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.”
Justin Clark, a senior lawyer on the Trump 2020
campaign, had a message for the group of Republican lawyers gathered at a
members-only club in Madison, Wisconsin, last November. Every time he
met with President Trump, Clark
told the group, Trump asked, “‘What are we doing about
voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’”
“Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in
places,” Clark said. He would later explain that he was referring to
what Democrats say about Republicans, but it was all part of a larger
point — namely, to ensure the president’s election, the Trump campaign
and RNC were stepping up their efforts to root out the supposed scourge
of “voter fraud.”
EU-Digest: Democrats must be aware that dangers loom from all around them, and that they can not cry victory until the fat lady sings - or in other words, that in the November elections they hit the big slam, and win the White House, the Congress and the Senate.
Read more at:
How the GOP Plans to Suppress the Vote and Sabotage the 2020 Election - Rolling Stone
