The Plot Against America: The GOP’s Plan to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the Election
Victor Juhasz.
The Plot Against America: The GOP’s Plan to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the Election
Blocking ballots, intimidating voters, spreading misinformation — undermining democracy is at the heart of Trump’s 2020 campaign
Rolling Stone | July 16, 2020
In June, President Trump sat in the Oval Office for one of his periodic interviews-turned-airing-of-grievances. When the conversation turned to the 2020 election, Trump singled out what he called the “biggest risk” to his bid for a second term. It was not the mounting death toll from COVID-19, or further economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, or anything else a reality-dwelling president might fret about.
“My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee that fight the expansion of mail-in voting and seek to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.”
Going into 2020, Trump had the political winds at his back with a strong economy, roaring stock market, and historically low unemployment. Then came COVID-19. As of this writing, more than 135,000 Americans are dead from the virus, more than 3 million have gotten infected, and the economy has tipped into Great Depression territory. With Trump at the helm, the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has ranked as one of the worst anywhere in the world.
By midsummer, the president’s approval ratings had sunk to the high 30s. According to Gallup, in the past 72 years only one incumbent president with a comparably dismal standing, Harry Truman, went on to win re-election. The possibility of Trump going down in flames, Hindenburg-style, and bringing the rest of the Republican ticket with him had even Fox News speculating on whether he might drop out of the race before the election.
But Trump defied the prewritten obituaries in 2016, and he could do it again this year. In recent months, a central theme of his re-election strategy has come into clear, unmistakable focus: Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election. “The president views vote-by-mail as a threat to his election,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign recently told 60 Minutes. Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that vote-by-mail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.” And Trump blasted out in a May tweet that “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.”
“They’re shouting the quiet part out loud,” Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top election lawyers, tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not whispering it. They’re shouting it.”