Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Why this retired general says Trump loyalists want to stage a coup: ‘Crazy thing going on inside that White House’

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A four-star United States retired general is sounding the alarm on key national security concerns after President Donald J. Trump shakes up the Pentagon staff less than one week after losing the election to President-elect Joe Biden.

“I have been shot at a lot and nearly killed a bunch of times,” said Gen. Barry Richard McCaffrey (ret.). “I’m not an alarmist. I stay cool under pressure. Mark me down as alarmed. I just listened to Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) — wonderful, experienced, mature guy — say this is just payback to [Mark] Esper not being a loyalist. I don’t believe it. We’re watching a setup of some people who are unqualified for office to be in control of the 2.1 million men and women of the armed forces.”

McCaffrey said, “And I remind our viewers, the only one who can give orders to the armed forces is the president and the secretary of defense. This acting secretary Chris Miller is a perfectly good, experienced combat soldier. He is unqualified for this office. The other three, one of them, a retired one-star, is a dangerous man. That team moving in, no one in his right mind would have accepted an appointment for 90 days. These people are in there to control a coercive institution of U.S. democracy. Watch out.” Continue reading.

Trump’s Post-Election Tactics Put Him in Unsavory Company

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Denying defeat, claiming fraud and using government machinery to reverse election results are the time-honored tools of dictators.

MOSCOW — When the strongman ruler of Belarus declared an implausible landslide victory in an election in August, and had himself sworn in for a sixth term as president, the United States and other Western nations denounced what they said was brazen defiance of the voters’ will.

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko’s victory, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last month, was “fraud.” Mr. Pompeo added: “We’ve opposed the fact that he’s now inaugurated himself. We know what the people of Belarus want. They want something different.”

Just a month on, Mr. Pompeo’s boss, President Trump, is now borrowing from Mr. Lukashenko’s playbook, joining a club of truculent leaders who, regardless of what voters decide, declare themselves the winners of elections. Continue reading.

Trump’s postelection power plays risk troubles at home and abroad

Republicans have remained largely silent as Trump launched two-pronged attack on legal, security institutions

Since President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection last week, his lies and lawsuits and his fuming and firings have left the country and the world wondering: Is he just a sore loser or a national security threat?

The Trump campaign’s allegations of widespread election fraud so far have run smack-dab into reality as judges demand evidence in the lawsuits filed in several key states — and they show no indication they could change the election result anyway.

Yet the fire that Trump’s legal strategy is starting, one that Republicans largely have not poured water on, could dangerously erode the nation’s confidence in the election outcome, some political observers say. Continue reading.

Trump lawyers suffer embarrassing rebukes from judges over voter fraud claims

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By now, it’s well-established that most of the arguments put forward by President Trump’s reelection campaign in its challenge of the results of the 2020 election are baseless and highly speculative. Even Trump allies, as The Washington Post reported late Tuesday, acknowledge the apparent futility of the effort. Others have reasoned that there’s no harm in going through the motions, with one anonymous GOP official asking, “What’s the downside for humoring him” for a little while?

But as scenes in courtrooms nationwide in recent days have shown, there is indeed a downside for those tasked with pursuing these claims. Repeatedly now, they have been rebuked by judges for how thin their arguments have been.

The most famous scene came in Pennsylvania, where a Trump lawyer strained to avoid acknowledging that their people were, in fact, allowed to observe the vote-counting process in Philadelphia: Continue reading.

The Abnormal Presidency

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Trump dramatically changed the presidency. Here’s a list of the 20
most important norms he broke — and how Biden can restore them.

At a frenetic and freewheeling rally in Macon, Ga., in mid-October, with less than three weeks to go before the election, President Trump turned introspective. He reflected on what sets him apart from every other president in American history: his refusal to be presidential.

“I always said, it’s much easier to be ‘presidential’ than to do what I do. … I’m more presidential if I wanted to be, but I got to get things done,” he said. “I don’t have enough time. … I can be more presidential than any president in our history — with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln when he wore the hat. That was tough to beat.”

