Here is a video of my presentation to the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign on the Republicans’ plans to overturn November’s elections if they don’t win them. All too many people are ignoring this tremendous threat. Either that or they are simply relying on the Democrats to stop them. Below the video is a transcript of my presentation. You can also listen to the presentation as a podcast here.

If ten years ago you had told me we’d be seeing scenes like what we saw in this video which I just showed, I’d have said you were being hysterical. I learned something from that. But still, in reviewing what I’m going to present, I had to ask myself again if I was at least exaggerating the extent of the danger. This video should serve as a reminder of what is possible.

Trump & Co. have learned something from January 6 also. They learned that a direct, violent coup was not possible. They had to lay different plans.

(in)Justice Samuel Alito flies this flag of the Christian nationalist fascists at his holiday home.

So what they have been preparing for the last 4 years is a coup with a legal or Constitutional cover. That is what the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity represents. In that ruling, the MAGA majority on the Supreme Court just simply made up what amounts to a new law out of whole cloth – that the president of the United States is above the law, that he can do whatever he likes and is not subject to legal prosecution.

I other words, this legalizes the overthrow of the rule of capital through democracy. 

The owners of capital in the US have ruled through democratic means ever since the Civil War ended nearly 160 years ago. It’s been the most successful such rule in history. So the questions are:

1. How did that base develop and how did capitalists like Yarvin, Thiel and Elon Musk develop such enormous conceit that they came to view  the overthrow of this 160 year method of rule as actually possible and even desirable?
2. What, exactly, are the means through which they intend to carry out this constitutional coup? 
3. And finally, what are some possible outcomes whether the coup succeeds or not.

What I am not going to get into is whether the outcome matters very much. Anybody who is not living in alternate reality knows the answer to that, as the video we just watched shows.

Now, normally we think of the establishment of authoritarian rule as happening when there is a crisis in society and when the working class is actually challenging the rule of capital. But I think that just the opposite is true in this case. Here is where that proverbial horseshoe concept comes into play. You have the opposite end of the spectrum, leading towards the same result.

I think what we have is an enormous crisis in the US working class. And incidentally we are not the only country with such a crisis. We’ve had a nearly 80 year war against all the traditions of struggle of the US working class. A leading force in that war has been every wing of the leadership of the US working class – that is to say, the union leadership. They have brought all the propaganda of the capitalist class directly into the only mass organizations the working class has ever built in the US. They have succeeded in alienating the vast majority of union members from their own unions. The union leadership has buttressed the capitalist propaganda of individualism, which is the exact opposite of working class solidarity. All this has created utter confusion within the working class. The nonprofiteers have also played their part in all of this.

Now, normally, a certain tension exists under capitalist democracy between the drive of the capitalists to complete domination vs. the resistance of the working class and the oppressed, the latter of whom must ultimately depend on the support of at least a major sector of the working class. But what happens when one side fragments, when the working class no longer is any sort of independent power? Then a vacuum develops and something must fill that vacuum. That is what the forces for this potential coup represent – a drive to fill that vacuum.

The rise of the far right, and its support from a small wing of the US capitalist class, does not result from a threat to capitalism from the working class. On the contrary, it results from the crisis of confusion and fragmentation in the working class. This crisis has created a huge vacuum which, among other things, has strengthened some of the most aggressive and reactionary tendencies of some of the capitalists. This is what Yarvin, Thiel, Musk and others represent.

In fact, it is this crisis in the U.S. working class which put Trump into office in the first place.

Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, making clear that he would disobey a Trump order to carry out a military coup.

Donald Trump discovered when he was president that he could not get the military tops to carry out a coup. On two separate occasions, he wanted the generals to call the troops out into the streets and on both occasions the top generals such as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley made it clear that they would not obey such an order. So Trump and his MAGA leaders tried to overturn the elections by the legal route. But it was an unplanned, hit or miss plan and it crumbled like a house of cards, just as did the January 6 attempt at a violent coup – which was also hardly planned. Since then, they have had four years to organize and refine their plans and to seize complete control over one of the two main capitalist parties, the Republican Party.

