The Washington establishment, mainstream media, Big Tech, and Wall Street are salivating to coronate Joe Biden as the legitimate President-elect of the 2020 election. Once Trump-loyalists in the media, networks like Fox News, and increasingly even Newsmax, are kowtowing to the Left’s narrative. This is likely due to fear of the prospect of being sued by a jerry-rigged FCC, which would be abused by Leftist forces within a Biden administration to silence dissidents like the gestapo.
At the same time, many within President Trump’s own cabinet, including his son-in-law and Vice President, have been reported to have already purchased lavish new properties in Florida, essentially undermining their President’s daily tweetstorms insisting that he was the true winner. It also subverts the President’s last-ditch crusade against allegations of widespread electoral fraud, including President Trump’s adamant belief that the putative Biden victories, particularly in the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, were the result of fraud, corruption, and a lack of transparency by Democratic-run state boards of elections.
Nevertheless, at least tens of millions of Americans continue to believe the 2020 election fraudulent. This includes nearly all of the 74+ million Trump voters, not to mention a handful of Democratic voters and nonvoters. The truth is that election fraud has been a recurrent theme in American history and has taken place with increasing brashness in recent elections. The Left’s bald-faced steal in 2020 was the most blatant abuse of power in modern American history; a total plundering of the Constitution, and the logical culmination of their shameless and repeated (and oft successful) attempts to delegitimize Trump throughout his four years in office.
There is little question that the Biden-Harris campaign ticket is the most corrupt Presidential-Vice Presidential duo in the history of modern politics. Biden’s countless business associations — through his son Hunter and other relatives — with China, Ukraine, Russia, and Latin America, make him a uniquely susceptible candidate. In a more self-respecting time, his foreign entanglements would be tantamount to treason, and prosecuted as such. Harris similarly fits the bill for a uniquely corrupted candidate: all her successful career achievements had their origins in marriages and affairs with powerful political and business leaders. Her current husband is a high-powered California lawyer. She rose to political prominence as the girlfriend of former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown. Her life story is one of shameless grift and self-degradation, subjecting herself to the basest indignities to accumulate power no matter the moral cost.
While neither Biden nor Harris are moral paragons, they are rather exceptional case studies of how to effectively aggregate and retain power in American politics today. The Left, in short, plays for keeps. Power, not “democratic norms,” is their modus operandi. They enter apoplectic rages whenever their opponent attempts to circumvent a norm for even the shortest of short-term victories. Once they reclaim power, they systematically erode whatever detritus remains of America’s dying constitutional order, religiously screaming “rule of law!” and “democracy!!” in their opponent’s ears as they realign the goalposts again and again, further consolidating the breadth of their power. And they have quite an impressive track record: nearly every institution of importance in America today, including a nontrivial share of the Republican Party, which insists on being the lovable losers until the end of time, is in one form or another influenced — either directly or indirectly — by Leftist politicking.
Of course, the Left’s ability to play their game unnoticed forever changed as soon as Trump entered Washington; and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. However, the aftermath of the 2020 election poses a unique tipping point in American history, a Rubicon moment of sorts. Trump is the only man with enough influence to offset the Left’s wholesale monopolization of political power for at least four more years. To date, Trump has talked a big game about investigating electoral fraud and securing the 2020 outcome in his favor. As the weeks have rolled on, however, many of his threats seem increasingly vacuous; remarks made by his outgoing Attorney General about not detecting widespread voter fraud or evidence of Hunter Biden’s many malfeasances ostensibly trivialize whatever actual substance backs the President’s accusations.
Meanwhile, Trump’s reluctance to take dramatic measures to secure the electoral outcome — to get assurances, for example, by his Supreme Court nominees that they will hear oral arguments on an election fraud case, or to use the Insurrection Act to demand a revote in states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, give credence to the view that the President himself, deep down, does not believe in massive fraud.
The Martial Law Option
But the bottom line is that there was fraud, and there is a mountain of evidence to support it. Whether it was sufficient to overturn the electoral outcome is an admittedly open question. But the manner in which the 2020 election was conducted was undeniably unconstitutional. One might even say that the mail-in balloting process itself was prima facie illegitimate, an illegitimacy that was only compounded by the myriad glitches signaling pervasive corruption caused by Dominion Voting Systems.
