The Atlantic (6/12/21): Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun - January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
Related (but not necessarily summarized here): Common Dreams (17/12/21): Trump's Jan. 6 Coup: How It Worked, How Close It Came, and Why It Failed - The planned coup nearly worked, but leftists stayed home and likely thwarted plans to call in troops to aid insurrectionists.
An insightful yet absolutely humongous article (my ctrl+P tells me it is around 49 pages! - this is around 9, although probably less than that, cause this site has a larger font size) - it's full of lots of examples, evidence, etc, but I wrote this in case you want the quick and dirty. Herein is a summary of the article, plus some additional points throughout, to draw out some of the implications made.
At it's core, the Trump operation, basically the GOP now, has two pillars, both drawing from deep traditions of the American far-right, but increasingly refined and calibrated for a putsch - and how this is a legitimate and likely threat to our republic. Pillar 1: A legalistic, neo-Constitutional scheme to subvert democracy (Pillar 2 I'll get to, but it's a mobilized base of tens of millions of people willing to permit or engage in political violence). The fundamental legal scheme underpinning the GOP strategy pivots on the Electoral College - already a GOP-favoring system, the GOP aims to rig it more. Based on their total number of representatives in both Congressional houses, each state has a number of electors, members of the electoral college, who cast a vote for the president. It's currently the political norm to have all of the electors of a state reflect the state's popular vote - if a candidate gets 51% of the vote of a state with 8 electors, then that candidate gets all 8 electoral votes - for a long while, the role of the elector has been ceremonial, and candidates need to win the approval of a majority of voters in a couple swing states (and forget everybody else - democracy for 1/10 of the country!). It need not be that way though... in a bady way! The US Constitution gives state legislatures the power to choose the electors, regardless of the state's popular vote. The new, Trumpian GOP strategy is, at its worst, to utilize this capacity, giving GOP-controlled legislatures in (at least some) swing states (where they have gerrymandered and voter-suppressed to ensure they have majorities, but wait, they have a whole new vote rigging method) to pick presidential electors as they please. This is what Trump's plan was between Nov 7th 2020 and January 6th 2021, but it was too novel and the time window too short. It was an effort to destabilize the accepted paradigm, and obtain Trump electors (over Biden electors) in swing states that broke blue, or at least grind the normally-ceremonial procedure of power transfer to a screeching halt. A stalemate and/or a breakdown of institutional norms, for Trump, is preferrable to a loss.
Next time, whether it's Trump or someone else as the GOP frontrunner, the infrastructure will likely be in place to subvert our already flawed (yet robust, stable, and generally trusted) democracy.
Core goal and strategy: get Republican swing-state state legislatures to replace Biden electors with Trump electors. Push, intimidate, and buy time. It's in this context we can understand what objective the Trump team had in all of their efforts - force or persuade state legislatures to proffer up Trump electors (either by intimidation of state officials (ie in Georgia and Michigan), by means of the courts (those 65 lawsuits they filed, of which they lost 64), or even through the Department of Justice (he almost replaced the acting AG with Clark, who would have used the DoJ channels to pressure state officials that way). There was also the means of the Vice President - Pence could use a crank strategy on January 6th to buy time (the Pence electoral count strategy wasn't supposed to actually deliver Trump a win - just buy time). Buy time for what? For state legislatures to cave to Trump and proffer up Trump electors, giving him the Constitutional victory; while a long-shot, this wasn't in vain - around that time, GOP leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate signaled to Trump they may go with his strategy. And it's plausible that one GOP Senate breaking would lead to the dam bursting, and other GOP state legislature's following suit. It was for this purpose that the January 6th "Stop the Steal" putsch was arranged - to either (A) pressure Congress to go with Trump's will, and/or (B) pressure Pence to cave to Trump's will, and/or (C) delay the official electoral vote count, but regardless, TO BUY TIME. In parallel, on Jan 5th, Trump attorney Sidney Powell filed a suit to Justice Alito over the election - the goal wasn't to actually get a ruling, but to get Alito to put the procedure on pause... BUYING TIME for state legislatures to proffer up Trump electors. Congress quickly proceeded with the official vote count after the capitol storming, after which the Supreme Court dismissed the suit. At that point it was moot though (since the count had occurred), and therefore it's still unclear how the SCOTUS would have broke if the suit was still politically relevant.
Remember, everything was about buying time and/or pressuring state legislatures in swing states, with the minimal goal of grinding the power transition process to the halt amidst a Constitutional crisis - what you might call a "Constitutional coup" - finding loopholes and weak points in the system to overwhelm it; part of what one might call "lawfare" (I'll add to this report that a superficial Constitutional veneer, beyond providing a skin of legitimacy to this effort, would also be necessary to avoid a default military ouster - if Trump's putsch was Constitutionally ambiguous (I'll elaborate on this ambiguity more throughout), it would also be ambiguous what the military would be obligated to do, and what they'd be willing to do, and if a military response would expose fractures in the armed forces. As we've seen in the spat between officers in the Army and the National Guard over if the armed forces were prepared to intervene at the capitol on January 6th (especially as one of the involved generals in the situation was one General Flynn, brother to former General Michael Flynn, QAnon conspiracy theorist (and shameless denier) and Trump advisor), and if they were ordered to not intervene, this is not an unlikely configuration (for counterview of this worst-case perspective (I'm myself skeptical of it, even as I add it here independent of the original article...), see commentary from Beau of the Fifth Column (21/12/21) on 22 December 2021 posting). It wasn't simply a random circus freakshow of a flailing demagogue, although it looked superficially ridiculous. Whether they're deliberate or not, don't let the comedic elements disarm your political alarm bells.
