Trump’s advisers have been working for months to move his focus away from baseless theories of election fraud. A group of outsiders is making that difficult.
Of all the outside advisers urging President Trump to seize control of federal elections this fall, the attorney Peter Ticktin can claim the deepest ties; the two men went to military school together as teenagers. In 2022, Ticktin helped Trump sue Hillary Clinton. This year, he pushed Trump to secure a pardon for Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk convicted of charges related to tampering with election equipment.
Which is why it might be worth listening when Ticktin says that Trump could do something soon to take over elections. “He’s the only one that I know for sure has the understanding of the severity of it,” Ticktin told us this month before taking the stage at an election-skeptic conference in Las Vegas. The way Ticktin sees it, there are three possible outcomes this fall. The first—a smooth election—won’t happen in his view because, he claims without evidence, Democrats already cheated in the primaries. The second is that Trump takes action before the election to prevent cheating. The last option is that Trump tries to declare martial law on or around November 3. “Either martial law, or step aside,” he told us about Trump’s choices in the last scenario. When we asked about the prospect of riots if Trump tries to overturn the election results, Ticktin said he was not concerned. “Believe me, our armed forces are a lot bigger than they are,” he said.
Trump has already tried to claim greater federal control over elections, which under the Constitution are administered primarily at the state and local level. In February, he said Republicans should nationalize voting in at least 15 places. In August, when the television and radio host Wayne Allyn Root pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and other measures, Trump played coy: “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that.” Later that month, Trump posted a Root column on the topic, with a headline that described the plan as “foolproof.” Peters announced after meeting with Trump in June that the president “basically said to his lead counsel to do what I was asking.” In a prime-time address at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump again repeated the false claim that he had won the 2020 election, and sarcastically encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” in the upcoming elections.
Rioting only works when an overwhelming majority will participate. Even if all the normal people participated (they won't), that still leaves over 100 million conservatives who will support the conservative government take-over. Conservatives will never oppose a conservative coup. Without their participation, rioting alone will simply not be enough to stop the coup.
Rioting will prove that conservatives will gleefully open fire on us and slaughter as many of us as they have ammo for. We will need to do much more than riot. Much more.
According to conservatives, the civil war was not properly finished. After decades of debating with them on that topic, I finally agree. We need to properly finish it or else they will.
But a civil war now...how do you fight that type of war when theres no physical boundaries? Its not like we can hack in to see who voted for trump, bump them off and it all work out.
We'd have to deal with the billionaires, their murder tech and the psycho-killers they pay to protect them. We'd have to deal with the military, which I understand now has IDF working there too.
What I think just might work is if some of the retired military generals teaming up and getting help from an outside country to neutralize a mutual enemy, but I also dont understand why this hasn't already been done. Or at least attempted.
I agree with everything you've said. To answer your question about what individuals can do to fight a war with no boundaries or front lines, I look at "the troubles" in Ireland.
While conservatives would call stochastic attacks "terrorism" (only when they are the targets of course), I don't think the term terrorism is accurate in acts of war. These types of attacks would be targeting enemies to eliminate them, not to terrorize anyone or convince anyone to do anything differently.
In a stochastic civil war, we would be focused on eliminating the threat, not scaring or influencing them. A conservative does not change, so attempting to frighten them or influence them is not an effective way to eliminate that threat. Negotiating with pathological liars and narcissists is also not going to work, which brings us back to the need to eliminate the threat without any other agenda.
Sherman needed to cut a second swath in his march to the sea, maybe through Alabama.
Agreed 100%