‘It must be made to fail’: Trump’s desperate bid to cling to power

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Donald Trump commemorates Veterans Day in first official appearance since Biden win – video

Donald Trump stepped out of the White House for the first time in six days on Wednesday as Americans strained to interpret a flurry of sudden personnel changes inside the administration, including at the Pentagon, while top Republicans refused to admit that Joe Biden had won the presidency.

Instead of ushering in a becalmed moment of transition, the US election eight days ago has given way to escalating concerns over the president’s shocking visible effort to cling to power – and over top Republicans’ failure to dispute the president’s wild claims of election fraud.

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The proportion of Biden’s victory in the popular vote crept up to 50.8% on Wednesday, the highest percentage for a challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Judges in six states had thrown out at least 13 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign to challenge the vote while agreeing to hear zero. There is every indication that Biden will be inaugurated on 20 January.

But continued leaks about the Trump team’s long-shot strategies for overturning the election result, and references such as one by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on Tuesday to a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”, fed a sense of alarm that America was witnessing more than just hardball politics, cynical fundraising or Trumpian sour grapes.

“What Donald Trump is attempting to do has a name: coup d’état,” said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University specializing in authoritarianism, on Twitter. “Poorly organized though it might seem, it is not bound to fail. It must be made to fail.

“Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless.”

Trump did not deliver remarks to reporters en route to a Veteran’s Day ceremony at Arlington national cemetery on Wednesday, where he stood with the vice-president, Mike Pence in the rain. Biden and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, attended a Veteran’s Day ceremony in Delaware.

Simultaneous to the Trump campaign’s move against election results in six key states, Trump was installing loyalists in the defense department and in other key security-related government posts. That was activity that might have prompted a warning from the United States about an authoritarian takeover if it happened in Turkey or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Trump fired the defense secretary, Mark Esper, by tweet on Monday and appointed as chief of staff Kashyap Patel, a key Republican operative during the Russia investigation. Trump also replaced the heads of intelligence and policy inside the Pentagon with political apparatchiks, while a fourth Republican political operative, Michael Ellis, was installed as general counsel of the national security agency. A further move by Trump to fire the FBI director was also reportedly under consideration.

“That is dangerous,” said Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University specializing in constitutional law and politics, of the 11th-hour personnel changes. “We have other checks, and I don’t believe that the military would go along with a coup, but we need to have people at the top of those departments willing to say what democracy demands.”

Multiple prominent analysts thought the moves inside the Pentagon smacked more of a hasty cover-up of conduct that could make trouble for Trump in the future than of a play to ensure control of the military for potential domestic deployment.

But moves by the administration in other theaters fueled concerns of an extraordinarily damaging plot afoot.

Earlier this week Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, issued a memo authorizing federal prosecutors to investigate election fraud, of which no evidence has yet to emerge. The director of the agency charged with funding presidential transitions has refused to sign off on Biden’s win, blocking millions of dollars and essential information transfer including on national security issues. The budget office has ordered employees to prepare Trump’s 2021 budget proposal for Congress – as if he will still be in office.

Trump’s attacks on the election result have been equally determined. Baseless fraud conspiracies spread by his Twitter account and by his sons are the subject of top-viewed posts Facebook, and polling indicates that the campaign to destroy faith in the election is working, with a majority of Republicans believing there was significant election fraud – on zero evidence.

Republicans are spending aggressively in an effort to find such evidence. A postmaster in Pennsylvania has claimed he was offered $130,000 by Republicans to stand up accusations of mail fraud, and the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas has offered $1m from his campaign coffers to anyone providing evidence of voter fraud.

As many times as it has already lost in court, the Trump campaign continues to bring lawsuits challenging the validity of ballots, with the ultimate aim of interrupting states’ efforts to certify their results, analysts say. If states cannot certify election results, the Trump campaign could pressure Republican-led state legislators to flip electoral votes – although that scenario, again, would be historically unprecedented and is seen as highly unlikely.

Most analysts saw the Trump campaign strategies to flip the election result outright as fatally weak. Trump lawyers admitted in court in Pennsylvania on Tuesday that there was no fraud they know about at present.

What’s really irresponsible about this is that they came forward with a claim of fraud with no evidence

Corey Brettschneider

“It’s not going to work. He’s not getting anywhere with these claims,” said Brettschneider. “What’s really irresponsible about this is that they came forward with a claim of fraud with no evidence.”

Trump also plans to flex his populist muscle, with organizers planning huge pro-Trump rallies in Washington DC on Saturday that they are calling the “Million Maga March”. Activists are calling for counter-protests if Trump’s plot on power advances further –especially if states start missing deadlines to certify their election results at the end of the month.

Republicans who might stop the spread of Trump’s lies about election fraud have instead treated the lies as creditable.

“At some point here, we’ll find out finally who was certified [the winner] in each of these states, and the electoral college will determine the winner and that person will be sworn in on January 20,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “No reason for alarm.”

Senator Lindsey Graham was more direct, telling Trump in a television appearance: “Do not concede.”

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The Republican pretense that the election result is not clear-cut pointed to motivations more immediate and less historic than a coup plot, many analysts thought. The party needs to pay down debt and keep voters activated for two difficult runoff US Senate races in Georgia on 5 January that will determine which party controls the Senate.

Trump also faces personal debts, in the hundreds of millions, once he leaves office. The Trump campaign has been drenching supporters with requests for money to “defend the election” – but a majority of the donations are being funneled to a political action committee Trump has just established.

In a public appearance on Tuesday, Biden was asked how he could “expect to work with Republicans if they won’t even acknowledge you as president-elect?”

“They will,” Biden said, expressing a faith not everyone shared. “They will.”