Steve Bannon told an audience: “And I will tell you right now, as God is
my witness, if we lose the midterms … some in this room are going to prison –
myself included.”
Now, it looks like Trump and the people around him are
seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this
November’s elections, according to reporting yesterday in The Washington
Post: “Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination
with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that
claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national
emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.”
Donald Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s
surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House and/or
Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the
regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some
could even go to prison, including Trump himself.
He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at
Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that
Texas and then other Red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce
the number of Democrats in the House.
In Red states they’re purging voters in Blue cities from the rolls like
there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers”
to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took
the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black)
fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after
technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.
But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today,
even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and
Senate in Republican hands. So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of
the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program
multiple times) have an idea: just imitate what Putin, Orbán, Hitler, and other
dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: declare an
emergency and use it to rig the election.
Yesterday, The Washington Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly
discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify
Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s
elections.
These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure
message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the
United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit
the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame. And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic
processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake
crisis to seize control of the election nationally.
If you’ve studied history — and you know I have —
that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up. Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely
American: it’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.
In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag,
went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was
probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof”
of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight.
Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and
the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political
opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.
Elections were technically still held, but under
conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any
meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal
bridge to a permanent dictatorship.
Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military
tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town.
Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place
permanently. Tens of thousands of protestors were arrested. Judges and teachers
were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake
news.”
While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an
election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential
system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was
the end of democracy in Turkey.
Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In
1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the
Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a
relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and
fury.
Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded
his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of
the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become
ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the
votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.
Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He
declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept
renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the COVID pandemic,
he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an
indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.
As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming
up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly
billionaires (see CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St.
Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 rightwing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to
cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political
environment in which they happened.
There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis
wannabe dictators inevitably declare — real, exaggerated, or cynically
manipulated — become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those
powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the
elections.
That’s why this shocking new reporting in The Washington
Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly
about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re
not blowing smoke: they’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.
They’re trying to figure out — and will learn from the
national reaction to this Post reporting — whether they can persuade the public
that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each
of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out
democracy itself.
And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency:
if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network
around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis
on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s
massive military buildup in the Middle East.
The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a
retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the
normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose
“wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.
History shows us, over and over again, that when a
nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy
used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an
emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended — just temporarily — to save the
country.” And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the
most dangerous word of all.
We’re now at that moment where influential figures are
publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The
real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin,
Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump — and their toadies like Corsi, Bondi, Noem, and
Gabbard — decide that elections themselves are the problem.
Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But
so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used IEEPA emergency authority as their
rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year
before stopping him.
Similarly, ICE goons kicking in people’s front doors and
smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a
blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s
agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the
Constitution has never stopped our convicted
felon/rapist/insurrectionist president in the past.
This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported
and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected
representatives — Democratic and Republican — and let them
know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any
fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.
-Thom Hartmann
