Bolton: “I disagree with that. As someone who has helped plan coups – not here, but, you know, in other places – it takes a lot of work. And that’s not what he did. It was just stumbling from one idea to another.”
But also, in my opinion, wrong. And it’s proven wrong by several things we know Trump considered doing between losing the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president on January 20, 2021.
Consider:
1) Trump has drafted executive orders that will have the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security confiscate voting machines in swing states. As CNN wrote earlier this year:
“While advisers publicly floated the idea at the time, revelations that two executive orders were actually drafted for different agencies to do the job underscore the extent to which allies of the former president wanted to weaponize the powers of his lame-duck administration , to cancel the election.
“Any operation for military or federal agents to seize voting equipment for political purposes would be unprecedented in US history.
2) Trump openly considered nominating environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clarke as attorney general in the days leading up to January 6. He did it because Clark, unlike incumbent Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, was willing to send a letter to swing states suggesting there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. (There wasn’t.) 3) Trump has flirted with appointing attorney Sidney Powell as special counsel to continue her efforts to overturn the election. “I’m making Sidney a special adviser to the president,” Trump told his chief of staff Mark Meadows in mid-December 2020. “Mark, you give her the forms…Give her the forms to get her on board.” (Powell was never officially appointed special counsel.) 4) Trump called the Georgia secretary of state and in a lengthy call urged him to “find 11,780 votes.” 5) Trump repeatedly pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence — including on before the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 — to overturn the results of the election, even though there is no constitutional authority for the vice president to do such a thing.
All of these actions suggest that Trump, in Bolton’s words, has made an effort to overturn a free and fair election. He relied on state and federal officials and at least considered using the official levers of government to pursue his fever dreams of the 2020 election.
The other point that I think Bolton’s analysis misses is this: Trump was not some low-level apparatchik trying to foment a rebellion. He was the sitting President of the United States. Which gave him more ability — as evidenced by the pressure he put on the Justice Department, as well as state and local officials — to try to get what he wanted.
The simple fact revealed when you look at the actions of Trump and his allies in the interregnum between the 2020 election and the 2021 inauguration is this: we came dangerously close to seeing the results of the 2020 election overturned .And that was because of what Trump did — and failed to do.
Add Comment