Date: 2024-10-31 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019392
Election 2020
Has Trump already won
Americans are Sleepwalking into a Stolen Election ... The Election isn’t Going to be Stolen. It’s Already Being Stolen.
Peter Burgess
A Screenshot of CNN. The chyron reads, “Trump Admits Blocking Money for USPS Will Hurt Mail-in Voting.” Source: CNN
There are 80 days to go. And right about now, America’s sleepwalking into a stolen election.
Why do I say that?
Consider the following set of facts. The mailed in vote is expected to rise to 51% of the total for Democrats in this election, thanks to the Covid pandemic being allowed to explode. But the Postal Service has warned mailed in votes might not arrive in time to be counted in 46 states out of 50 states. The President, meanwhile, has openly admitted to crippling the Postal Service, in order to…stop mailed in votes from being counted. Obama has come out and said that Trump is trying to “actively kneecap” the Postal Service.
There is an obvious, transparent plan to steal the election. Why on earth do Americans still want to debate this? Why, every time I write about this, does Steve or Tucker want to tell me that my “theory lacks evidence”? Trump has admitted it! It’s not the stuff of conspiracy theory — it’s come from the President’s very own lips.
That’s not the bad news. The bad news is that it’s working.
Let me say it again. Postal votes are going to rise to 50% of the total for the opposition, but the USPS has warned that it won’t be able to deliver votes in time in nearly every one of 50 states.
How did that come to be? Just a few weeks ago, a Trump ally was appointed to head the US Postal Service, who promptly purged it, and changed the centuries old practice and ethos of delivering letters “rain or shine,” to something more like, “we’ll deliver it if we want to.”
Hence, mail is now already backed up or going missing in state after state.
Then there’s the fact that thanks to Trump’s crony heading the USPS, 500 mail sorting machines have been “taken out of service.” That might not sound like a lot, but it’s 15% of the total — easily enough to swing an election.
And then there’s the sudden tripling of the price states pay to mail in votes.
That is not a recipe for any sort of regular election which is the stuff of a robust democracy. It is the stuff, to put it bluntly, of a stolen election.
Americans aren’t nearly concerned enough. They are sleepwalking into a stolen election.
What’s the endgame of this plan? It couldn’t be more obvious, and you probably already know it. Mailed in votes arrive “too late.” They’re “damaged” and therefore “uncountable.” Many mysteriously go missing. Nobody can quite track them down.
Those that do manage to arrive are the subject of intense, prolonged legal challenges. These legal challenges play out at a painfully microscopic level — county by country, city by city, town by town, a la “hanging chads”. They center on minutia. Are these votes really still countable? What exact time were they posted? Are they damaged on this side or that side? Do the signatures match? Were they handled properly?
The judiciary has already been captured. “My judges,” as Trump’s bragged, are hardly impartial. They’re incompetents and fools for a reason — appointed by Trump, they know where their bread is buttered. In municipality after municipality, the captured judiciary pays off: it decides the election, bit by bit, for the extremists.
Meanwhile, as all this plays out, for the nation, the results of the election are drawn out — into a vague, unforeseeable future. Where there should be the certainty of democracy, there’s only the haze of uncertainty. Nobody quite knows what to do. There are no good rules for this kind of situation — at least that’s what the Trumpists cry.
Off they march to the Supreme Court. Maybe they ask for a delay, maybe a postponement of the results, or maybe to cancel sets of votes altogether. The Supreme Court handily decides it for the Republicans — how many times have they done that by now, since the Supreme Court is stacked for them?
Bang! There’s your stolen election.
It’s easy enough to see, and you’ve already contemplated it. You know what’s coming — you’d be a fool not to.
I’m only here to tell you one thing, really. Your gut is precisely right. This is exactly how it happens. I say that as someone who’s survived authoritarian collapses, and studied it, too. If there was a textbook for how democracies die, this would be one of its final chapters.
A President announcing he’s crippled the vote? A newly captured government agency warning it can’t deliver votes in time in nearly every state? Sorting machines mysteriously being decommissioned just before an election? A captured judiciary ready to decide in favor of the extremists?
If this were any other country, Americans would just shake their heads, because, well, like I said, we all know that this is exactly how it happens.
The difference, though, is that this time it’s happening in America. And Americans — at least many of them, too many of them — seem to be relying on that old exceptionalism to get them through it. It can’t happen here! My friend, it is.
Make no mistake. The naysayers are wrong. The election really is being stolen in open view, for anyone who cares to look. Government agencies and branches captured by authoritarians working in tandem to form a kind of pincer movement. This, too, is how authoritarians work. They flaunt it, precisely to rub your face in it, so that a society comes to feel demoralized, dispirited, broken from the get go.
Imagine, for a moment, what happens if the vote isn’t delivered in time to be counted in nearly every state — just as a captured Postal Service warns. Trump either coasts to an easy victory, or his margin of defeat is made to be tiny, because it’s Democrats who plan to vote postally disproportionately. Then the legal challenges begin.
And now there’s a kind of war of attrition. Democracy is attacked with a thousand cuts — little slashes which cut away a vein here, a vein there. This challenge in that municipality, that attack in this one. It lasts months, and seems to go on forever. The game is to slowly drain the last lifeblood from democracy’s body. And with every passing day, democracy seems weaker, more frail, feebler. Soon, it’s bent over, then its knees buckle, and then it struggles for breath.
This is how it happens. America’s sleepwalking into a stolen election.
So what can Americans do about it? There are three things — but they’ve rejected two of them, culturally and socially, so that only leaves one. The first thing they could have done is to demand Trump’s resignation now, before the election can be stolen. That’s what a people more experienced with authoritarianism would have done, but Americans are apathetic at the best of times, so no such mass movement has emerged. The second thing Americans could have done was to build a truly transformational opposition — not so much a Biden and Harris, but leaders who left no doubt that they were capable of mobilizing voting in record numbers. But because the center and left fought one another, instead of uniting, now the opposition is, to it kindly, less than inspirational to either.
That leaves just one thing Americans can do now. Vote. VOTE. En masse. Vote like they’ve never voted before. Especially in constituencies that traditionally don’t, like young people and minorities. And not postally, either, since the Postal Service has been captured at the very top.
That’s it. Vote. Americans have denied themselves any other options — and now time is running dangerously, crucially short.
This is America’s last chance to keep its democracy. And watching Americans sleepwalking into a stolen election — I can’t say I’m confident about it all.
Umair August 2020
Eudaimonia and Co Eudaimonia & Co