Before I get into their known plans for a constitutional coup, I have to mention the plans that probably exist beneath the surface – plans for violent terrorist attacks on voting centers and the places where votes are counted. I think the video I showed demonstrates that such plans most likely are in the works. Trump and MAGA discovered that an outright frontal attack like Jan. 6 won’t work. They also found that there is a real risk of infiltration, like happened when these types planned to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. They went into a decline after Jan. 6, but they also reorganized themselves.  One of the foremost groups is American Patriots Three Percenters or AP3, which is already active on the Southern border, “rounding up” immigrants. AP3 has connections with various sheriffs and police and has law enforcement members. The New American Journal quoted one of them as saying “The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box. It’ll be decided at the ammo box.” He said he is ready to force his way into voting centers if need be, or “whatever it takes.”  A study by the Institute for Strategic Development shows how these terrorist groups have reconstituted themselves to make infiltration by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies more difficult.  So we simply don’t know what their plans are or what they might do. But we have to keep that danger in mind.

Now, let’s look at their plans for a coup under legal cover.

To get a glimpse of those plans we should turn to what happened in Fulton County Georgia in the May, 2024 primary elections. Fulton County is the county in which Atlanta is located and it is the absolute epicenter of the Democratic vote in

The America First Policy Institute. They are at the center of the plans to overturn the 2024 elections if the elections don’t go Trump’s way.

Georgia because it contains the great majority of black voters in the state. If the Democrats are to win that state, they must get a huge majority in Fulton County. And something peculiar happened in the May primary in Fulton County. One of the election board members, Julie Adams, refused to certify the vote. Now, remember, this was the statewide primary which would just determine which two candidates would be in the November runoffs for state office. It had nothing to do with the presidential election nor even the presidential primary, which had been in March. So why would Adams refuse to certify the vote? The answer is to be found in understanding who Julie Adams is: She is the state head of the America First Policy Institute, the AFPI. This is a multi-multi million dollar institute tied in with Trump and with such foundations as Judicial Watch, which has done so much to enable MAGA to take over the judicial system. And Adams’ refusal to certify the vote in that key county for the state – and possibly the nation – was a test run for the federal election.

Adams is not alone. According to Rolling Stone, some 70 election deniers now serve on election boards in key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania . So, we can count on the effort of Julie Adams to be repeated 50, 60, 70 times or more. This, in itself, can tend to overwhelm the system.

Then, on top of that, we have had the harassment of and threats to election officials and just rank and file poll workers – those who actually count the ballots. According to the Brennan Center 38% of poll workers have reported such harassment and threats of violence, including threats to their lives and the lives of their families. This has caused mass resignations and retirements and as a result over 25% of those who will be administering the election will be doing so for the first time. The result of lack of experience can be seen in one simple mistake: In the 2020 election disrict of Wilkes Barre PA, poll workers didn’t have enough paper of the proper thickness on hand and this led to an hours long delay in voting. That, of course, led to all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. Now, multiply that by scores of times over, and you get a sense of the chaos that can result. You get a sense of the excuses the election deniers can seize upon to refuse to certify the vote.

However, we should not get carried away here. Again, according to the Brennan Center and others, certification of the vote results is not optional. The election boards are not created to interpret the law. Their role is purely to serve as human adding machines. And in all of the 60 plus court cases arising from the 2020 election, the courts ruled fairly quickly against the challenges. But such challenges can create a climate, a base for further challenges. Nor can we rule out the possibility that an entire local election board would refuse to count the votes. Normally, we can expect the courts to resolve this fairly quickly. That is not necessarily true in 2024 as we will see.

In 2022, the federal presidential electoral count reform act was passed. That act provides for quick federal court action in case of disputes of election results – in other words, disruptions by election denying officials. It also provides for a means of preventing individual rogue federal judges like Aileen Cannon in Florida from playing a role. It also provides for quick resolution by the Supreme Court, but here a question arises. The act provides for a key role to be played by the state’s governor. That would seem to fly in the face of an extreme legal theory called the independent state legislature theory. This  theory claims that the state legislatures are the one and only authority in everything to do with running elections, including determining its outcome.

The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court will go along with overturning the election if they think they can get away with it.

