Brussels (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – Trump is now a weaker candidate than he was only a week ago: way older than Kamala Harris and a convicted felon to her ex-prosecutor. Money is flowing into Democratic coffers at an unprecedented pace. The party is newly energized.
Should he be defeated at the polls, Trump’s only hope to secure a win is through the slavish and cynical Supreme Court of the USA (SCOTUS). The GOP has done it before (Bush).
The electoral college is built to ignore the popular vote, it is innately an anti-democratic institution. Add to it an anti-democratic SCOTUS and the Presidency is Trump’s.
Further down the road, Trump may also seek to either abolish term limits or to designate one of his sons as an heir in the equivalent of a dynastic monarchy.
Next move in the hostile takeover:
SCOTUS may collude with Trump to deny the Democrats a Harris ticket in several states as well as access to any and all funds collected by the party hitherto.
There is one more legal move: fraud. The GOP can sue for having been defrauded by the Democrats and also claim that donors and voters in the primaries have been swindled. Lower MAGA courts and SCOTUS will have no trouble to play ball with this. This is both unprecedented and runs against this high court’s own precedent (Trump vs. Anderson). But this kangaroo SCOTUS maintains a very conflicted relationship with precedents – and with the truth. It will do what’s good for Trump, period.
Some predict that “all hell will break loose” should this transpire. It won’t. Study the history of the Communist party in the Weimar Republic.
The Communists and Socialists in the Weimar Republic in Germany were far stronger than the Democrats are now in the USA. When Hitler was appointed dictator by the legislature (in the March 1933 Enabling Act), they just went along with it. This pattern has occurred all over the world in the wake of an authoritarian takeover.
When democracy is defeated, people just give up and move on, accepting the inevitability of a Hitler or an Orban or a Netanyahu or an Erdogan or a Putin.
The Democrats have already folded over much worse (Trump vs. USA) – and on multiple occasions.
The last desperate argument is that equating the USA to Russia or to the Weimar Republic is a false equivalency. The USA has a venerated system of checks and balances and has survived as a democracy against all odds (recall the Civil War).
Yet, tradition is no bulwark against usurpation and a hostile takeover. Institutions are malleable and only as good as the people who run them.
Republican Rome has lasted twice as long as the USA. Its checks and balances were way more sophisticated. In some ways, it was more profoundly democratic than the USA. Yet, it had transitioned seamlessly, voluntarily, and abruptly into the rapacious and tyrannical Roman Empire.
