And make no mistake, it is absolutely an attempted coup.
It strikes me as less an attempted coup than a sideshow for Trump's die-hard supporters, an attempt by him and by the GOP to maintain a polarized electorate in the run-up to a critical pair of Senate seat runoff elections in January.
So far seems to me Biden is playing it with a good ear to avoid overreaction. He's going ahead with his vetting of prospective Cabinet members to extent he can, and obtaining what he can in terms of briefings from former officials in those agencies, plus (possibly) some off-record more official current info... "there are ways"... and some of them might even be countenanced by current Republican officials.
Not sure why it's necessary for senior Republican leadership to play Trump now like he's half-God, half-toddler, but also not sure it's just a calculus based in sheer politics. There could be a fair bit the public does not yet know about how Trump and his circles of advisors and congressional overseers have actually governed during the past four years.
As for us out here: no need (yet) to play into Trump's desire to have massive demonstrations against him rise up all over metro areas in the US, with inevitable provocations to violence then possibly enabling his desire to declare a state of emergency and suspend a lot of the rights that currently remain in hand to defeat the staging of a soft coup under guise of court actions. The courts are not inclined to go along. It remains to be seen if the high court would play the game as Trump has figured. I see nothing to indicate that it would operate as a rubber stamp, starting with perfectly human resentment of such an assumption. Those recent appointments by Trump have all more than just "read" the constitution. There's less leeway in its texts for a "coup" than the Don imagines.
What Trump is trying to do now is so far past the idea of Americans consenting to their own governance that it makes him look not only pathetic but more ignorant than most of us observers may have imagined. On the other hand, it's entirely possible Trump is now mostly consumed about saving his ass and that of his family and certain enablers from legal troubles. T'is the season of expected pardons. As to his own, well, a dramatic chapter about that could yet be in the offing, who knows. But none of that changes outcome of this election. Biden will get sworn in on Jan 20, whether as #46 or #47 depending on the usefulness of an interim Prez Pence to Donald Trump.
Graham has overstepped the law in suggesting whole rafts of votes could just be thrown out to effectively install Trump as the winner of the 2020 election (and he should be at least censured if not charged with election interference in Georgia). At the very least he has outraged county and precinct level election workers all around the USA. That counts for something in terms of upward grass roots pressure on state lawmakers to keep their noses out of the upcoming electoral college vote. The legislature has no part in that unless a popular vote-count for President is literally tied, which is not the case in any state.
McConnell has led the GOP's more typically needle-threading way though the daylight between factions of the Republican base with his wordsmithed statements about a timely inauguration and peaceful transfer of power. I don't doubt for a moment that he means it, despite his clear avoidance of taking a stance on "who won" for as long as possible. Again, he doesn't care who lands in the oval office as long as he can maintain even a razor-thin margin in the Senate and so his majority leadership. In the end it's not going to be good optics that he didn't step up to tell Trump the GSA administrator needed to launch the transition. He's forgetting he might need Biden to help tamp down what McConnell sees as a threat by the progressive wing of the Dems in the House. Every day the delay of transition continues, the good will dwindles from what it was in the past peer and at least minimally collegial relationships of Biden and McConnell.
Timothy Snyder's right to point out concerns for both Dems and Republicans in that series of tweets. But again, I don't think an appropriate response to even a soft coup at the moment is massive demonstrations.
Trump hasn't even managed dictatorship 101's Rule One (despite his efforts to decry media as "fake news"): a would-be dictator must first effectively squash the free press. But in the USA, even conservative leaning mainstream outlets assume Biden has won and are on to talking about policy expectations, what should get baked into the market as Biden's Cabinet picks emerge and so forth. When media outlets openly and properly portray Kayleigh McEnany as a discredited propaganda artist not unlike "Baghdad Bob", well...
Start worrying when Trump brings a successful "prior restraint" order on the Fourth Estate's ongoing demonstration that the way to assert a right to publish is... well, to publish.
And it’s too kind to say a choice to disenfranchise groups of voters not voting for you is just pragmatic. It’s racist, illegal, un-patriotic, and killing democracy and the Constitution, a document they swore to protect and defend. So they are oath breakers before the God they tell you they fear, but that’s just another sham, a con, to fool their suckers, isn't it?
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