It’s a Grift! It’s a Coup! It’s BOTH!

At 2:26 p.m. on Dec. 14, California Assembly-woman Shirley Weber announced that Joe Biden had won all 55 of California’s votes in the Electoral College, thereby giving him an Electoral College majority of 302 votes — 32 more than necessary — formally assuring his election. 

It was a clear turning point: First, Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Biden — more than a month after most other world leaders, and then, Senate Majority Leader “Moscow” Mitch McConnell offered his congratulations as well. It was the first admission by GOP leadership that Biden had been elected president, more than a month after Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania secured the outcome.

Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election — seen as a grift by some (raising more than $200 million in three weeks), and a coup attempt by others — clearly suffered a major blow. But grift or coup, there’s little chance he’ll stop anytime soon. There’s too much money, too much limelight and too much power at stake.

The Grift

On the grift side, Trump had responded to initial signs of his loss with a flood of more than 130 fundraising emails in the first three weeks. 

“The blatant voter fraud throughout corrupt Democrat-run cities is unprecedented,” a typical email read. 

Yet, in the more than 50 court cases Trump’s lawyers have filed, they’ve never produced any evidence of such fraud. 

“When they come after ME, they’re really coming after YOU and everything YOU stand for,” an email went on to say.

“This Election isn’t over yet.  We still have a long way to go and I need to know that I can count on you,” it continued. “I’m putting together an Election Defense Task Force that will be made up of my STRONGEST defenders.” 

The email goes on to ask for an immediate $5 contribution to join the task force and “increase your impact by 1000%” — though exactly how is never explained.

In fact, the Washington Post accurately described it as “a nonexistent fundraising account.” The first flood of emails linked to a page where, election law expert Rick Hasen noted, “half of that money will go towards retiring his campaign debt instead.” 

But there were also emails that linked to a donation page for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” committee. Initially, it said that 60% of donations would go toward retiring campaign debt and the other 40% would go to the Republican National Committee.

By mid-November, fundraising requests were coming from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising effort splitting its proceeds between the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and Save America, a new Trump leadership PAC, which initially got 60%, then 75% of each contribution. Leadership PACs cannot retire campaign debt but are otherwise lightly regulated. They can be used to pay for events at Trump’s properties or to finance his travel or personal expenses. In short, they’re almost like personal piggy-banks. “There’s not really a legal mechanism that would prevent somebody from enriching themselves with the contributions that they receive into their leadership PAC in the same way that personal-use restrictions would prohibit that for a campaign committee,” campaign finance legal expert Kate Belinski told  the Post on Dec. 1.

On Dec. 3, the Trump campaign announced that, along with the RNC, it had raised $495 million between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, including $207.5 million in the 20 days after Election Day. That same day, the Post reported that the Trump campaign had spent only $8.8 million contesting election results — a small fraction of the money raised within that time. 

Then, on Dec. 18, Business Insider reported that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had set up a campaign shell company, American Made Media Consultants, that secretly paid the president’s family members and spent nearly half of the Trump campaign’s $1.26 billion war chest — a total of $617 million. There is a relatively innocent explanation — Mitt Romney used a similar entity, named “American Rambler,” to make major TV ad buys, and lawyers at Jones Day, a top GOP law firm, suggested the Trump campaign do the same.

But that doesn’t account for what happened after the shell company (American Made Media Consultants) was created, especially the secretive way it was run, the disproportionate amount of money it handled and the Trump family hands in the cookie jar, all of which are reminiscent of how Trump and his siblings used a similar shady entity, “All County Building Supply & Maintenance,” to help evade inheritance taxes of nearly half a billion dollars, according to a 2018 New York Times investigation. As The Times explained, that entity “was ostensibly a purchasing agent for Fred Trump’s buildings,” but that’s not actually what it did:

Instead All County siphoned millions of dollars from Fred Trump’s empire by simply marking up purchases already made by his employees. Those millions, effectively untaxed gifts, then flowed to All County’s owners — Donald Trump, his siblings and a cousin. Fred Trump then used the padded All County receipts to justify bigger rent increases for thousands of tenants.

American Made Media Consultants has only just now been brought to light, so we have no idea if it was used in any similar sort of illegal or unethical manner. But the Trump family clearly knows how to do it, if they had wished. As one clean government expert — Brendan Fischer, the director of federal reform at the Campaign Legal Center — told Business Insider, the payments to American Made Media Consultants were a “scheme to evade telling voters even the basics on where its money is really going” and a “shield to disguise the ultimate recipients of its spending.” 

