In the end, the coup did not take place. In the most grudging manner possible, Donald Trump signalled on Monday night that the transition of power could begin.
That, a White House official told reporters, was as close as Trump will probably ever come to concession, but the machinery of transition has gathered momentum. Joe Biden’s incoming administration now has a government internet domain, is being briefed by government agencies and is due to receive federal funding.
The Pentagon quickly announced it would be providing support for the transfer of power. And one by one, senior Republicans – an especially timid category – are recognising the election result.
But there is no doubt US democracy has been given a scare. As the sense of imminent threat begins to fade, the convoluted inner workings of the electoral system are coming under scrutiny to determine whether it was as robust as its advocates had hoped – or whether the nation simply got lucky this time.
“I had long been in the camp of people who believed that the guardrails of democracy were working,” Katrina Mulligan, a former senior official in the justice department’s national security division. “But my view has actually shifted in the last few weeks as I watched some of this stuff play out. Now I actually think that we are depending far too much on fragile parts of our democracy, and expecting individuals, rather than institutions, to do the work the institution should be doing.”
Trump made no secret of his gameplan even before the election, and it has come into sharper focus with every madcap day since: cast doubt on the reliability of postal ballots, claim victory on election night before most of them were counted, and then sow enough confusion with allegations, justice department investigations and street mayhem with far-right militias to delay certification of the results.
Such a delay would create an opportunity for Republican-run state legislatures to step in and select their own electors to send to the electoral college, which formally decides who becomes president. That would produce a constitutional crisis that would ultimately be settled by the supreme court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority and has become increasingly politicised.For the plan to work it required political fealty to trump actual votes but, at several crucial decision points, that did not happen.
The key ingredient for a classic coup – a politically motivated military – was absent from the start, though not for want of Trump’s efforts. He tried to bring active duty troops on to the streets to quell the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer, but the defence secretary, Mark Esper, refused to cooperate.
After Esper was fired in the wake of the election, and Trump loyalists were installed in senior decision-making positions, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, used a planned public appearance at the dedication of an army museum to send a pointed message.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
