Thursday's postcard, and Bart Gellman's prescient reporting

December 7, 2023

“Showtime”—Majestic Great Blue Heron wintering and fishing on lower Latah Creek

“It’s not a maybe”

Although Donald Trump lies as readily as he exhales, he also makes a habit of signaling his worst intentions. It’s both paradox and method; a trait that caught the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning (2014) journalist Barton Gellman four years ago.

Gellman was struck by the consistent answers Trump was offering to questions about whether he would accept the results of the coming election, in his re-election bid against Joe Biden. It was never an unqualified “yes” and included Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the only way he could lose to Joe Biden is if the election was rigged against him. It was, Gellman told an interviewer in October 2020, a thread that needed to be pulled.

Barton Gellman

“It’s not a maybe,” Gellman told NPR, pointing out that, in accepting the Republican nomination earlier that year, Trump had shown his hand by saying the only way he could lose to Biden was if “the election is rigged.”

“The American people don't get a say in this as far as Trump's frame of reference has it,” he added. “It's either going to be vote for him or the vote was crooked. That's a man who won't leave.”

In Gellman-esque style, his thread-pulling went beyond a mere prediction. His article for The Atlantic—“The Election that Could Break America”—was a well-focused stress test. The basic problem was that the system of gathering, counting and certifying the actual vote and the electoral college vote was vulnerable to manipulation if the outcome of the vote was resisted. Re-reading the 2020 piece is chilling for how accurately it predicted the drama both in and outside of the Capitol just three months later. The fulcrum of his article—laid out in the two paragraphs below—was eerily prescient.

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

— Barton Gellman, The Election that Could Break America, October 2020

We are still learning, day by day, just how accurate Gellman’s 2020 piece was—including the central roles the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson played in pushing bogus legal claims and trying to thwart the certification of Biden electors.

Gellman was not alone last time. Nor is he alone this time in trying to focus alarm and attention on how vulnerable the nation is—still—to plans that Trump and his allies have been formulating that would remove or paralyze checks and balances on his power if he were to regain the White House.

Last week was notable in that both the New York Times and The Atlantic (for whom Gelman now writes) published deep dives into the prospect of a next Trump Presidency. The Times’s centerpiece was a smorgasbord ranging from Trump’s decades-long praise for authoritarian regimes (including his expressed admiration for the brutality with which the Chinese government attacked unarmed student protestors in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) to his presently and clearly expressed aims to use the levers of White House power to prosecute his political opponents and muzzle media criticism. (Trump, as if on cue, told Sean Hannity and an Iowa town hall audience two days ago that he would not abuse power to punish his enemies—“except on day one.”)

Gellman’s new warning, How Trump Gets Away With It, focuses on how vulnerable the justice system is to being systematically manipulated by a future Trump White House deeply committed to doing so.

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