It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État

During the campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off. Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.

And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.

So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.

And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.

That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.

“We” Haven’t Lost Our Sense of Shame. Only Republicans Have.

Republicans once lectured the rest of about the absence of shame. In the Epstein era, they’re the shameless ones.

At moments of massive social breakdown, when we are in the process of discovering to our horror that something evil has been going on in our society that much of the elite class was in on and that regular people were not told about—and this is surely such a moment—it’s a first and natural reflex among the people who are paid to ponder these things to ask where “we” went wrong. How can “we” have allowed this? And more importantly, how, knowing what we know today, can “we” be anything less than zealous in our pursuit of the whole truth?

Well, I say, excuse me, but who is this “we”? I’m not part of that “we.” You’re not part of that “we.” That “we” is a very specific “they”: It’s elites who believe they live in some atmospheric level beneath which the law and morality evaporate. With respect to Jeffrey Epstein, this elite, so perfectly dubbed “the Epstein class” by Senator Jon Ossoff, included representatives of both political parties: You had Bill Clinton and Larry Summers along with Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick. We don’t know exactly what these men did and did not do, and we need to be careful about such speculation, even with respect to Trump. But at bottom, they and many others consorted with someone they had to know was evil.

Now, finally, we are in the phase where we’re searching for answers. But again, with that last sentence, the “we” problem arises again. What “we” is searching for answers? That “we” includes me; and, I presume, you; and most of the media; and a sizable majority of the American people; and it includes Ro Khanna and a number of congressional Democrats and one admirable congressional Republican, Thomas Massie.

But by and large, it does not include the people who lead the Republican Party. It does include—credit where it’s due—many rank-and-file conservatives, who kept this issue bubbling on right-wing podcasts and in chat rooms. But it doesn’t include their leaders. In fact, their leaders—following their infallible Dear Leader—are actively blocking the search for answers. So, no—“we” haven’t lost our sense of shame. Trump and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and James Comer and dozens of other Republicans who have the power to dig for answers have lost theirs.

Trump, obviously, wants the issue to go away so badly that he now may even start a war to distract us from anything Epstein-related. Bondi, the most cowardly and corrupt attorney general in modern history (yes, worse than John Mitchell!), presumably knows the truth and obviously doesn’t want it out. Ditto Patel.

And as for Comer, neither he nor any other Republican member of the House Oversight Committee bothered to show up for former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner’s closed-door testimony this week. Comer topped that by telling Sean Hannity Thursday night: “What we have seen from the millions of documents that have been released is that Donald Trump is completely exonerated in the whole Epstein saga.” And although nearly all GOP House members voted for that Epstein transparency act, no Republican in either the House or the Senate besides Massie has shown the slightest interest in unearthing the facts.

So that’s the “we” here who have no sense of shame. Not us. It’s just Republicans, who obviously are either terrified that there’s something appalling in those files about their president or know it already.

I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture. Newt Gingrich did it, while he was cheating on his second wife. Reagan education secretary and national scold Bill Bennett did it constantly, pumping out bestselling books about how liberalism had destroyed shame through its pernicious celebration of individual difference. Then we learned that the quality of shame completely eluded him every time he walked through the doors of a gambling casino, and that kind of finished him off as an arbiter of social morality.

Today? They’re the ones with no shame. Many have observed, in the wake of the amazing arrest in the U.K. of the sybarite formerly known as Prince (Andrew), that accountability seems to exist everywhere except the United States. Some observers also point to the sentencing this week in South Korea of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose demise Americans would do well to pay attention to.

On December 3, 2024, accusing the opposition party of engaging in “anti-state activities,” Yoon declared martial law. He suspended political activities, including convenings of the national and local legislatures, and he placed restrictions on the press. Fortunately for South Korea, it was all over within days: Yoon was impeached on December 14, arrested the next January 15, and on Thursday he was sentenced to life in prison.

How did South Korea manage to deliver justice so swiftly? Because a number of members of his own party opposed him. On the night Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the National Assembly called an emergency session; a quorum quickly gathered, and the assembly voted to condemn Yoon’s declaration. The vote of 190 members that night was unanimous, and it included 18 members of Yoon’s own party.

Once upon a sweet old time, it was utterly impossible to imagine such a political crisis in the United States. Today? Alas, the only part of the South Korea story that’s hard to imagine in the United States is 18 members of Trump’s Republican Party opposing him.

That’s the “we” that those of us who love this country—in the only meaningful sense, of wanting it to live up to its potential and its highest ideals, including holding everyone equal before the law—need to be wary of. They will always put Trump before country. And certainly before the girls, now women, so viciously violated by Epstein and whatever members of his “class.” Shameful indeed.

The Sickening Image That Will Haunt Pam Bondi the Rest of Her Life

The attorney general’s congressional hearing was so bad, Fox didn’t even cover it. And it may not even have been the worst thing she did this week!

During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.

Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.

It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.

Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.

Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.

And yet, for all this? In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.

Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing—Ticketmaster’s stock is already surging.” That last sentence is true. If you’re interested, you can read here about why this is so bad. The bottom line is that Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.

To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch........

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