US politics - Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the government
Any political leader who even considers supporting Trump can't be trusted. Trump openly plotted a coup to overthrow the government of the USA, and yet people like Dave Wilson of the "Palmetto Family Council" in South Carolina are still willing to back him under the right circumstances, while NPR reporters treat this basically as normal politics (though the reporter did insert the comment "we all know who Trump is by now").
Wilson is either hopelessly ignorant and confused, or a tyrant at heart. Either way, he's not someone any serious citizen should listen to. 1/8
US politics - Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the government
When I say Trump openly plotted a coup, I mean is that he was recruiting members of the political elite to publicly endorse a coup attempt, which would lend a veneer of legitimacy of a subsequent coup. He may have never 'pulled the trigger', and it may not be possible to convict him of any crimes, but that doesn’t change the political fact that he was claiming the powers of the President despite clearly losing the election. If he had won that elite support, many of his appointees probably would have ignored legal orders from President Biden and obeyed illegal orders from Trump, leaving it to the military, civil service, and law enforcement to decide whose orders to follow; we’d be in the middle of a civil war right now. 2/8
US politics - Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the government
Trump made several appeals for support from elite government officials. All were couched in bogus factual or legal claims, so even if those government officials had endorsed his claims, any attempt by Trump to stay in office for a second term would have been a coup. Some of the major appeals went to various judges, VP Pence, state legislators, and state Secretaries of State. (details below with references) 3/8
#Trump #Biden #President #2024 #coup #election #usa #crime
US politics - Trump's conspiracy to overthrow the government
1. Judges: Trump immediately made unfounded claims that widespread election fraud had cost him the election. Trump’s team made no serious effort to distinguish serious claims from utter bullshit, leaving me to believe that they had no reasonable basis for the fraud claims (see the Navarro Report, for example, which is full of completely asinine claims). Consequently, Trump and his lawyers have been sanctioned for bringing frivolous lawsuits before multiple courts. It’s unclear whether Trump intended these lawsuits simply as political stunts to support his anti-election propaganda campaign, or if he thought that some judges would put partisan and personal loyalty above their Constitutional duty; but regardless, even if judges had used these bullshit claims as an excuse to invalidate election results, this still would have been a coup. 4/8
Sanctions in CO: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/attorney-sanctions-upheld-utterly-baseless-lawsuit-challenging-2020-election-2022-12-13/
Sanctions in FL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/trump-lawyers-sanctioned-nearly-1-million-political-lawsuit-vs-clinton-2023-01-20/
Summary of legal results: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/11/30/trumps-judicial-campaign-to-upend-the-2020-election-a-failure-but-not-a-wipe-out/
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_law/litigation/
#Trump #judiciary #President #2024 #coup #election #usa #crime