It must be said that President Trump has a national duty — a moral imperative, even — to ensure our elections are secure and subject to non-invidious influences, with origins both domestic and international. To that end, a martial law orchestrated revote in at least the four defendant-states in the quashed Texas lawsuit: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin is needed. Under his authority, Trump can designate a special election day limited to a presidential revote because of the existing evidence of voter fraud. Overseen by the military, the votes would be cast via paper ballots, in-person, with mandatory photo identification and hand counted with both Republican and Democratic observers monitoring the process.
The Democrats established a precedent in the nearly two-year-long Robert Mueller investigation for the threshold of evidence needed to create a special counsel. The evidence requirement was several leagues below a standard of plausibility; one might cynically describe it as “make-believe.” However, if a preposterous dossier warranted a two-plus year investigation and millions of taxpayer dollars spent, an election in which a significant portion of Americans have reason to believe there was widespread fraud — and in which evidence in fact exists to support that suspicion — merits a full-fledged investigation.
If necessary, the President should use his emergency powers to postpone Inauguration Day until his special counsel completes the investigation. The special counsel should be allowed to take as long as necessary to thoroughly investigate the 2020 electoral process, which should be a bipartisan issue given how both parties have responded to the outcomes of the past two contests. In 2016, the result was irrevocably shadowed by alleged Russian meddling; the same story materialized in 2020, but this time the GOP received the short end of the stick, the result of schizophrenic voting machines (among, obviously, many other things).
A healthy democracy cannot function with half the electorate believing the President illegitimate. Nor will America be much of a ‘democracy’ at all if millions of more Americans lose trust in our governing institutions, which are already at terminal levels of distrust. Cynicism and whitewashed victories make not democratic political regimes. Quite the contrary: they germinate even more contempt for the process, which makes all but inevitable virulent, authoritarian, and even violent political movements.
The Electoral Act of 1887 Option
If the martial law/special counsel idea is beyond the President’s capabilities (in this instance, it would be because the President lacks the personal willpower to undertake such endeavors, as he has the legal authority through the 1976 National Emergencies Act to pull off this feat), the President can attempt to broker a compromise under the penumbras of the Electoral Count Act of 1887. However, this option is messier, will invariably involve more litigation, and has a far less likelihood of success, particularly given the time constraints.
The 1887 Act was passed in response to the haphazard 1876 presidential election in which the North and South agreed to install Rutherford B. Hayes, the popular vote loser, as president. In exchange, the North agreed to remove troops still stationed in Southern states, ending the process of Reconstruction which began shortly after the Civil War. The reason Republicans would have to work “within the penumbras” of the 1887 Act is because its statutory language does not in itself guarantee a victory for Trump. This is because the Act stipulates that whenever there are competing electors sent from any particular state (in our case, both the governor and the state Republican party officials sent competing electors in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and several more states), unless both houses of Congress agree to override the governor’s certification, the governor, and not the state legislatures, have the final say on whose electoral votes get certified.
As it stands now, we have a divided Congress with a House of Representatives under Democratic control. Thus, notwithstanding a miracle, the House (and probably the Senate, too, given the intrinsic cuckery of most Republican officeholders), will certify the governors’ electors in all three of these states, which would put Joe Biden over the constitutional threshold. Now, the 1887 Act technically does grant the sitting Vice President the authority to certify the electoral outcome if there is a dispute between both houses of Congress, but because the Act’s drafters envisioned the Vice President’s biases affecting the result, it allows the state governors to override the Vice President’s certification. So, ultimately, the Vice President is reduced to a ceremonial role in the process of certification under the Act. (And hence, while admirable, talk of Mike Pence overturning the results through the 1887 Act will likely prove futile.)
Having said that, the 1887 Act has never officially been invoked in a contested election. Since it is well over a century old, and given the unique exigencies of modern America, some of its provisions are likely to be considered outdated, and for similar reasons, unconstitutional. As a result, the 2020 election could ultimately pan out more like the 1876 election, which produced the outcome it did based on a compromise reached between Congress and the Executive Branch. Whereas in 1876 the debate basically centered on whether to end remaining military occupation in the former-Confederacy, in 2020 a similar type of compromise may result in, for example, allowance of President Trump to retain power with his consent to place all Supreme Court decisions in the hands of Democratic Party lawmakers. Thus, the Democrats would then be permitted to nominate whomever they like, or even experiment with more radical measures such as Court-packing, rotating judges, and whatever else they might conjure up.