Pillar 2: An angry, reactionary, violence-embracing, and largely-upper class base: Underpinning this strategy is a mass movement with a strong orientation for political violence. Around 8-12% of Americans (about 21-32 million American adults) believe that (1) Biden is illegitimate, and (2) some sort of violent action is necessary, or would be justified, to "correct" the system. Researchers at the University of Chicago tried to analyze who these people were - they found that the likelihood to be at the capitol on January 6th didn't correlate with declining income - in fact, more than half had white-collar jobs, and only 7% were unemployed (compare that to the 25% of violent extremists over the previous decade the FBI says were unemployed). Nor did they correlate if they were from deep Trump country or not. The only factor that held through ever state was if the non-latino white proportion in your area was in decline. Two thirds of the 8% (from above, from UoC studies) subscribed to the Great Replacement conspiracy, the idea that some "puppet master" (usually of a Jewish flavor, ofc) is trying to replace white people with people of color. Right-wing militia membership is not dense amongst this group of people either, although they are supportive. The reporter notes that something like this kind of movement - upper class, reactionary, racist, mobilized - hasn't been seen since the KKK resurgence of the 1920s.
Analysis of what happened and why it failed: This willingly violent group of people was essential to the force and terror of the January 6th putsch attempt. Do note that the goal on January 6th was not so much to "take over", but to at very least delay the official electoral vote count, to buy time for state legislatures to change their minds and send in Trump electors. It wasn't a stupid or foolish event. There was just one flaw. Trump's strategy largely failed due to its novelty at the time - GOP poiticians were reluctant to go along with it. Further, his legal team was a proverbial "clown car", and there were still some principled GOP members. And finally, the GOP didn't quite have the institutional stranglehold to easily achieve Trump's goals. Not to say it was impossible for them to go for it, and hope for a Constitutional stalemate (that's basically what they tried to do), but it wouldn't be easy.
Why things are actually boding dark for 2024: It's looking now like it will be easy. The Trumpers in the GOP are rooting out the more principled Republicans - the ones that were political ghouls, but still hewed to the basic framework of our republic, such as Raffensperger from Georgia, who stood toe-to-toe with Trump as the latter tried to intimidate him into submitting to his plan (remember him asking for 11,000 or so votes on call?). Further, the GOP is gerrymandering, unbound by the Voting Rights Act, and instituting all sorts of traditional voter suppression legislation. The DoJ is going after them for this, and rightfully so. But this misses the bigger threat - the GOP is passing legislation to take control of elections from local county election boards, and put them under the wing of the legislature. In these states, especially post-gerrymander, the legislature will almost certainly be GOP dominated, and so will these election boards. These election boards can determine what is and isn't an eligible vote. Further, the GOP is honing a legal argument for state legislatures to ignore state's popular votes altogether, and letting the legislature vote. So if some state (idk, Georgia, let's say) votes majority Democrat in 2024, but the legislature is controlled by the GOP, this legal strategy would allow them to ignore the popular vote after the fact, and allowing the GOP to determine the winner (somewhat similar to the Bush vs. Gore case, albeit even more illegitimate, imo). The report notes that four of the Supreme Court justices have signaled their support for this strategy, with tie-breaking, Trump-appointed Amy Coney Barrett still a mystery on this (it seems, due to the ommission, that Bush-appointed Justice Roberts likely doesn't support such a system).
Threats on the ground, and summary: On top of this, the Trump base is on a campaign of intimidation - constant death threats are pushing non-partisan workers out of basic institutions, from electoral boards to school boards (not sure if the reporter covered the latter in this report, but it is documented well elsewhere). The Trump base, as has been polled, is willing to resort to violence to achieve their ends, and there are tens of millions who are okay with doing so. They need not secure an actual popular vote victory, or even a proper electoral vote victory - a combination of GOP shenanigans and militant far right intimidation might be enough to break democracy in 2024.
All of this is to say, the GOP might not even try to win a fair election in 2024, at least not in the way we have conceived of it since God-knows-when. Instead, they may try to pry open the Constitution for every ounce of authoritarianism they can (dressed up as "states rights" and "small government"), ignoring one of the last elements of popular will in America's electoral system - the state's electors going to the state's winner.
Democrats are failing to rise to the moment: We can't just hope to "turn out the vote" in 2024. The crisis we face is much bigger. Yet to the reporter's horror, this is what it seems the Democrats are doing - the failure to progress on filibuster reform (necessary to pass any meaningful voting rights reform to address the suppressive efforts of the GOP), the failure to sue the GOP legislatures for their most onerous legislation (taking power from local election boards and giving it to GOP-controlled state boards), and the failure to properly message how dangerous this movement is. An insidious way the latter plays out is the constant pleading of the Democrats for "bipartisanship". The GOP doesn't care about policy anymore, Democrats. Stop trying to find good politics there. Like for the liberals of Weimar Germany, the light at the end of the tunnel is probably a train coming to hit the Democrats... and the republic.
Hopefully things don't go this way. But this appears to be the GOP strategy, at very least. This should be a lesson - fascists do not care about doing things "the right way". They simply care about seizing power. For them the state is just a gun. There's nothing sacred about it. Democrats should stop treating the GOP like they are playing the same game, or we will all pay the price for their derelection, indolence and blind foolishness. We can't just bitch about the Dems though - we need to organize, especially in the workplace, to occupy the source of power in this privatized country.