Tim Stevenson is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens (bereal@vermontel.net) and is the author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press) and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press). He is working on a book about mutual care communities.
ATHENS-Speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Sept. 30, Sen. Elissa Slotkin warned citizens to be alert to a “security threat” during the final days before the Nov. 3 election, suggesting that such would be used to justify federal intervention.
“The authoritarian playbook is very clear,” the Michigan Democrat and former CIA officer stated. “When you’re at risk of losing, you either (A) make up a threat that only you can protect the American people from, or (B) find a way for federal law enforcement or military to seize ballots or voting machines.”
It is true that we don’t know what President Trump may specifically be planning before, during, or after the election.
It is also irresponsible and dangerously disempowering if, in light of all that we do know about him, we proceed as if we have forgotten his attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and that he admitted to The New York Times that he regretted not seizing the voting machines in 2020, having already prepared the executive order to do so.
Trump can hardly afford now to act otherwise — not only because the fragile ego of his crippling malignant narcissism cannot tolerate defeat. More importantly, the loss of the House and possibly the Senate would render him vulnerable to Democrat-initiated public hearings about his unprecedented corruption and serial defiance of the law. There’s also the possibility of his third impeachment — perhaps this time including conviction, and the loss of his presidency and its attendant power.
As fascism scholar Timothy Snyder observed, Nov. 3 will be “the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States.”
It certainly represents a Rubicon moment for We the People. The outcome will determine whether we submit to a coup and plunge further into the nightmare abyss of a full-throated fascist state — or it will demonstrate the power of a fully engaged citizenry and begin to reclaim a functioning democracy for ourselves.
To have any chance of prevailing over the long haul, we must have a decisive victory in November. We must be prepared to defend the anticipated favorable results of the election by fully expecting that Trump will do anything he can to thwart the will of the majority.
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So how do we prepare for what Sen. Slotkin identified as a “security threat that would be used to justify federal intervention,” like seizing ballots and voting machines and by otherwise arrogating control of the election, and in effect, our nation?
The first essential step, of course, is to vote and help get out the vote in the hope of producing a blue tsunami that might result in an outcome similar to the overwhelming margins of the recent election in another authoritarian country — Hungary.
There, despite the preparations he had made to interfere in the outcome of a close election, now-former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán decided to accept the vote and not contest the overwhelming mandate of the people to step down.
At the same time, we also need to be exceptionally alert for any signs of Trump’s malfeasance, publicly announcing and denouncing such actions. This would be the moment for all of us to assume our patriotic responsibility and become the Paul and Pauline Reveres of the 21st century!
The signs are everywhere as Trump is conditioning the body politic for a coup through the increasing escalation of his fascistic intentions:
• He has actively called out white Minnesotans to engage in a race war by attacking their Somali American neighbors as “enemy combatants.”
• He has responded to a recent Time interview by saying “I don’t rule anything out” when asked if he would declare a national emergency.
• He has told a cheering crowd in Nebraska: “Let [Iran] take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,”
• He has betrayed Ukraine — our ally — by waiving sanctions on our mutual enemy, Russia, through his diesel deal with that country’s president, Vladimir Putin.
• He has escalated violence of border enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE), including murders that have been executed with impunity, coupled with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s promise that ICE agents could be deployed at polling places for a “specific threat” or “serving a warrant.”
• The administration has hosted meetings at the White House with election deniers who are encouraging him to take over the election.
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In light of the foregoing, and so much more, I wholeheartedly agree with Sen. Slotkin’s warning.
It is entirely reasonable to anticipate that Trump will attempt a reprise of Jan. 6, only this time as president of the United States, with all of the authority and power that goes with this office, surrounded by sycophants willing to do the bidding of Dear Leader, absent any adults in the room to provide any guardrails.
I fear that Trump is very capable of declaring a national emergency, perhaps by staging a false-flag terrorist event that he would attribute (without evidence, of course) to “antifa” communists or perhaps agents of Iran.
Trump could be led by his personal militia — the ICE brownshirts, with perhaps elements of the armed services who are under the sway of the Pentagon’s Christian nationalist leader, Pete Hegseth, portraying such a coup as the biblical Rapture.
Supported by the other federal agencies that are populated with his vetted loyalists and mandated by a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) to enforce its sweeping directives, Trump would arouse cult fervor amongst the extremist elements of his MAGA/Christian nationalist base —especially armed militias.
The latter might provoke a “patriotic” civil war to support an increasingly full-blown authoritarian regime and its widespread and violent suppression of its opponents, especially the many of us who would resist this coup and its radical appropriation of such illegitimate power.
For those of you who insist that such speculation is crazy, off-the-wall nonsense (and I hope it turns out you’re correct!), I ask you this.
Is this scenario any more fantastic than the now-discredited conviction that many of us entertained — not too long ago — that fascism couldn’t possibly happen here in America?
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