
Black Lives changed
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white people think about policing in America
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put bold new demands
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the agenda, and is producing substantial, albeit thus far
insufficient, changes in policies. The immigrant rights movement
responded to the Muslim ban and the caging of children at the border
with mass protest that forced a national reckoning with these cruel
policies. Workers, often outside of union structures, have taken to
the streets in extraordinary numbers – from the Fight for 15
to strikes
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Amazon employees and essential workers. They have won big increases in
wages and improved working conditions. The Occupy movement
reintroduced the problem of economic oligarchy into the political
debate. Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s presidential
candidacies were powered by this movement vision and pushed the
Democratic Party to the left. And the “resistance” groups that
mobilized early in the Trump years — the Women’s March,
Indivisible, and others — have built muscle memory among millions of
people of what it’s like to engage in sustained activism. Most
encouraging, these movements have recruited millions
of _new_ supporters. These groups together provide a powerful social
base from which to contest the president’s planned usurpation of
power.

And the movements have substantial leverage in two decisive arenas:
politics and the economy. In politics, the Democratic Party relies on
voters allied with these movements. If the party decides to play
hardball, it can stop Trump from stealing the election. Right now,
Democrats can insist on funding for a free and fair election as well
as the Postal Service, and ensure that local election systems have the
resources and systems in place to accommodate the surge of mail-in
ballots. And when Trump tries to steal the election after November 3,
Democrats will control governors’ mansions in Michigan, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If the Republican legislatures
in these states try to overrule the will of the people, governors can
push back and send a legitimate electoral vote tally to Congress.
Likewise, after the election, Democratic House and Senate members will
have leverage of their own.

Getting Democrats to use the full extent of their power will not be
easy. It will take a mass movement on a scale we have not yet seen,
and the mobilization will need to be sustained for weeks and possibly
months. Intense pressure from millions of people — that rivals the
intensity of the Trump base — will be needed to stiffen the spines
of national and state Democratic leaders.

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Related
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The Democratic Party Must Harness the Legitimate Rage of Americans.
Otherwise, the Right Will Use It With Horrifying Results.
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The professional communicators, technocrats, and lawyers in much of
the mainstream Democratic Party and some in the media will be
horrified by this call for a mass nonviolent uprising in response to
the theft of an election. Culturally, the professional, middle-class
people in these roles believe that expertise and good judgment, not
mass protest, deliver the goods. They have learned in their own lives
that rational debate, rule-following, and conflict avoidance help them
climb the ladder. Unfortunately, these traits and behaviors don’t
work against autocrats. Politically, the Democratic Party has, for 30
years, triangulated, dodged, and capitulated to its ruthless
opponents, and since its leaders are from that earlier generation
schooled to cower, they will not adapt quickly now. The liberal
establishment inside the Beltway will argue for sober analysis,
moderate messages, following procedures, and, above all … for
waiting. We must prepare to defy those milquetoast nostrums just as
much as we prepare for Trump’s planned theft of the election.
Overcoming complacency, rampant incredulity that “it could happen
here,” and misplaced faith in norms, courts and elites may be our
biggest challenges.

Unfortunately, rational debate, rule-following, and conflict
avoidance don’t work against autocrats.

Another key movement objective should be to force corporate and
Republican elites to break with Trump. Doing so will require pushing
them to answer a simple question: Is the price of keeping Trump in
power greater than the price of allowing Biden to take over as
president? Truth be told, Biden should not scare the elite. He has
been sympathetic to their agenda on everything from bankruptcy to
trade, and has resisted policies like Medicare for All. But Trump has
delivered deregulation
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tax cuts, and huge numbers of judges
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the right’s core constituencies. He has, until perhaps recently,
been good for their bottom line. So the protests will need to be not
only boisterous and performative but also to put profits at risk. We
should plan for and encourage forms of mass action such as work
stoppages, consumer boycotts, and rent strikes that target the
corporate class. The message from us to them needs to be clear: If you
stand by and allow Trump to steal the election, we will threaten your
profit. The only thing that would compel corporate titans and their
political lackeys in the Republican Party to abandon Trump would be a
crisis — not a crisis of conscience but of profitability.

[illustration of people protesting]

Illustration: Daniel Greenfeld for The Intercept

If Trump steals the election, a broad united front will have to make
the country ungovernable and the reigning regime illegitimate, despite
the risks involved. We can take lessons and heart from other countries
around the world where autocrats have sought to steal elections. We
can pull off a peaceful Orange Revolution
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so, we will need to encourage mass civil disobedience — and dare the
authorities to arrest hundreds of thousands of people day after day.
If an illegitimate election gives rise to civil disorder that cannot
be easily suppressed, corporate and political elites will move to dump
Trump to protect their interests.

To prevent Trump from stealing the election, we must act now. Movement
leaders should discuss these scenarios with their members and plan for
action immediately on election night and beyond. We can also reach
beyond progressive bubbles and talk to other people of good will,
local elected officials, civil servants, members of security forces,
and faith and civic leaders who will likely be willing to take risks
they have never previously considered if they are engaged about the
stakes and respectfully invited in. Thousands more people should be
trained in the methods of nonviolent civil disobedience; this would be
the right way to honor and carry forward
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tradition of the late John Lewis, who famously enjoined us to make
“good trouble, necessary trouble” in response to injustice.
Organizations should create bail funds and recruit lawyers. Everyone
working to defeat Trump should redouble their efforts, with a focus on
mobilizing voters of color — a landslide weakens Trump’s hand —
and also be prepared to keep staff and volunteers going until noon on
January 20. Grassroots groups in key states should be supported with
extra human and financial resources, since all of us are depending on
them to be able to keep up the fight past Election Day. Everyday
people can make plans as workers, tenants, and consumers to organize
and prepare to use their economic leverage in the days and weeks after
Election Day to cut off the source of profits for Trump’s corporate
enablers. We can also organize mutual aid, building on the explosion
of such effort
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the pandemic, to support people who take such risks, many of whom
already face great hardship.

We hope that the worst does not unfold this fall. If the establishment
concludes Trump is a menace to them as well as to the rest of us, they
may yet rally to find a path to ease Trump out of the way and get him
to abide by the results. But we should not make the fatal mistake of
underestimating Trump or, more importantly, his supporters and the
vast infrastructure aligned behind him. Trump did not beam into
America from another planet; there are millions of people who are
driving this authoritarian turn, and they are independent actors
unlikely to stand down. If they don’t believe
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Covid-19 or in wearing masks
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and do believe in unproven drugs
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what makes anyone think they’ll believe Trump lost the election? Fox
News and the right-wing social media apparatus are formidable vehicles
for mobilization and coordination. Perhaps most ominously, some of
local law enforcement has proved to be in cahoots with the right-wing
machine.

So we should prepare now to respond — psychologically and
strategically — to something akin to a coup. These are dark but
plausible scenarios, and we’d be better off facing than avoiding
them. The worst of all possible outcomes would be for a broad united
front of anti-Trump forces to be caught flatfooted in the 72 hours
after Election Day, stunned by his brazenness and gathering its wits.
We must lay the groundwork now for the kind of mass action that
defends democracy and evicts this despicable, racist, wannabe
authoritarian from the White House. In so doing, we will remind
ourselves that American democracy is not a set of institutions or
rules or an event that happens once every four years; it is what
everyday people do to participate in and shape the life of our
country.

_Frances Fox Piven is a distinguished professor emerita of political
science and sociology at the Graduate Center at CUNY. _

_Deepak Bhargava is a distinguished lecturer in urban studies at
CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies._

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