Earlier this month, President Trump refused to rule out overthrowing our form of government before the midterm elections in November.
A right-wing commentator named Wayne Root, while interviewing Trump, suggested that if the Senate fails to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, Trump should take matters into his own hands by declaring a “national emergency.”
“If you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s help.”
At this point, according to CNN, Trump “cut Root off and coyly suggested such an option was in play”: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Ty Cobb, who served as White House counsel in Trump’s first term, said a few weeks ago that the president’s prime-time speech was meant to lay the “predicate that he needs to declare an emergency.” In February, Trump urged his party to “take over voting in at least 15 places, Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump is apparently unimpressed by Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution. It provides:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time, by law, make or alter such Regulations,.”
It means no more to him than the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Law, constitutional mandate, democracy, decency, “the blessings of liberty”, and government “of the people, by the people, for the people” don’t register with our aspiring dictator. They elude his grasp. Sort of like a soldier being willing to die for his country. Is that really a thing? Why?
It must be said that Trump’s flirtation with “nationalizing the election” is as radically unconstitutional as his moves against birthright citizenship are. But the stakes of his longed-for takeover of elections are the largest imaginable. An election under Trump would be like one under Putin. Bunker Hill, Yorktown, Antietam, Gettysburg, Normandy, Selma and Birmingham would be cast aside in service of a vile and endlessly corrupt despot. Not since the Civil War would so large a legacy be spent in such a horrifyingly unworthy cause.
I understand, of course, that Trump’s knee-bending acolytes will claim that “this is just Trump being Trump” — like saying he’ll “bomb the s— out of Oman,” or kill Iran’s “whole civilization,” or invade Greenland, or, of course, “grab women by the p—-“. No wonder right-wing Christians are so taken with him.
But recall that Trump’s dreams of destroying American democracy are not just idle threats. He’s tried to carry them out before. He urged thousands of violent insurrectionists to cast out and overthrow the lawful government of the United States. People were killed in the astonishing and literally unprecedented effort. He demanded that Georgia’s Secretary of State feloniously steal the presidential election — on tape. He tried to insist that non-violent Black Lives Matter protesters be fired upon by the federal government: “Can’t you just shoot them, shoot them in the legs or something,” he urged Defense Secretary Mark Esper.
Who honestly believes that Trump wouldn’t act to end American democracy to serve his own private purposes? Really?
Must we wait until he and his massive host of Republican criminal enablers actually move to do us in?
Gene Nichol is a professor of law teaching courses in the constitution and federal courts at the University of North Carolina School of Law.
