CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Commander in Chief for Life

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Seymour Hersh reported yesterday that the White House has an operational plan for November, and that the plan does not depend on persuading anyone.

The man running it, according to Hersh, is Stephen Miller, whose assignment is to keep Democrats from taking Senate seats in a short list of contested states: Alaska, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas. The method has nothing to do with rooting out fraud. Hersh’s sources describe a plan to station uniformed troops at polling places in the closest races, with Marine Corps units directed toward precincts holding large numbers of Black and Hispanic voters. Texas and Georgia are named. The theory is that a certain number of citizens will see soldiers at the door of the church basement and turn around. A source with firsthand political knowledge told Hersh that discouraging even a handful at the right precincts could hold a seat or take one.

That is the entire scheme. It needs no hacked tabulator, no slate of fake electors, no Eastman memo. It needs a uniform standing in a doorway on a Tuesday morning.

It also has a fallback, and the fallback is the part worth losing sleep over. Soldiers at precincts can be enjoined, filmed, and converted into a turnout drive for the other side. A war cannot. Since April this country has been fighting one in Iran that the president started by himself, and a commander in chief in the middle of a war he started is a very difficult man to remove.

Why now is no mystery. A national Emerson survey this week put the Democrats eleven points up on the generic congressional ballot. Fox’s own poll gave them seven, with Brit Hume conceding on air that his network’s numbers held nothing good for Republicans. Trump’s approval sits at thirty-nine percent, the lowest of either term. Kalshi has the House going Democratic at eighty-three percent. If both chambers turn over, the new Congress will move on impeachment, and the president knows it.

II. The Option They Discarded

The most instructive detail in Hersh’s account is the thing they decided against.

In April, Senator Elissa Slotkin asked Pete Hegseth at an Armed Services hearing whether he would deploy troops to seize ballots and voting machines on election day if the president ordered it. Hegseth refused to answer, dismissing the question as a gotcha hypothetical. Hersh now reports that the White House election operatives concluded ballot seizure was not politically viable and settled on intimidation instead.

They set it aside because they have never needed it.

Greg Palast has spent two decades documenting the quieter instrument, and his findings have the tedious quality of real evidence. Interstate Crosscheck, which flagged voters for removal on the strength of a shared name. Felon rolls in Florida. Phantom moving in Georgia. Form irregularities in Ohio. Provisional ballots issued and then discarded on technicalities the voter never learns about. The MIT study Palast cites, Losing Votes by Mail, put mail-in loss at twenty-two percent. I went through all of this in these pages in November 2020, while the country watched CNN repeat itself and congratulated itself on a count that had finally gone the other way. The machinery that ate close to six million votes in 2016 was never dismantled. It was, for one cycle, simply out-voted.

So the progression is legible. Purge the rolls and nobody sees it. Spoil the mail-in ballots and nobody sees it. When the margin grows too wide for paperwork to close, you send the Marines. The escalation from the clerk’s office to the rifle company is an admission that the quiet method has run out of room.

III. The Vulnerability Nobody Wanted to Hear About

Hersh writes that Trump’s speech last week about weaknesses in American election infrastructure was largely false. He is right about the speech. It is worth saying plainly that the underlying weakness is real, which is exactly what makes it useful to this president.

At DefCon, invited hackers took apart voting machines then in........

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