Is Our System Strong Enough to Block Another Trump Coup Attempt?

Congress prepares to confirm Joe Biden’s election after the Capitol riot of January 6. Photo: Erin Schaff/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In this close and very intense presidential contest, there are two possible outcomes we can count on absolutely: Either Donald Trump will win, or Donald Trump will falsely claim he’s won. We won’t necessarily know for sure which of these realities prevails right away. Based on what happened in 2020 and the likely pattern of election returns this time around, we’ll probably get the Trump victory claim on Election Night (it occurred at around three in the morning in 2020) or the morning after, while confirmation of the actual winner by media consensus may not occur until a few days later (it was on Saturday, November 7, in 2020, when the Associated Press and every other major media outlet called the race for Joe Biden) once late-counted mail ballots are in. What does not seem to be on the table is any gracious concession of defeat by the 45th president, who has repeatedly and redundantly precondemned the election as “rigged” against him. If he does win, the MAGA party line suggests, that means he should have won by a vast, historic landslide without all the “election interference” engaged in by his enemies.

But while election denial from Team Trump is a near certainty should he lose or the result be in doubt, there are encouraging signs that the system Trump stress-tested in 2020 is now stronger. Indeed, this week, we are hearing from two unlikely sources some highly reassuring words about the resiliency of the institutional barriers to a second attempted postelection coup.

Probably no one galvanized preelection fears about a 2020 Trump coup more than journalist Barton Gellman. While many of us writers warned for months about the implications of Trump’s near-daily attacks on voting by mail, Gellman laid out a fully developed scenario in September that eerily anticipated what Team Trump would do, up to and including a challenge to the confirmation of Biden’s win by Congress on January 6 that would depend on Mike Pence refusing to “count” Biden electors.

So it’s worth noting that Gellman is feeling much better about 2024 despite Trump’s very bad intent, as he explains at Time:

The threat remains acute. Trump, backed this time by Republicans who have adopted his pre-emptive election denial, will try again to defy the voters if they choose Harris. …

But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn.

The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it.

Gellman puts a lot of stock in the pre-2024 training of nonpartisan election officials who have assessed what happened in 2020 and have contingency plans for both legal and political attacks on their work. He also points out that even though Trump has a more compliant Republican Party that in 2020, he does not control the federal government. And like others, he reminds us that in the end, Joe Biden was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2021, despite all the Trump-engineered chaos. He also takes a long look at the possibility that precisely because they’ve been denied many legal avenues for challenging the results, MAGA folk may resort to overt violence at the state or local levels to impede the vote count:

Neither violence nor the threat of it is likely to have any meaningful impact on the vote count. Since 2020, state and county officials have taken extensive steps to build in layers of security. In Maricopa County, the tabulation center is now surrounded by a sturdy wall, guarded by law-enforcement teams, and surveilled by drones. In Durham County, North Carolina, says elections director Derek L. Bowens, “we also activate our emergency-response center on Election Day and we have patrols of polling locations.” Staff members in every precinct will wear an “alert badge” that summons help at the press of a button. Police officers in all 50 states will be carrying pocket guides to election law, and law-enforcement groups like the National Sheriffs Association are teaming up with election officials for contingency planning.

Gellman isn’t the only prominent writer who is simultaneously sure Trump will try to pull off a coup and confident he won’t succeed. Anti-Trump conservative columnist David French of the New York Times has concluded that everything the former president tried in 2020 has now been foreclosed by a combination of legislative reforms and court rulings. He adds to Gellman’s arguments the insight that massive legal penalties meted out to 2020’s most notorious election deniers could have a chilling effect on similar mass lying in 2024:

It is … no mystery as to why right-wing media was notably restrained after the 2022 midterm elections. In spite of MAGA’s losses — and in spite of the fact that MAGA politicians were calling the outcome rigged — right-wing media largely ignored (or debunked) their fantastical claims. The liability risk was simply too great to amplify Republican lies.

French also hedges his predictions by worrying that the strengthening of the election system could simply lead MAGA folk into more openly seditious behavior:

Given the hysterical rhetoric around this election, including the common right-wing refrain that Kamala Harris is a “Marxist” who has “destroyed” America and may even put Christians in “gulags,” I’d be surprised if the post-election period is entirely peaceful.

We might even see an attempted repeat of Jan. 6, but this time with protesters actually using firearms and attempting a longer occupation of the Capitol. I’d fully expect to hear revived talk of secession, this time even more serious than it was after Biden won in 2020.

But as both Gellman and French illustrate, it’s not easy to get from mere chaos to Donald Trump taking the oath of office next January 20. If enough people around the former president come to realize that chaos isn’t a strategy, perhaps we can avoid another attempted coup.