This should be a particularly attractive option for the President and his supporters given the fickle loyalty exhibited by his three Supreme Court nominees thus far, and especially given the lackluster condition of our “conservative”-majority Court overall, which has already proved incapable of rendering landmark jurisprudential decisions serving President Trump’s political interests (look no further than Bostock). Indeed, part of the reason these radical measures have to even be considered in the first place is because the Court punted not once, but twice, on reviewing the allegations of electoral fraud. More recently, this was observed in the Court’s refusal to hear the Texas lawsuit, allegedly because John Roberts was too afraid of potential backlash by ANTIFA and BLM protestors.
The problem with this second option is that litigation would be all but inevitable to achieve the desired outcome. And the Supreme Court, as the court of last resort, has signaled its reluctance to take on any case it deems too controversial for the alleged purposes of “institutional legitimacy.” However, it is certainly a legal question of merit as to whether the 1887 Act is constitutional for granting the state governor, rather than the state legislature, final authority on certification. Moreover, it is unclear whether the legislatures have the ability to overrule their governors’ authorities, and if not, whether preventing them from doing so is constitutional. These are all valid questions of law in spite of the numerous tangled constitutional problems posed. For these reasons, however, it is not clear that strictly adhering to the 1887 Act would be President Trump’s best option.
The Bait-and-switch
A less appealing compromise might be to allow Joe Biden to ascend to the presidency, for instance, with the condition that he also must retain Mike Pence as his Vice President. The logic in this approach would not be so much that Mike Pence would offer a whole lot in the way of a roadblock to Joe Biden’s political agenda. Nor does it emanate from the somewhat absurd conspiracy that Kamala Harris is the grand mastermind pulling the strings behind a would-be Biden Presidency. (In reality, although Harris is slightly more sentient than Joe, both are beholden to the same globalist puppeteers.)
Nay, a Joe Biden-Mike Pence administration would not buy Republicans much political clout other than keeping Pence within a heartbeat of the presidency; should some misfortune then befall ol’ Joe, Pence’s rise to the nation’s highest office should come with the guarantee that he would immediately nominate Trump as his Vice President, and then step down to elevate Trump to the Presidency once again.
Indeed, the above scenarios are ordered by plausibleness with the latter case being least likely. That being said, where there are exceptional circumstances such as occurred this year, unprecedented actions must be considered (and taken) to reclaim institutional legitimacy and bind up the wounds of polarization.
The Hail Mary
Perhaps the most farfetched scenario would be that both Trump and Pence agree to depart Washington and abdicate power on January 20th, with the condition that either Rick Scott or Marco Rubio step down from their senatorial posts during the interim period. Governor DeSantis could then appoint President Trump to the vacant office, who, by agreement with Mitch McConnell and the Republican-controlled senate, would succeed McConnell as senate majority leader during a Biden presidency. If miraculously pulled off, that scenario would equip Trump with arguably more power than he has ever had, even as President. It would give Trump domain over the fate of the Supreme Court, while according Congress a prime opportunity to meaningfully seize power from the administrative state for perhaps the first time since World War II. In short, it would be the ultimate Trumpian power play.
Up Towards Caesarism
In all of the above hypotheticals, the principal objective in them all was to retain power, regardless of ‘institutional cost’ — something Republicans abjectly failed at doing in the decades leading to Trump’s Presidency. This time, however, the stakes are set extremely high. If Trump fails to act, a Republican will never win the presidency again, because there will be nothing stopping Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress from implementing their agenda and monopolizing the electoral process forever. This is therefore perhaps the last time in American history where the opportunity for reform is still available. If and when Trump departs, the process of historical revisionism and ‘unpersoning’ will enter into overdrive. President Trump should realize that if he fails to act now, history will render him as something worse than a loser: he will become a forgotten man, forever lost to the recesses of time.
But history will remember the man who uses the full powers of his office to claim what is justly his. That man, be it President Trump or somebody else, will belong to the ages.
By Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus