The Best of Trump

Trump has considerable advantages when it comes to pulling off a coup. He has stocked the federal bureaucracy with cronies who were ready and eager to help him steal this election — including a postmaster general who barely bothers to hide that he's trying to slow down the mail and an attorney general who has eagerly joined Trump's efforts to delegitimize mail-in ballots. Trump also has a Republican Senate that has so far backed his every play, no matter how corrupt or even criminal, to hold on to power. He has hundreds of state-level Republican politicians willing to pull all sorts of strings to help him. (Which is one reason why Trump performed much better than expected in some states — voter suppression works.) And he has a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, one that is hostile to the very concept of voting rights. To ice that particular cake, a number of those justices — including Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh — have made it clear they were willing to entertain ludicrous legal arguments to throw out legitimate ballots. But Trump just can't get out of the way of all the people ready and willing to help him steal this election. His stalwart belief that he knows better than the experts and that any problem can be met with more bluster and bullshit is, once again, breaking a system that, if he'd just left it alone, might have actually worked for him. This is how he kept failing at business. Trump was basically handed a billion dollars in free cash — first by his father and then through his time on "The Apprentice" — over the years. He could have stuffed that money in a mutual fund, spent the rest of his life playing golf, and been rich beyond most people's wildest imagination. Instead, Trump insisted on burning through all that dough on a series of bad business decisions, putting him anywhere from $400 million to over $1 billion in debt.  Similarly, if Trump had reacted to the coronavirus by stepping aside and letting the medical experts, some of whom still exist in the federal government, do their jobs, it's likely that the pandemic would be far better controlled. He would have enjoyed a ratings boost that would have helped his re-election chances. Instead, Trump meddled every step of the way: undermining testing, insinuating that the whole thing was a hoax to hurt him, mocking people who wear masks, encouraging people to ignore social distancing and pushing snake-oil "miracle" cures, and even one point, pondering whether injecting oneself with household cleaning products might be the magic bullet. Thankfully, Trump's insistence on mismanaging his affairs appears to be undermining his own efforts at a coup. The original plan was clearly to cough up some dense legal language that made it sound as if there were legitimate constitutional concerns that counting all the votes would somehow imperil our electoral systems. It would be total nonsense, of course, but the rebuttals would also come from lawyers talking legalese, causing most of the public to view the whole thing as an impenetrable legal dispute rather than an outright assault on democracy.