We’re coming to the end of a four-year-wide eye of a storm. MAGApublicans have spent four years eating away the structural impediments that forced them to abort to their last attempted coup. With Elon Musk’s help, they’ve spent four long years preemptively convincing too much of America that the Deep State has rigged the 2024 election against America’s whiniest professional victim, Donald J. Trump. Starting tomorrow night, we’ll begin to discover whether they’ve rotted away enough of those old structural impediments to bring the whole house crashing down. (Continued below the cartoon…)
The threat of armed political violence MAGA poses probably won’t materialize, but it may not need to. Since 2020, MAGA stooges have overrun the legislatures and election boards in many of the “red states.” They’ve won one branch of Congress. One of them said the quiet part – that the Republican Party has given up on the concept of democracy – out loud, when he suggested it would be legitimate to simply give Trump North Carolina’s electoral votes before any votes are even counted.
The Little Secret
The “little secret” Trump alluded to sharing with the MAGA Speaker of the House is probably this poorly kept one: The red states are going to muck up the election however they can. They’ll declare voting irregularities (regardless of their existence) are concerted and overwhelming. They’ll claim some portion of the electorate was illegal immigrants, or brazenly appoint an “alternate” slate of electors who’ll vote for Trump even if Harris wins. It doesn’t matter how they’ll do it. They’ve planned to create chaos, to sue over the chaos they’ve created, and to appeal those lawsuits all the way up to the corrupt Supreme Court. Extremist Republican Supreme Court (In)justices, who’ve eagerly and repeatedly ignored precedent, laws, and even the Constitution, to issue rulings Republicans desire, are probably already writing rough drafts of their ruling, and stretching, and practicing their best straight face in the mirror, or whatever they usually do when they’re getting ready to betray the nation.
The MAGA endgame
The Court would throw the election to the House of Representatives. Even if Democrats retake the House, there’s no guarantee that they’d be able to stop the House from stealing the election for Trump, because every state’s delegation would get only one vote. Wyoming’s congressional delegation consists of one representative. Wyoming would get one vote. California’s delegation consists of fifty-two representatives. California would also get just one vote. Red states outnumber the blue. You can guess the outcome of that vote.
If Republicans successfully game the system this way, Harris can win both the popular vote and the electoral college, and still lose. There’s not a lot the blue states could do about it, short of seceding from the Union and starting a civil war. And since Republicans own most of the private arsenals in this country, that probably wouldn’t be a war democracy fans would win.
The Good News
The good news is that something like this requires hundreds of people to have nerves of steel. Dozens of those people are bound to decide that turning the USA into a MAGA utopia is not worth the risk. If they fail, they can expect to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more) hiring criminal defense attorneys, and they’d face years or decades in prison. In the end, many of these cogs in the MAGA machine are going to prioritize their own freedom, and the machine will grind to a whimpering halt.