Bolton: “I don’t agree with that. As someone who has helped plan coups, not here, but, you know, elsewhere, a lot of work is needed. And that’s not what he did. She stumbled “from one idea to another.”
But also, in my opinion, wrong. And proved wrong by several things we know Trump contemplated doing during the period between when he lost the 2020 presidential election and when Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president on January 20, 2021.
Consider:
1) Trump had executive orders drafted that would cause the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security to confiscate voting machines in the oscillating states. As CNN wrote earlier this year:
“While advisers publicly presented the idea at the time, revelations that two draft executive orders were actually drafted for different agencies to carry out the work underscore the extent to which the former president’s allies they wanted to arm the powers of their lame administration to annul the elections.
“Any operation by military or federal agents to seize voting equipment for political purposes would have been unprecedented in U.S. history.”
2) Trump openly contemplated appointing environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark as attorney general in the days leading up to Jan. 6. He did so because Clark, unlike acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, was willing to send a letter to the oscillating states suggesting that there had been widespread voters. fraud in the 2020 election. (There had been none.) 3) Trump flirted with the name of attorney Sidney Powell as a special attorney to advance even further in his attempts to annul the election. “I’m making Sidney a special adviser to the president,” Trump told his chief of staff Mark Meadows in mid-December 2020. “Mark, give him the forms … Give him the forms to incorporate.” . (Powell was never officially appointed special counsel.) 4) Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state and, in a lengthy conversation, urged him to “find 11,780 votes.” 5) Trump repeatedly pressured the then vice president. Mike Pence, including the night before the Electoral College count on Jan. 6 – to annul the election results, even though there is no constitutional authority for the vice president to do such a thing.
All of these actions suggest that Trump, in Bolton’s words, was working to undo a free and fair election. He relied on state and federal officials and at least contemplated using official government levers to fuel his feverish dreams about the 2020 election.
The other point that I think Bolton’s analysis misses is that Trump was not a low-level apparatchik trying to foment rebellion. He was the incumbent president of the United States. Which gave him greater capacity, as evidenced by the pressure he exerted on the Justice Department, as well as state and local officials, to try to get what he wanted.
The simple fact that was revealed after examining the actions of Trump and his allies in the interregnum between the 2020 election and the inauguration of 2021 is as follows: we came dangerously close to witnessing the reversal of the election results of the 2020. And that was what Trump did and didn’t do.