What does it mean to be presidential? Article II of the Constitution describes the office in just a handful of paragraphs. To a remarkable extent, the presidency is shaped by unwritten traditions and expectations that historians and political scientists call “norms” — what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of American democracy. Continue reading.

Trump Suddenly Gives Top Defense Policy Job To Bigoted Crank Tata

A former Fox News commentator loyal to Trump has been moved into the Pentagon’s top policy job, only months after the Senate rejected his nomination due to numerous offensive and deranged comments he has made. 

Defense officials said that Anthony Tata, a retired Army one-star general, will be “performing the duties” of undersecretary for defense policy. His temporary appointment followed the resignation of James Anderson, who had been acting undersecretary, after Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday. 

The appointment of Tata came one day after Christopher Miller’s second day on the job as defense chief. Continue reading.

Can Trump really stage a coup? Experts break it down.

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For the first time in history, an incumbent president is refusing to concede after clearly and indisputably losing a presidential election. That’s making observers, citizens, and experts nervous that Trump may be preparing to stage a coup of some sort, or perhaps call again on his supporters to commit violence to sustain his rule. 

Though it sounds alarmist, such happenings are certainly not unprecedented in the global arena; the United States frequently interferes with the Democratic process in other countries, and often undermines it in order to provoke a coupor make a citizenry lose faith in a governing party, as US interests did in Bolivia last year. What is more unprecedented is for such a thing to happen in the United States. We’ve certainly had bitter and controversial presidential elections, including, infamously, in 2000. Moreover, the Founding Fathers prophesied this happening: as my colleague Matthew Rozsa noted, in early American history George Washington warned against Americans electing a president who’d refuse to step down.

But in a historical first, Trump is the first president to flat out refuse to concede, leading some to believe he’s setting the gears in motion for a coup d’etat. Since the election was called on Saturday, Trump has tweeted baseless claims that there’s a pathway to invalidating counted ballots. In addition to his refusal to concede, he’s pushed to fight the election results with evidence-free lawsuits. Continue reading.

Biden behaves as the incoming president, even as Trump balks at giving up power

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WILMINGTON, Del. — President-elect Joe Biden sought to project the authority of an incoming president Monday as he dealt with matters domestic and international, even as the defeated incumbent continued to balk at turning over the reins.

Biden began taking calls from foreign leaders, speaking Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He also was weighing whom to appoint to top White House positions, with several of his longtime advisers expected to take senior roles. And he turned his attention to the coronavirus, dispatching a key aide to brief Senate Democrats this week and making a strong pitch to Americans of every ideology to follow public health recommendations.

Biden urged Americans to wear masks, at one point holding one up during a speech in Wilmington, and sought to depoliticize the act of putting one on. Continue reading.

Leaked call audio shows Trump officials denying election results

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Top Trump loyalists are trying to cling to power by firing critics, rehiring other loyalists, instructing federal government employees that the election isn’t over yet, and threatening appointees that their future work prospects could get crushed if they try to abandon ship now.

Driving the news: In leaked audio of a Monday conference call with USAID staff, obtained by Axios, the agency’s top-ranking official John Barsa told staff to “play until the whistle blows” and that “DC, at the end of the day, is a really small town” — which participants read as a threat to anyone who starts job hunting. 

The big picture: Monday’s leaked call came as Trump and his inner circle continued to publicly deny the reality that rival Joe Biden has won the election. Continue reading.

Until He’s Out Of Office, Trump Will Be Very Dangerous

America is entering a very dangerous time. For his next 11 weeks in office, Donald Trump will be in a position to exact revenge, a word that by his own account is his entire life philosophy. We should all hope that he goes into one of his down emotional periods for an extended time so that lethargy, not blind rage, dominates his behavior until Jan. 20.

Through phony charges of ballot-box stuffing, firing officials, issuing pardons to friends and family and other acts Trump can do great damage between now and Inauguration Day, when his shield against criminal prosecution vanishes. He can also hobble the transition to a Biden administration.

One of the most destabilizing things Trump could do is refuse to release, or severely limit, funds to pay for the transition to a Biden administration.

Continue reading.