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Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election Are Unparalleled in U.S. History

The president’s push to prevent states from certifying electors and get legislators
to override voters’ choice eclipses even the bitter 1876 election as an audacious
use of brute political force.
President Trump’s strategy has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic
action by an executive who is weeks away from losing power.
President Trump’s strategy has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic
action by an executive who is weeks away from losing power.Credit...Anna Moneymaker
for The New York Times
David E. Sanger

By David E. Sanger

Nov. 19, 2020

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are

unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political
force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the
presidency during Reconstruction.

Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and
a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly
six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College
margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms,
not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.

“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in
Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s
doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he
acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the
world about how democracy functions.”

Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he
needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the
beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress
opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.

Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other
safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s
will.

The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State
Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken
the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the
White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.

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“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan
State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the
process.”

Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress
a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper
procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr.
Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to
resolve it in ways untested in modern times.

Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the
framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a
constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the
law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid
electoral votes.”

But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least
two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia
and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled
legislatures and Republican governors.
On Politics with Lisa Lerer: A guiding hand through the political news cycle,
telling you what you really need to know.

Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results,
although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of
Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not
publicly said one way or another who won his state.

Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy
theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called
that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president
62 days from losing power.

In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has
challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process
in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against
him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s
16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.

In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At
the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses
S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three
states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”

“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and
author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the
outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person
thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on
Election Day.”

“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order

to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”

He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”

Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally
in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme
Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation
gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated
by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)

“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to
Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said
then. “Does everyone understand that?”

Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational
legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states.
In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court,
unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were
falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting
Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.

Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the
president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday.
The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that
Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said
were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague
connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and
billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in
American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as
the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the
Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.

“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about,
you’re lucky.”

Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to
convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.

Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned
him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was
a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John
R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.

“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,”
he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”

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