Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.
Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.
Former president Donald Trump did not directly respond to a question about whether he would respect and encourage a peaceful transfer of power after the election, and he falsely claimed that “you had a peaceful transfer of power” in 2021 when a violent mob assaulted the U.S. Capitol.
Speaking to an audience of mostly business people at the Economic Club in Chicago, Trump was interviewed by Bloomberg News editor in chief John Micklethwait about economic policies, but toward the end of the hour-long question-and-answer session, he took issue with Micklethwait’s questioning on politics and democracy.
“It was love and peace,” Trump said of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in which Trump supporters trying to stop the affirmation of Joe Biden’s win assaulted 140 police officers, damaged the Capitol and destroyed government property
With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.
A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.
“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”
And on Tuesday, he once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when pressed by an interviewer at an economic forum in Chicago.
With early voting underway in key battlegrounds, the race for the White House is moving toward Election Day in an extraordinary and sobering fashion. Mr. Trump has long flirted with, if not openly endorsed, anti-democratic tendencies with his continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, embrace of conspiracy theories of large-scale voter fraud and accusations that the justice system is being weaponized against him. He has praised leaders including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for being authoritarian strongmen.
But never before has a presidential nominee — let alone a former president — openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy. As he escalates his threats of political retribution, Mr. Trump is offering voters the choice of a very different, and far less democratic, form of American government.
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER DONALD J. TRUMP is ever held accountable for January 6th—a prospect, always uncertain, made even more tenuous by the Supreme Court’s ruling creating immunity for presidential crimes—that dark day’s legacy endures within the worsening culture of political violence in America. With less than a month to go before the 2024 election, fear among election workers is palpable. Statistics show that threats to local election officials are surging, up 73 percent since the same time in 2022. Election officials are preparing with things like panic buttons, bulletproof glass, and sheriff’s deputies at every polling place, while election-worker turnover has reached historic highs.