In a 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Moore v Harper, the Supreme Court majority rejected that legal theory. But (in)Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissented. They in effect accepted the independent state legislature theory. Since then, the rest of the MAGA (in)Justices, most especially Chief (in)Justice John Roberts, have gone further down that road. That’s what we saw in their ruling that a president (meaning Trump) is immune from criminal prosecution for any “official” act. To repeat: there is absolutely nothing in the law or in the Constitution that justifies this ruling. They in effect simply created a new law. In the past, Roberts was concerned that the court would retain some degree of credibility, that a majority of the public would see the court as being above politics. This ruling was a declaration by him that he didn’t give a damn how the court was perceived any more. He sensed a MAGA victory and that was that.

So, whether the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority could travel down the road of the independent state legislature theory after the coming election is an open question. I will return to that later.

Now, as we remember, in 2020, the electoral count in congress was challenged by a couple of senators and a few Representatives. The federal electoral count reform act tightens that up to require one fifth of members of each house for a challenge to be considered. I think it’s pretty likely that there will be such numbers if Harris wins. For such challenges to succeed, the Republicans would need a majority in both houses. That was why Trump held his first election rally in weeks out in Montana in early August. He is sure to win Montana by double digits, but there the incumbent senator is Democrat John Tester, and Trump was campaigning for his Republican rival. A key to overturning the election, should that be necessary, will be for the Republicans to gain a majority in the senate, and the Montana senate race gives them a good chance.

Democrats’ strategy
Now, what is the Democrats’ strategy for preventing the MAGA Republicans from overturning the election and instituting a constitutional coup? A few weeks ago, liberal TV personality Rachel Maddow interviewed “progressive” Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, and Maddow posed this exact question to her. Warren gave two answers: First is to run up the votes for Democrats all up and down the ballot so the result is so “overwhelming” that they cannot overturn it. Second is to take it to courts. It is not ruled out that they can get an overwhelming victory but that is by no means assured. In fact, at this time the result is up in the air.

I think if  the Democrats do gain an overwhelming victory, that will intimidate the election deniers, including those on the election commissions and many of them will back off from trying to overturn the election. Even the MAGA (in)Justices on the Supreme Court would feel the pressure. A recent article in CNN detailed how the (in)Justices negotiate and compromise among themselves just as do the elected politicians. In other words, while they are more insulated, the (in)Justices are also subject to political pressure.

To get elected, a presidential candidate must get at least 270 electoral college votes. What would happen if Harris got that number or only slightly more? I think that situation, which is entirely possible, would send the election deniers into overdrive. It is exactly such a contingency for which they are planning. It cannot be ruled out that so many challenges could be made at the county level that state boards could be overwhelmed and one or two could simply find it “impossible” to rule. All sorts of delays and confusions are possible. The MAGA majority on the Supreme Court is waiting for that like a fox waits for a gopher to emerge from its hole. Waiting, waiting, and then the predator springs. It’s impossible to predict exactly how court challenges could reach the Supreme Court or what pro-MAGA decision the majority could reach.

Another route for a legal coup could be this: if Harris wins a slim majority of electoral votes, then because of the electoral math it’s most likely that the Senate will swing Republican. Because of gerrymandering, the House could stay in the Republican’s grip. In that case, and if the vice president – who is Harris – declares a Democrat victory, it’s certain that the results from at least one state would be challenged. The challenge would be to the results in one particular state or a series of states, maybe Wisconsin, for example. In that case, it’s most likely that the challenge would win in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Also, keep this in mind: All the Republican majority has to do is deprive the Democratic contender of the majority of potential electoral votes. If there are enough states that cannot send in electoral votes by January 6 so that neither candidate gets a majority of all the 538 possible votes because 538 total votes are not sent in, then the House of Representatives chooses the next president. Each delegation from each state gets one vote. It doesn’t matter if the delegation has two delegates, as Montana has, or it has 52 as does California. Each delegation gets one vote, and since the majority of states are rural and the MAGAists are in the majority in those states, it’s certain that the House of Representatives would install Trump.

