The Biggest Question Of The Election: How Will Trump Cheat

The Biggest Question Of The Election: How Will Trump Cheat Next?HuffPost   Thu, September 24, 2020  

WASHINGTON — With just six weeks to go until Election Day, President Donald Trump’s critics have a nagging worry: How will he cheat next?  With a president accused of stiffing hundreds of contractors as a private businessman, who knowingly accepted Russian help to win in 2016, who has already begged and extorted foreign leaders for help winning in 2020, that he will try in the coming days, they say, is a foregone conclusion.  “I think the notion of whether he will try to cheat is almost laughable. Of course he is going to cheat,” said Daniel Goldman, the former federal prosecutor who led the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment investigation of Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine.  Goldman said the possibilities range from actively encouraging foreign help again to announcing trumped-up charges against prominent Democrats in the closing days to trying to suppress the vote. “I think you’re going to see him use all the levers of government at his disposal,” he said. “That is incredibly scary.”  Mary Trump, the president’s niece who wrote in her recent book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” that Trump even cheated getting into the University of Pennsylvania by paying someone to take his SATs for him, said there is no need to speculate. “It’s already happening. He’s actively cheating already,” she said, citing the mistrust he is sowing in the use of mail ballots and his sabotage of the postal service to make it harder to deliver those ballots.  “The closer we get, the more bad polling he sees, the more desperate he will be,” she said.  Neither the White House nor Trump’s campaign responded to HuffPost queries on this topic.  Trump himself, asked specifically on Wednesday about whether he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose, would not do so. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” he said, and then continued his attacks on the legitimacy of mail ballots. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very, we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”  That came hours after he admitted that he expects the election to be decided by the Supreme Court, which is why he wants to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg last week. “This scam that the Democrats are pulling ― it’s a scam ― this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court,” he said.  Which itself came after repeated assertions that any election he does not win is, by that very fact, proof of its illegitimacy. “The only way they can win is to cheat, in my opinion,” he said last week.  “He will seek to shut down the election process as quickly as possible, so that a full count becomes difficult,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an authoritarianism expert at New York University.  All of Trump’s comments trying to delegitimize the coming election have come against the backdrop of Attorney General William Barr’s politically charged investigation to discredit a special counsel probe into the assistance Trump received from Russia in 2016 as well as the recent revelation that Russia is working to help Trump again. Trump, rather than publicly renouncing such assistance from Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, instead criticized his FBI director for revealing it to Congress.  One former national security official in Trump’s White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Americans who are not yet alarmed by Trump’s actions and statements to date are making a grave miscalculation.  “The president absolutely in his mind is convinced that the law does not apply to him,” the former official said, adding that Trump would, if he thought he could get away with it, try to invalidate the election entirely. “I would not put it past this president at all. If he could be a Putin-esque strongman, he would love that.”  There can be no doubt that Trump will do anything to try to win the election.  The question needing an answer is neither if or what but when.