Alarm over ‘slow moving coup’ sounding louder than ever
RED ALERT: Focus turns to January 2025 as ‘Big Lie’ becomes threat to peaceful transfer of power
For many months – if not years – HBO ‘Real Time’ host Bill Maher has been sounding the alarm about what he calls a “slow moving coup” threatening to upend American democracy.
He has at times been a lonely voice.
But suddenly, his warning has hit a crescendo.
Several notable developments over the past couple of months have raised the topic to the top of the agenda in some venues.
It was the top story in The Guardian on Sunday. It has been discussed on CNN more than once. And a book warning about it –“Midnight in Washington” – rocketed to the top of The New York Times best seller list the first week it was on sale.
It seems like the only ones NOT paying attention also are the only ones with the power to do something about it: Republican members of the US Senate.
Three times this year they have prevented federal voting rights legislation from even being debated.
They ignore the warnings at their peril – and ours!
Most instructive on this topic was the appearance Nov. 12 of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Bill Maher’s show.
Schiff and Tavis Smiley joined Maher to discuss “how best to fend off the slow-moving coup threatening American democracy,” is how the segment is described.
Schiff is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, so he is uniquely well qualified on the topic. In addition, his best-selling book “Midnight in Washington” deals with it extensively.
Both Maher and Schiff are worth listening to in detail.
“I'm concerned only about the future,” Maher begins. “I'm concerned about the past only as it affects the future … what I care about is January 6, 2025.”
Maher mentions his Oct. 8 segment on the topic “about what I thought was gonna happen, the slow-moving coup, which I've been talking about since before Trump was even elected,” he says. (Watch the video below)
Maher does mention the past, in passing: “[Trump] thought last time that all the Republicans would fall in line with what he wanted and do his bidding. And they didn’t; some had integrity.
“What he's been doing since is replacing those people. There's a purge going on behind the scenes. So next time, when he calls them up and says, ‘I hope you can find me a few votes,’ they’re going to say, ‘How many?’ He's going to have his stooges in place.”
Maher then predicts that the Democrats are going to lose control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms. “The Democrats are going to lose big in 2022, which is going to make it worse,” he says.
“Trump is going to declare for office, he's going to get the nomination. The rallies are going to start, [and] it's going to get very violent out there.”
Looking directly at Schiff, Maher then poses the key question: “What are we doing about the next time the election happens?”
It is a question he has been asking repeatedly on many recent episodes of his show.
Maher says the actual election result is less of a concern: “It doesn't matter whether he loses – he's going to say he won. We know that! There's no doubt he's going to say ‘I won’, and this time he's not going to go away so easily come January 20, 2025.
“What are we doing about that? When he is insisting that he is the president whether he won or not, and there are people who are helping him with it.”
Schiff’s response was emphatic, if not completely satisfying: “I'm in complete agreement with expressing how you feel about this. What Donald Trump took away from the failed insurrection is that, if he couldn't find 11,000 votes in Georgia, couldn't find a corrupt election official to give him those votes – he's determined the next time he'll have someone in a position who will,” Schiff says.
He described what is currently occurring largely out of sight as “basically a two-prong strategy. They're trying to disenfranchise people of color around the country, so that they can win, and, if they lose, they want to be positioned to overturn the result,” he says.
But then he digresses, without really saying what his prescription is.
“We must hold the House,” Schiff says. “If Kevin McCarthy had been speaker in 2020, if we'd lost a few more seats in the 2020 election in the House, he would have overturned the result in the House.
“[McCarthy] will do whatever Donald Trump tells him to do. Someone like that can never be allowed to go near the Speaker's office.”
Which begs the question: How, exactly, can it be prevented?
Of all the people who might have a good answer for that question, Rep. Adam Schiff is definitely one of the best. I happen to know, because he has represented my community in Congress since his surprise victory in 1998 after a stint in the US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles.
Not only did he serve as House manager the first time Trump was impeached, he currently serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which is privy to all sorts of confidential top-secret information we don't know about.
All of this experience gives Schiff significant credibility when it comes to his book published Oct. 12 Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could
It gets 4-1/2 stars on Goodreads, where it is described as follows:
“From the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the vital inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, and a warning that the forces of autocracy unleashed by Trump remain as potent as ever,” says the review.
