Challenge to Milley and Esper--Do Your Duty

[Dill]

(08-17-2020, 10:14 AM)michaelsean Wrote: Oh shit is this another he won’t leave office things?  It was Bush, then Obama, and now Trump. They have no mechanism to stay in office. His authority is over. Nothing he does after the oath is taken counts.
“Open letters” might as well open with “look at me!”.  Two random military vets make up a scenario and we are supposed to discuss it because they wrote it down?

Actually, Trump does have a mechanism for staying in office. More about that below.

I don't remember an ongoing public discussion about whether Bush would leave office. Might have been, but it was a fringe discussion if so. 

I do remember Limbaugh suggesting that could be a problem with Obama, given Obama's contempt for the Constitution.
http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/the-new-prediction-obama-wont-leave

Also, the Burrad Street Journal published a spoof of Right Wing paranoia, a supposed interview in which Obama stated unconditionally that he would not step down if Trump won. https://www.burrardstreetjournal.com/obama-refusing-to-leave-if-trump-elected/. For the right groups, that quickly circulated as an actual Obama quote. People probably filed that in the folder with the video where admitted he was really a Muslim.

Newsmax apparently published some letters and links on this, warning of the "terrifying socialist policies" which would follow the usurpation.https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/right-wing-conspiracy-theory-barack-obama-third-term/

So yes there were a number of people worried that Obama would stay in office, mostly people already sure he was a dictator and the most corrupt president ever. In other words, a segment of right wing media followers, probably greatly overlapping with the people who thought Obama was really born in Kenya. Not serious.

But now "not serious" has captured the Republican party and the White House. That means two things are different this time around:

1. It's not just a couple of vets publishing a letter in a venue not known for its conspiratorial tendency, but for its dependable reporting. Rather, Trump's abuse of power is the subject of mainstream news articles and commentary as well.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/13/tracking-trumps-effort-stay-office-by-any-means-necessary/
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2019/how-trump-could-lose-the-election-and-remain-president/
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/17/could-trump-use-the-virus-to-stay-in-power-192883
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-02/trump-plans-emergency-to-stay-in-office-top-democrat-says
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-could-happen-if-donald-trump-rejects-electoral-defeat
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-2020-election-lose-emergency-powers-biden-polls-a9651041.html
https://www.justsecurity.org/69996/the-looming-crisis-of-emergency-powers-and-holding-the-2020-presidential-election/

2. We have all this this legitimate buzz because, unlike Bush and Obama, Trump is actually taking active steps to challenge/"rig"/disrupt the upcoming election. We see other threads on this subject in this forum, especially the one on the USPS. So far as I am aware, Neither Bush nor Obama committed any action on the level of appointing a new head of the Post Office in hopes CREATING a problem with mail in ballots, a mode of voting likely to increase voter turn out, something not in Trump's favor. Add to this his floating the idea of postponing the election because of the Coronavirus.

This disturbs people because Trump has already gotten away with a number of things presidents aren't supposed to do, let alone get away with, ranging from firing people investigating him to openly seeking to profit from office to abusing his foreign policy powers for partisan ends to firing whistleblowers and their families to appointing an AG who dismisses prosecutors investigating the president.

And finally, Trump does have the (wholly legitimate) power to declare a state of emergency at election time, e.g., claiming that the election was fraudulent. And it could be a REAL emergency, with an ACTUALLY BROKEN ELECTION.  Not fake at all, in the sense that it might be genuinely impossible to really tell who won, impossible to get a valid recount. People saying his powers end at noon on Jan. 20 and the Secret Service will march him out of the WH, etc. appear to assume that he has not declared a state of emergency, which would be a power to override "normal" procedures, to cut/control national communications, including the internet, and deploy the military. And hope the SC can decide in his favor. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/presidential-emergency-powers/576418/

If there IS a big election mess because the PS can't handle mail in ballots and we have not protected ourselves from Russian interference, then it is entirely possible that the Republican Party will follow Trump on this, along with tens of millions of followers who already utterly believe there has been a four-year coup attempt against his presidency. Why wouldn't they believe Trump over the NYT and WaPO and Nancy Pelosi, considering Trump's assumption of emergency control wholly legitimate, and efforts to block it wholly illegitimate--part of the coup. Who here trusts Trump's DOJ to refuse all orders were he to declare a state of emergency?

I personally do not think there is a serious chance that Trump could finagle his way to a second term unelected. He cannot "trick" the majority of Americans who know who he is. A majority of military officers, from mid-level up, would likely refuse orders. But he can trick a significant plurality. So I do think it well within his power to cause one final, tremendous Constitutional/social crisis before he is levered out of there. Pretty sure the Joint Chiefs were not seriously thinking about what to do if Bush or Obama refused to step down, but they are now thinking about Trump.