The Coup

There’s no doubt that Trump is conning his small donor base, the only question is “How much?” and “How much else is he doing as well?” The latter question leads into the subject of staging a coup, or more precisely, an autogolpe — a “self-coup,” which takes place when a democratically elected leader uses the position to dissolve or disarm the national legislature and the courts, putting the leader above the law. While many observers have resisted such talk, it’s important to realize that a failed coup is a coup nonetheless, even a comically inept one. What’s more, even a comically inept coup can sometimes succeed.

That’s why Dec. 14 was such an important day. Before that, there was genuine uncertainty about whether Trump’s coup might succeed. Trump and his closest allies kept coming up with harebrained schemes about how he could hold onto power and only a small handful of Republican officials offered any sort of solid resistance.

Perhaps the last such scheme before Dec. 14 was a Texas lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, seeking to overturn their election results. It was initiated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — under FBI investigation for criminal activity, and no doubt interested in a possible Trump pardon — and then joined by 17 other Republican attorneys general, and supported by a 60%-plus majority of Republican House members, 126 of them, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The idea that one state could sue another in federal court to invalidate its elections flies directly in the face of everything conservatives supposedly believe about federalism and states rights, but a 5-4 conservative majority of Supreme Court justices ignored their own principles in handing the 2000 election to George Bush, so it arguably wasn’t that harebrained … until it turned out that it was. Only two justices agreed to even hear the case — and none said they’d support it.

Then, on Dec. 14 itself, “alternative delegations” of Republican electors to the Electoral College met in seven states that Trump lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — on the far-fetched theory that their illegitimate status could somehow be magically reversed. These seven cosplay delegations hadn’t been endorsed by their state legislatures, as originally envisioned in Trumpian “constitutional” fantasies. But at least they were the electors that would have been elected if Trump had won their states instead of Biden. So at least they had the right players, even if everything else was bogus. Sure, it was another harebrained notion, but harebrained notions have had quite a run these past four years.

The Longer View

Here in California, Weber had a different thought. 

“We continue to validate that this democracy — this experiment in treating everyone equal and making sure that every vote counts — is truly, truly successful,” Weber said, after the vote.

This time, at least, she was right. But for how long? That’s the question.

Trump’s effort to overturn the election had clearly suffered a major blow, soon to be compounded by Putin and McConnell, as organized Republican opposition appeared to crumble. But the damage Trump has done to American democracy could prove far worse in four years. Weber was only right by a hair: Biden won the national popular vote by over seven million votes, but a shift of fewer than 43,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin would have produced an Electoral College tie, and Trump would have won the tie-breaking election in the House of Representatives, which would have voted under a one-state-one-vote rule.

That scenario underscores a crucial fact: however anomalous, atypical and quixotic Trump’s attack on our democracy might be, it is echoed by a framework of constitutional structures that are inherently hostile to the one-person/one-vote spirit of democracy we nowadays take to be fundamental to our democracy. What’s more, between these two extremes — the atypical Trump and the foundational constitutional structures — there lies an extensive middle ground in which democracy must battle for its very life. We’re quite mistaken if we think the only danger that we face is a Trumpian coup. Trump was never going to turn into Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. Full-blown authoritarian rule isn’t what serious students of world politics have feared. Instead, they worry about what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way called “Competitive Authoritarianism” in their 2010 book on the subject. “Modern democratic regimes all meet four minimum criteria,” they explain:

1) Executives and legislatures are chosen through elections that are open, free, and fair; 2) virtually all adults possess the right to vote; 3) political rights and civil liberties, including freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom to criticize the government without reprisal, are broadly protected; and 4) elected authorities possess real authority to govern, in that they are not subject to the tutelary authority of military or clerical leaders.

That’s not to say there are no violations, but “such violations are not broad or systemic enough to seriously impede democratic challenges to incumbent governments. In other words, they do not fundamentally alter the playing field between government and opposition.”

So then, how does America stand up? Mark Copelovitch is a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin who’s been tweeting observations for some time through the lens of “Today in life under competitive authoritarianism.” He recently observed, “Arguably, the US has basically not fully met the 1st 2 of Levitsky & Way’s democratic criteria since the failure of Reconstruction. Trump-era backsliding is mostly on criterion 3. But the problem now is additive. EC + increases in gerrymandering & malapportionment + Trump.”

This can — and should be — cause for serious concern. All the Republicans scrambling to make Trump’s harebrained schemes pay off should surely worry us — a lot. But Copelovitch sees a silver lining: 

“I actually do think this is what we are starting to realize & why the Court/Senate/statehood reforms have gained traction,” he wrote. “The immediate authoritarian threat of Trump since 2017 has shined light on the enduring undemocratic nature of our political institutions. Both are threats.”

The silver lining is that people are waking up.