“In ‘Midnight in Washington’, Schiff argues that the Trump presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the peril will last for years, requiring unprecedented vigilance against the growing and dangerous appeal of authoritarianism.”
If this sounds familiar it should – it was the exact topic covered by him and Bill Maher
“The congressman chronicles step by step just how our democracy was put at such risk, and traces his own path to meeting the crisis …Schiff takes us inside his team of impeachment managers and their desperate defense of the constitution amid the rise of a distinctly American brand of autocracy.”
It is definitely an inside story worth reading from an absolutely impeccable source.
Indeed, if this was not sufficient to get you in a sweat, a bigger surprise was the top story by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian on Nov. 14 ‘Terrifying for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup? with is sub-heading: “Republicans are vying for critical positions in many states – from which they could launch a far more effective power-grab than Trump’s 2020 effort.”
It's mostly under the radar, but thanks to The Guardian and Mr. Pilkington it is less so today than it was before.
“What could be construed as an anti-democratic scramble for power at any cost is taking place right now in jurisdictions across the country,” the article warns.
“Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024.”
Pilkington writes that the ex-president is coy about whether he will run in 2024, but “his followers are busily maneuvering themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020.”
There, again, is the red-flag word that is gaining wider and wider currency: a coup.
“The machinations are unfolding right across the US at all levels of government, from the local precinct, through counties and states, to the national stage of Congress. The stage is being set for a spectacle that could, in 2024, make last year’s unprecedented assault on American democracy look like a dress rehearsal.”
The article then quotes election law expert Ben Ginsberg: “In 2020 Donald Trump put a huge strain on the fabric of this democracy, on the country,” said Ginsberg, who represented four of the last six Republican presidential nominees. “In 2024 the strain on the fabric could turn into a tear.”
In case you need reminding, the article then goes into detail about how the ex-president has repeated the “Big Lie” about the “stolen election” over and over until it has taken on a life of its own.
“He’s telling supporters at his regular presidential campaign-style rallies that 2020 was “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.” He has used his iron grip over the Republican party to cajole officials in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin and other states to conduct “audits” of the 2020 election count in further vain searches for fraud,” Pilkington recounts.
This strategy is being used mostly at the state level, out of sight of the national media. It is particularly focused on those states where the result was close in 2020, and challenged multiple times in multiple ways – all unsuccessful.
But then Pilkington notes: “A clear pattern is emerging. Trump has endorsed a number of Republican candidates for key state election positions who share a common feature: They all avidly embrace the myth of the stolen election and the lie that Biden is an impostor in the White House,” he writes.
“The candidates are being aggressively promoted for secretary of state positions – the top official that oversees elections in US states. Should any one of them succeed, they would hold enormous sway over the running of the 2024 presidential election in their state, including how the votes would be counted.”
This is both diabolical and methodical.
Solution hiding in plain sight
If you are tempted to just throw your hands in the air and despair, there is actually a solution and it is hiding in plain sight.
More than three versions of a new federal voting rights act have been put on the table this year. Two have passed the House; a third was introduced into the Senate. All three did not make it past the filibuster, with Senate Republicans almost unanimous in their opposition.
I have addressed this previously more than once, most recently on Oct. 19:
Then, I wrote: “The future of our democracy may indeed depend upon [voting rights legislation] passing. But it may not even get a vote – if Republicans mount a filibuster.”
They did. It still does. A new federal voting rights law is the only viable way to prevent the disaster that is unfolding before our eyes.
Perhaps as this topic gets wider attention it will rise to the level when Senators can no longer pretend it is not an issue. They are the last bulwark between us and a coup d’tat.
Watch Bill Maher’s segment on the slow moving coup here.
This is deadly serious. We can see the danger ahead! The ONLY way to stop this coup from actually happening is to pass strict federal requirements for voting rights throughout the country.
BUT that won’t happen while the Republicans can block it in the Senate, as they have done three times.
The Senate must do the right thing and abolish the filibuster. That is the last thing standing in the way. At the very least they must carve out an exception for voting rights. It’s too important to let the GOP get away with it.