‘Terrifying for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup? | Donald
At 1.35pm on 6 January, the top Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, stood before his party and delivered a dire warning.
If they overruled the will of 81 million voters by blocking Joe Biden’s certification as president in a bid to snatch re-election for the defeated candidate, Donald Trump, “it would damage our Republic forever”.
Five minutes before he started speaking, hundreds of Trump supporters incited by the then president’s false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen broke through Capitol police lines and were storming the building. McConnell’s next remark has been forgotten in the catastrophe that followed – the inner sanctums of America’s democracy defiled, five people dead, and 138 police officers injured.
He said: “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.”
Eleven months on, McConnell’s words sound eerily portentous. What could be construed as an anti-democratic scramble for power at any cost is taking place right now in jurisdictions across the country.
Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024. With the former president hinting strongly that he may stand again, his followers are busily manoeuvring themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020.
The machinations are unfolding right across the US at all levels of government, from the local precinct, through counties and states, to the national stage of Congress. The stage is being set for a spectacle that could, in 2024, make last year’s unprecedented assault on American democracy look like a dress rehearsal.
The Guardian has spoken to leading Republican election experts, specialists in voting practices, democracy advocates and election officials in swing states, all of whom fear that McConnell’s warning is coming true.
“In 2020 Donald Trump put a huge strain on the fabric of this democracy, on the country,” said Ben Ginsberg, a leading election lawyer who represented four of the last six Republican presidential nominees. “In 2024 the strain on the fabric could turn into a tear.”
Since Joe Biden was inaugurated on 20 January, Trump has dug himself deeper into his big lie about the “rigged election” that was stolen from him. Far from cooling on the subject, he has continued to amplify the false claim in ever more brazen terms.
Initially he condemned the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January. But in recent months Trump has emerged as an unashamed champion of the insurrectionists, calling them “great people” and a “loving crowd”, and lamenting that they are now being “persecuted so unfairly”.
Trump recorded a video last month praising Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot…
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