Can Trump Overthrow the American System?

This article by Global Geneva's America's editor, William Dowell, is shared with his personal column on Substack: A Different Place.

There are times when a country’s future depends more on the judgment and courage of the ordinary citizen than on its military and political leaders. The midterm elections promise to be just such a moment.

The Washington Post recently reported that US national security experts were being asked by state election authorities for advice on making sure that the upcoming midterm elections are not tampered with by the federal government. The US, in fact, has considerable experience advising developing nations on how to ensure elections are free and fair.

The US traces its roots to a loose union of states, some of which had very different views on where the country should be headed. As a result, the US Constitution reserves the conduct of elections to the states, and not to the federal government.

Donald Trump has tried to reverse that principle established in the U.S. Constitution. He insists that elections should be nationalized — i.e., under federal, meaning his, control.

He has also tried to use his total control over the Justice Department to seize voter registration records. US federal law prohibits armed federal officers from appearing at election sites, but Trump has shown a tendency to violate the law and then count on delays in the courts to make his violation an accomplished fact. That could be the strategy in the upcoming midterms.

Reuters reported that Trump plans to send roughly 1,000 monitors to election sites where the race is likely to be close, or Democrats are in the majority. That’s three times more than were deployed during the last midterms. The reasoning may be that if monitors challenge votes, the election results can be tied up in courts indefinitely. The longer such things drag on and the muddier the whole picture, the better the opportunity to upend adverse results or make some kind of “deal” to “save” the nation from its state of paralysis. The last thing Trump would want, given the electoral writing on the wall for his party, is for everyone to wake up on Wednesday, November 4, with the whole thing settled (unless, of course, the GOP magically wins).

The problem for Trump and his “monitors,” however, is that — as every investigation into the matter, including exhaustive efforts by the Heritage Society and Trump’s own Kobach Commission, has determined, voter fraud is simply not there, at least not in any amount that would effect an election’s final outcome. A recent Justice Department investigation into voter fraud in California, for example, turned up only 28 suspected cases out of more than 27 million eligible voters, just slightly over one in a million.

That’s hardly likely to influence an election, but a lawsuit can hamstring the entire process. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his supporters filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results. All were judged without merit. Some were so obviously frivolous that the lawyers filing them were sanctioned by the court. Trump continued to insist that the election had been stolen from him.

Now, undaunted by past failures, he has announced a million dollar reward for anyone providing information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for “creat[ing]” voter fraud in the midterms or in past elections. Make what one will of the bona fides of such a Trumpian promise, with a five-line Truth Social post Trump has likely ginned up an army of bounty-hunters to make what is already for millions the courageous act of casting a vote that much more fraught.

An Unsettling Call to Insurrection

The reasons for concern over the midterms are obvious. The ferocious attack by Trump’s supporters against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, following a Trump rally in Washington, is reason enough for alarm. Trump tried to join the mob but was kept back by his Secret Service detail. The rioters, after smashing the doors and windows of the Capitol, erected a gallows and went looking for Vice President Mike Pence, threatening to hang him if that’s what it took to prevent a formal certification of the election results.

At least five people died in the riot; several police officers later committed suicide as a result of post-traumatic stress; another 174 were injured in the melee. Trump nevertheless pardoned the riot organizers, claiming that, despite participating in what amounted to an attempted insurrection, they were innocent, upstanding citizens.

All that happened five years ago. Trump, whose behavior is increasingly erratic, wields considerably more power today.

He has placed willing political zombies in the Justice Department, at the head of the military and CIA, and he’s molded ICE into a personal praetorian guard — in other words, a private army that he can use as he wishes.

Although according to recent polls, more than two-thirds of Americans now disapprove of Trump and his policies, he remains a danger to democracy. The midterms are his last chance to hold on to power.

What’s in It for Him, and the Rest of the World

If the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, Trump will be reduced to a lame duck, by no means harmless but considerably less dangerous. If the Republicans win, his depredations will only intensify.

The New York Times warns that Trump may be planning to resume the war with Iran in the hopes that an even more devastating attack will kick that country back to the Stone Age. More concerning is the Trump administration’s apparent preference for war over defense, symbolized by Pete Hegseth’s insistence on calling himself “Secretary of War.”

Names may not mean that much, but Trump’s proposed defense budget has swelled to more than $1.5 trillion.

A good chunk of that is devoted to nuclear weapons.

Current nuclear warheads range from around 450 kilotons to 1.2 megatons — 80 times the power of the 15-kiloton bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The concern is that the new budget calls for much smaller, low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used to replace the bunker-buster bombs that Trump dropped on Iran but that apparently failed to do the job.

Once a nuclear weapon of any power is used, a line will be crossed. There has been talk about Vladimir Putin dropping small tactical nuclear weapons on Ukraine. Only the threat of global condemnation holds him back.

Questions about nuclear war are one thing, but Trump also plans to hold joint meetings with Putin and Xi Jinping in China and later at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who clearly no longer has majority support of the US population, will attempt to decide the future fate of the country in collaboration with two of the world’s leading dictators, the public be damned. For that reason, this summit would not be — to cite a couple of infamous historical parallels — Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, or even Neville Chamberlain at Munich: It would be worse.

What Would Nixon Do?

The closest comparison to where Trump finds himself now may be the Watergate scandal. I was in Washington, working for NBC Nightly News, during Nixon’s last days. The president had replaced the heads of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and there was some concern that he might attempt to use the military to stage a coup d’état. In the end, the Republican leaders in Congress convinced Nixon to leave quietly.

With Hegseth constantly talking about the need for the US Army to exhibit a fierce warrior ethos while promoting high levels of testosterone, there is legitimate concern that Trump might try to use the military to stage a coup.

It’s unlikely that the military would comply. The US Army has always made it clear that the loyalty of officers and men is to the US Constitution, not to any individual or political party. But when an unpredictable president, entering his dotage, is trying to overthrow tradition, nothing is certain.

Hegseth has tried to introduce the culture wars into the military, scuttling the careers of a number of highly respected Black generals and admirals, dismissing female officers, and blocking promotions of others based on race and gender. It’s doubtful that he has earned the trust of the US military’s high command. If Trump turned to the military for support against the American public, he’d likely run into stiff opposition.

What’s more likely to happen is a repeat of the Deep Throat experience. Accurate inside information funneled to two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, working at The Washington Post, enabled the newspaper to deliver a coup de grâce to Nixon’s presidency.

Deep Throat’s identity remained a mystery for years. Then it was revealed that the informant was actually W. Mark Felt, the associate/deputy director of the FBI. In the end, duty to the country outweighed politics or the restrictions of the job.

And What Will Trump Do?

Trump is hardly alone in his inability to acknowledge electoral defeat. The relatively brief history of representative democracy is strewn with leaders who, for a variety of reasons, didn’t take well the loss or diminution of their power at the hands of the voting public. Some claimed fraud; some simply seized power; and some, like Putin, rewrote the electoral rules in advance to prevent such outcomes.

We’ve long assumed US elections were different. Americans have always tried to use common sense when they voted. Now, with a lawless president whose concept of reality is anything but real, the future is less than certain. Better vote this November 3. It may be your last chance.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.