A conspiracy theory the leftist media have been simmering on the back burner this year is that President Trump, should he lose the White House on November 3, will refuse to leave office.
Every few weeks they turn up the heat and bring it to a boil, the latest example being Dexter Filkins’ offering in The New Yorker. Top military people, Filkins avers, are terrified that Trump is planning a dictatorship and will use the military to establish it.
Filkins’ paranoid piece is one of at least four that have appeared since the beginning of the year: one in Slate, one in The Atlantic, and two in the New York Times.
But at least Slate suggested it can’t and won’t happen.
The Guard Around 1600 Pennsylvania?
Filkins is quite disturbed that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed up in uniform next to Trump when he appeared at St. John’s Episcopal Church during the height of the Floyd riots in Washington, D.C.
Filkins found the usual suspects to say Milley violated the unspoken rule that appearing in uniform that way just isn’t done, and that it might just mean Trump has compromised the political neutrality of the military.
And Trump might just conscript the military to carry out his nefarious plan. “The ultimate test of the military’s adherence to principle may come in November,” Filkins wrote. “A growing number of commentators suggest that the country should prepare for the possibility that Trump, if he loses, will refuse to leave the White House.”
The military would never side with such a president, of course, but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try, Filkins concluded:
Most of the former senior officers told me that the military would never try to influence or overturn an election, even one in which the result is uncertain. “If there’s a disputed election, it will be decided by the Supreme Court, and once that happens it’s over,” the second former officer said. “A hundred per cent of the machine will turn to the new legally elected President.”
But the former senior military official presented a scenario that he found particularly alarming: if the election is disputed, Trump could conceivably ask a friendly governor to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., to support him. The official told me that the Guard, with separate leadership in each state, does not necessarily adhere to the same rigid standards as the regular U.S. military. “Some of the leaders are blatantly political,” he said. “The fear is that President Trump refuses to leave, and National Guard troops surround the White House.”
The Times, Slate, The Atlantic
Filkins tendentious piece of paranoia followed two pieces in the Times. One appeared May 24, the other, five days later.
The first piece, as The New American reported, opened with a fictitious scenario in which Trump refuses to leave office, then detailed the efforts of “scenario planners” who are wondering what to do if Trump seizes power from a legally elected Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.
Then came an opinion piece from the Times’s Roger Cohen. He is certain Trump will stop at nothing, and said just that. “Trump is a coward,” the courageous Cohen opined. “Perhaps if Biden wins, the president will skulk out of the White House like the little boy he is who never grew into a man. And the nightmare will be over. I don’t think so. The chances are growing that Trump will not concede in the event of a Biden victory, that he may encourage violence and use the fear and division spread by the virus to extend autocratic power.
Trump is a doughnut. There is a hole in the middle of him where honesty, humanity, decency, morality and dignity never formed. …
Behind this oversized, sticky, misshapen doughnut of a president the hard diamond of recoverable truth lurks. To seize it, and save the Republic, requires the certain knowledge that Trump will stop at nothing between now and Nov. 3.
Two days later, Slate explained that “he wouldn’t get away with it; those around him would almost certainly advise him against it, if he asked.”
That’s because the military and Secret Service would abandon him. Foreign countries would not recognize his ambassadors. He would be arrested at least for criminal trespass on Inauguration Day. And he would be charged with inciting an insurrection if he ordered the military to prevent Biden from taking office.
That obvious truth appears not to have occurred to Filkins and Cohen or to Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Writing in The Atlantic in February, McQuade’s evidence for Trump’s predicted perfidy is this:
The Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., joked about the failed impeachment attempt. “I now support reparations,” he tweeted. “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.”
Worse still, Trump retweeted Falwell and joked about it himself!
Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen says the possibility is all too real: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
First Anti-Trump Conspiracy
The latest anti-Trump conspiracy is of a piece with the idea that Trump would refuse to accept the election result if Clinton prevailed.
Clinton herself called Trump “a direct threat to our democracy” because he suggested he might challenge the election result — just as Al Gore did when George Bush defeated him in 2000.
Amusingly, it was Clinton and the Democrats, along with their army of street thugs, who refused to accept the election result with riots, the Russia collusion hoax, and the failed impeachment.
Photo: TebNad / iStock / Getty Images Plus
H/T: The Daily Caller