Or they would if the Democrats’ game plan as outlined by Elizabeth Warren, among others, is adhered to. That’s where a movement from below comes in. A popular black Instagramer in Atlanta, “Talia”, who has some 25,000 followers, was asked on Instagram what black people in Atlanta would do if the Republicans tried to steal the elections. Her answer was succinct: “They’re gonna riot,” she wrote. It seems pretty certain that there would be mass protests throughout the country. In fact, that could happen even before the election if the fascist groups conduct terrorist attacks on voters or on black or Latino populations.

What would be the response of the Democrats and their fronts – the NGO’s and the union leadership? In 2000, the Republicans in Florida moved to prevent a recount that would have led to the victory of Al Gore. The Republicans staged what was called the “Brooks Brothers riot” (named after the Brooks Brothers brand of suits) to ensure there would be no recount. The AFL-CIO leadership discouraged any street protests in Florida because their masters, the Democratic Party, didn’t want to encourage lack of faith in the system. They made sure that nothing went beyond the legal challenge. (By the way, the lead lawyer for Bush and the Republicans was none other than present chief inJustice John Roberts, and he based his argument on a version of the independent state legislature theory.) In 2020 the Democrats carried out the same legal-based strategy successfully. What Elizabeth Warren explained in her interview with Rachel Maddow is what a New York Times article had already reported on for 2024. This time the stakes are far higher than they were even in 2020, and I think it’s possible that if a mass protest movement develops a wing of the union leadership could break from the present strategy and jump to the head of that movement. Same with some of the NGO’s. What would happen then? Would the country be paralyzed, with transportation – rail, shipping and the air industries shut down? How would MAGA respond? I’m inclined to think that in the face of a mass movement they would tend to back off, especially if the unions are involved. But who knows. Maybe MAGA would carry out terrorist attacks. If that happens, it would probably spur the resistance to even greater heights.

If Harris/Walz win, I think there would be a crisis inside the Republican party. Hundreds of Republican officials would suddenly discover that they never did support Trump. Already we see signs of that, such as the several Republican speakers at the recent Democratic convention. There will be a movement to put the Christian nationalists and similar types out of power in the Republican Party. If that succeeds, then where would the MAGA movement go? Or if it fails, what would the mainstream Republicans do? In either case, it seems to me that a split in the Republican Party would be possible and a new party could develop. That would shake up the entire bipartisan monopoly that already is on its death bed.

As for the Democrats, there already is pressure on Harris to try to return to “bipartisanship” and even appoint some mainstream Republicans to her cabinet. That’s what we saw in the DNC with the Republican speakers. If Harris gets in by “normal” means, I think it’s entirely possible that she could turn in that direction. However, if she gets in through a mass movement in the streets, that fact will serve as pressure on her to move “left”.

Of course, if Trump/Vance get in, then all bets are off for what might happen, as Cheryl Zuur showed in her presentation back on Aug. 4.

Organize!
What role can those who understand the extreme danger of MAGA and a possible MAGA coup play?

Right now, the overwhelming mood of those who want to fight MAGA is to elect Harris and the Democrats and hope for the best. If the Democrats get in, they are sure to disappoint many millions. And if they don’t, MAGA will feel enormously empowered and become even more aggressive. No matter what the outcome, MAGA is not going away and, in fact, increased violence from groups like AP3 I think are likely, and the Democrats will prove (once again) incapable of dealing with it adequately. I think, I hope, that that will lead to a transformation of the mood among at least a sector of the working class and working class youth.

That is what we have to look for.

It seems to me that the unions have to be at the center of such a resistance, but the union leadership will be reluctant (at best) to act. So central to any plans is to find some union members who might be willing to bring it up inside their unions and in their workplaces. The goal could be for the union to organize a meeting of all union members and supporters to discuss this danger and what the unions can do to counter it.

Maybe we can start discussions around this in our communities and/or in schools and through that find the ones and twos of union members.

Through that, MAGA Resistance Committees could be built. Such committees absolutely must be organized democratically, with regular meetings and an elected leadership. That way, no matter what the outcome of the November elections, the beginnings of a working class based movement could develop.

That is a possible avenue of approach for now. As events proceed, who knows what will develop? For example, if there is a terrorist attack, that could lead events in a very different direction. But either way, we have to start looking for ways of organizing now.