A reminder of how Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election
With election day now upon us, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at a few of the articles I wrote to remind voters of the many ways Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and remain in office. I believe you’ll get a feel for how close our republic came to being destroyed by an egomaniacal narcissist with dictatorial ambitions.
Mere weeks following the election, Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell called on Trump to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” put the country under martial law, and “set up military tribunals” to investigate the election using the Insurrection Act.
A week prior to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a pair of memos were issued by then-Senior Legal Advisor to the Trump 2020 campaign, attorney to Donald Trump, and former Strident Conservative contributor Jenna Ellis, calling on then-Vice President Mike Pence to help Trump steal the election. Specifically, Ellis wanted Pence — who was constitutionally responsible for presiding over Congress’ counting of electoral votes on January 6 — to simply refuse to open envelopes from states where the election results were considered fraudulent because they went for Biden.
In December 2020, calls went out from the Trump cult calling for a military coup and/or secession from the Union to take place following a 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision rejecting Trump’s attempt to steal the election via a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the outcome in four battleground states.
Shortly after hearing the news of the Supreme Court decision in the Texas case, internet personalities who didn’t have a life before joining the Trump cult, Diamond and Silk, openly called for a military coup to keep Trump in office:
If the Supreme Court can't save our Republic, then where is the Military?
— Diamond and Silk® (@DiamondandSilk) December 11, 2020
Meanwhile, Allen West, the failed TEA Party congressman and then-state chairman of the Republican Party of Texas released a statement calling for a new “Union of states”:
In an op-ed by the editorial board at the pro-Trump propaganda publication known as The Epoch Times, Trump was urged to launch a military coup, invoke the Insurrection Act, and seize voting machines to examine them for evidence of voter fraud in key states in order to provide a so-called transparent accounting of the 2020 election.
As we learned during the hearing conducted by the January 6 committee, the idea of putting the country under martial law and/or having Trump stage a military coup was receiving serious consideration by the wannabe dictator. For example, a few days after the January 6 attack, we learned that among the records Donald Trump’s lawyers attempted to withhold from January 6 committee was a draft of an executive order to stage a military coup that would have allowed Trump to remain in power. Under the order, the military would have been required to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” all voting machines, equipment, computers, records, etc.
Though never issued, the order along with an accompanying document titled “Remarks on National Healing” spelled out in great detail the lengths Donald Trump was prepared to go to steal the 2020 election (via Politico):
The executive order — which also would have appointed a special counsel to probe the 2020 election — was never issued. The remarks are a draft of a speech Trump gave the next day. Together, the two documents point to the wildly divergent perspectives of White House advisers and allies during Trump’s frenetic final weeks in office.
It’s not clear who wrote either document. But the draft executive order is dated Dec.16, 2020 and is consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president. On Dec. 18, 2020, Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office.
In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios. (Emphasis mine)
Of course, Donald Trump denied ever discussing a military coup during his meeting with Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn and in a tweet, he called it . . . are you ready? . . . “Fake News.”
Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020
According to Trump, this little get-together had nothing to do with martial law, a military coup, or appointing Sidney Powell as special counsel. But if his denials were true, why did he retweet the posts of people who called for martial law? Why did he hold this strategy meeting at the White House? Why were the two leading advocates of a military coup to steal the election (Powell and Flynn) invited to attend?
These unanswered questions had many top-level White House officials extremely concerned at the time that he was considering such a power grab in an attempt to overturn the election and remain in power (via Axios):
Their fears include Trump’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance.
A senior administration official said (at the time) that when Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”
“People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.” (Emphasis mine)
Even after Biden’s victory, Trump, egged on by supporters like Sidney Powell, refused to concede. Instead, he holed up inside the White House where he continued to assert that he actually won the election and eventually leading his army of cultists in a last-ditch effort to establish his dictatorship with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Unfortunately, Trump has been working on another way to steal the 2024 election via what I’m calling the Joseph Stalin Plan — a plan where those who vote aren’t as important as those who count the vote.
In a speech given in 2022 to a group of Republican National Committee members, Trump treated the crowd to a replay of 2020 Election Theatre and repeated the claim that he won the election in a landslide before suggesting that Republicans could win more elections if they were the ones counting the votes.
Arguing that Republicans needed to get “tougher” at the ballot box, Trump told the crowd, “The vote counter is often more important than the candidate,” before adding that he picked up the concept from pro-Trump echo chamber radio host Mark Levin. “We have to get a lot tougher and smarter at the polls.”
He then regurgitated his election fraud theories, stating that Republicans needed to be more vigilant about the tabulation process.
In a March 2022 hearing on the January 6 attack, a federal judge said in a ruling that Trump “likely” broke federal law while trying to overturn the election results. Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” US District Judge David Carter wrote. “Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory.” (Emphasis mine)
There can be no doubt that Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and that he wants absolute power at any cost, even if he has to break the law. Something to remember as we approach the 2024 election.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.
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