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Why Wouldn’t He?
That’s what we keep coming back to these days, when people ask us if Trump really might try to pull one of the extra-crazy anti-Democratic measures he’s been batting around, just to try to keep himself in power
And it’s getting to the point now among rabid Trump supporters where anyone close to the President who is advising him against doing a coup, is seen as being — and probably always having been — part of an ever-existing, ever-broadening plot against Trump. Which means that Trump’s lies are still working on them at least, which means there are a heck of a lot of people who are completely susceptible to propaganda out there.
That list of supposed plotters against the President now includes the Supreme Court, other politicians and judges he once supported, and maybe Attorney General Bill Barr, who wedged his way into the Trump Administration by literally arguing the President is the Justice Department, though now he just said in reference to the Presidential election:
“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to.”
However, Barr won’t be around after Christmas.
So a lot of what happens next hinges not just on Trump’s ego, sore-loser-dom, and never thinking of anyone but himself. It also has a lot to do with an assessment by him and others around him that some decent number of Americans might very well be willing to live under a dictatorship without complaining about it too much.
And we don’t just mean those ardent conspiracy theory believing Trump fans, who obviously largely would jump right in there. We’re also talking about swaths of the American public who might not really care all that much, because even though they might “get” it’s a bad thing, might also not “get” how Trump installing himself as a despot would have any significant impact on their day-to-day lives. “I’m not a political junkie”, one such person just told me today.
Now, Trump is denying he’s considering declaring martial law, in order to order the military to supervise a do-over of elections in several states he lost. (Presumably with a new…
