Trump Advised: Do Anything Necessary to Retain Power

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Last week, I gave you the good news that more and more MAGA Republicans who supported or submitted to Donald Trump are standing up to him. I have additional heartening news in this regard. 

But the counterpoint to that is how, as a result, Trump and his core group are becoming ever more reckless, desperate, and dangerous. So let’s start with that.

You already knew these were people capable of anything. Now, some are urging Trump to declare martial law. As reported by The Atlantic, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and lifelong Trump friend who helped him sue Hillary Clinton, is one of a number of people calling on Trump to do anything necessary to retain power. Another is TV and radio host Wayne Allyn Root, whom Trump also listens to. 

Ticktin told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a LindellTV host and Gateway Pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text; Trump regularly reposts them on Truth Social. “I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allyn Root,” Root told us last week. “Because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency.” 

Ticktin spoke explicitly about using the military and said he didn’t worry about mass unrest because soldiers could “handle it.” 

Many of us always knew it could come to this. Anyone who is surprised by the possibility is being naive. And we’ve already seen the extent to which our fellow “good” citizens can’t really be bothered to reorder their priorities and fully suit up for democracy. 

But they may need to. Those openly speaking and actually planning to seize power after a loss must not be dismissed as outsiders without influence — because they have Trump’s ear.  And so far, we have no reason to expect those with moral authority and professional qualifications to stand up and say: No, this is not going to happen. 

Who could rise to the occasion? It would have to be retired military, at a minimum, and retired law enforcement, and retired judges. They’re the only ones who can take the risk. 

Some will argue that highlighting dangerous ideas only causes panic, and even helps promote them, makes them seem viable and, worse yet, encourages those who want to implement them.  But I can’t see how ignoring a ticking object is wise. 

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And note that the White House, while saying it has no plans for martial law,  is already doing everything it can to create an environment ripe for it. 

This includes pushing on every front to question the voting process itself, and to strike every last person they don’t like off the voting roster. They’re doing this at the same time that nearly every alleged case of “voter fraud” is proving groundless. In one of the latest cases, after the administration claimed to have found 185 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls, Nevada investigated and said that, no, every last one of those is a citizen. 

The data from 69 years of election research shows that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to encounter meaningful voter fraud.

And Texas’s highest court essentially agreed with a lower court in saying the state had provided no evidence in its decade-long prosecution of Crystal Mason for allegedly voting illegally — for which she faced a potential five years in jail. 

Still, they keep it up, and, like Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin in his unremitting attacks on Ukraine, they seem determined to step up their assault on public confidence in election outcomes, with one new order, initiative, lawsuit after another. These developments are now coming at us by the day, even the hour. 

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This all is all directly tied to Trump’s precipitous drop in the estimation of the American public — his approval rating has now fallen to just 33 percent. Of course, Trump’s name is not on any ballot in the upcoming midterm elections, but he has exhorted GOP voters to go to the polls as if he were running everywhere. 

This may turn out to be a counter-productive strategy. While GOP candidates look weak in opinion surveys, many are in fact doing better than Trump. And a number of Republican office holders seeking re-election are taking pains to distance themselves from the unpopular president. But for perspective, only 28 percent approve of the media, according to Gallup, despite the fact that most of the media does a decent job and certainly shouldn’t be ranked lower than Trump, an incredible phenomenon. 

Meanwhile, Trump continues to push the boundaries daily. His violations of moral standards and common decency grow ever bolder. You may have heard about recent ads airing on Fox that promote Trump as a great leader, in language redolent of any dictatorship, and that include the line: “Paid for by the US government.”  

These things are all happening simultaneously in a growing wave that is mounting so fast there simply isn’t time to process them, much less marshal the will to effectively challenge each one in turn.  

I don’t think I’m being alarmist when I say that we’re running out of time. We need more people to recognize what’s at stake and act before the worst-case scenarios become reality. 

As promised above, here’s a deeper dive into the evidence that more and more Republican office-holders, worried that Trump’s coattails will have a negative impact on their prospects in November, are cutting ties to the MAGA-in-Chief. The term-limited Republican secretary of state in South Dakota has actually endorsed the Democratic candidate to take her position. She put out this statement: 

South Dakota deserves a Secretary of State who will strengthen confidence through performance rather than provocation; who will support election officials rather than burden them for political effect; who will protect voter access and election security without pretending those goals are enemies.

Meanwhile, Trump’s frontline defenders — online creators and influencers — appear to be “losing interest in the president,” according to an extensive artificial intelligence analysis The Wall Street Journal did of 70,000 hours of right-wing podcasts. “Mentions of Trump’s name per hour on conservative podcasts have fallen nearly 70% from their peak in the run-up to the 2024 election.” 

To be fair, that was when Trump himself was on the ballot, but still, the guy is president now — and he was the motivating factor for most of these podcasters. In another indication of Trump’s weakening hold on the public, Mediaite reported that Fox news was mentioning Trump 30 percent less.    

And let’s not forget Trump’s apocalyptic and profiteering assault on the press, most recently banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. 

This isn’t just Trump testing the limits of the law like gunning a fully-loaded SUV over a Walmart speed bump. This is Trump acting like American justice simply doesn’t apply to him.

Still, evidence continues to grow that Trump’s self-aggrandizing con game, like his continual invocation of “fake news,” may have worn out its welcome. Pretty much everyone else now knows that when someone in power labels something “fake news,” they mean “real news I don’t want to hear.” 

So, is it all crumbling? That is often what happens when a scam is finally exposed — and Trump’s MAGA movement, with its duplicitous appeals to the average joe while actually doing the bidding of the billionaire class, was always a giant scam. Its all-too-protracted success is hardly surprising, because the kind of people who bought into it are the likeliest targets of scammers -– easily fooled, poorly informed people who fall prey to con artists, from megachurch hucksters to tricksters peddling survivalism. 

We need to reject Trump and Trumpism, but we also need to confront the deeper pathology that made their success possible: the know-nothingism that has always characterized too much of the American populace and periodically becomes truly dangerous in the wrong hands.