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This is How Trump Steals the Next Election

Written by and published by Umair Haque in Medium.com on 6/12/20

There is No “If” About it — Trump is Going to Try to Steal the Election. The Question is, Will He Get Away With It?

There’s a man sitting in an oval shaped office in a big white house, staring out across a lawn that ends in a chain link fence, thinking to himself: “How am I going to steal the next election?”

Trump’s approval ratings are plummeting. Even his hardcore supporters — that fringe of American Idiots — is being chipped away at.

Trump is going to try to steal the next election. The question is: is America prepared?

I know this next part will sound scary. Bare with me until the end. those of us who’ve both studied authoritarianism and survived it can tell you with near absolute certainty that not only is Trump going to try to steal the next election, he’s going to try to do it in a certain way. A way that those who hope to be tyrants and dictators always do.

Put yourself in Trump’s skin for a moment. Sorry. You’re going to need a shower afterwards.You’re a malignant narcissist. Nobody’s ever really loved you, because you’re not capable of warmth, empathy, shame, friendship, caring. The only thing you know, and crave, is power, admiration, respect. As you yourself put it, “dominating” others.

Becoming President was your one bid for the admiration and respect you’ve always sought — but never earned. But now that’s failing, too. The world laughs at you. The nation has begun not just to dislike you — but to genuinely abhor you, as a man of no honor, a person with nothing inside but a giant void.

Protests wrack the cities. Statues are pulled down. A pandemic rages. The death count spirals into the realm of world war. Your nation is a failure, and the world knows it. You can’t get re-elected legitimately with a record like this. You weren’t really “elected” in the first place.

Now your back is against the wall. What is a person like you — a power-seeking narcissist, a man without honor, shame, courage, or principles — to do? That is when you are most dangerous of all, like a wounded animal. When you’re backed into a corner. You are going to take by force what you can’t have freely. You are going to try to steal the next election.

And then you chuckle. Because you’ve said as much, over and over again. You’ve joked about it, and you’ve brooded on it publicly. Not just stealing the election, but never giving up power, handing it your kids, building a dynasty of dictators all your own.

Only not very many people seem to really believe you. People are gullible. They don’t believe you when you show them who are, when you tell them what you’re going to do. Instead, they say you’d never try that. Their denial is your greatest asset. You’ve shown them who you are — authoritarian, fascist, aspiring dictator. Isn’t that kind of folly why you have such contempt for the very people you are supposed to lead? Why bother caring for them at all — when they don’t believe you when you show them exactly who you are, over and over again? People are there to be used. They always have been. Especially people who don’t believe what’s right before their own eyes.

That snaps you back into focus. Right now, you are thinking very, very hard, about one thing, and one thing only: how to steal the next election. That, by the way, is why you don’t care about any of the terrible things happening to the country you purport to lead: the pandemic, the deaths, the economic fallout, the social upheaval, any of it. You only care about one thing — one thing — right now. How to steal the election.

How will you do it?

You have an endless list of tactics at your disposal. All you need to do is combine them into a strategy now.

You can deter minorities who vote against you — with dirty tricks, with the brutal policing your country’s famous for, with “voter challenges.”

You can mount legal challenges, in the event you lose by a narrow margin. The Supreme Court is on your side, thanks to your first term, in which you stacked it.

You can count on a supine Congress, and the party which you lead, which will follow you into the abyss — hasn’t it already — to back you in trying to steal the Presidency, whatever the outcome of the election.

You’ve already threatened to declare martial law.All you need is one more event, in a nation already on a razor’s edge, to go through with it. And if you can do that, then you can control who votes where and when, and — hey presto! — the election’s yours. You drool with anticipation, hoping for that one event which lets you declare martial law.

Your party’s already published a stance calling for shooting people on the streets. You smile to yourself. People who can just be…shot…don’t tend to vote. You know how easily it will be to steal this election.

Then there are your friends, in the Kremlin. They will do whatever they can to help you. Flooding social media with propaganda and disinformation, just like last time? Planting all kinds of fake news?

Even hacking the vote itself? You laugh. Sure, you’re under their thumb. But isn’t it worth it? They’re going to help you steal an election.

But not just them. You remember how, during the last election, the issue had become her emails. Your opponent’s. It wasn’t your lack of character, judgment, experience, or even any remotely positive human qualities of goodness and decency. Nope. Her emails. How easy was it to trick the media into doing what you wanted? Hadn’t you done it all your life? A lie here, a half-truth there — and weren’t they always ready to pounce on the nearest woman, minority, person of color?

But her emails! You giggle at the stupidity of it. And you know that this time around, you can misdirect the media with any number of similar scandals. Maybe that irritating woman who heads the opposition against you will have a scandal. Maybe this other woman will. Maybe that Latina in Congress will have one. Scandal after scandal appears before your eyes. And you remember how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of a nation that’s already gone half-blind with ignorance, fear, and rage. But her…emails. LOL.

You remember, too, then, how the warnings had been ignored. A tiny number had called it all correctly. That you’d do the things fascists do, because you were a fascists: camps, raids, bans, purges, Gestapos.

But nobody much had listened to them. The nation’s intellectual class had warned, instead, of calling you a fascist or an authoritarian.

This time you laugh, hard, sneering in contempt. What fools! You told them exactly who you were, and what you were going to do. You spent election season rallying your base of American Idiots by calling refugees and immigrants vermin, promising to ban them and build walls. But these intellectuals — these ivory-tower fools — didn’t believe you when you said it out loud.

You guffaw, realizing: they probably don’t believe you’re going to try to steal this election, also, even though you’ve told them that, too.

You suddenly feel a surge of confidence.

You can steal this election. Why, it’s going to be easier than last time. This time, you’re already President. You can order the soldiers into the streets. You can create havoc on a scale the nation has never seen before. Your friends in the Kremlin will do anything to keep you there. And this nation, especially its intellectuals and media — how easy are they to fool? They still don’t believe you, every time you tell them exactly who you are, and what you’re going to do. LOL. You can steal this election just like grabbing a p*ssy. Isn’t that all it is? Grabbing a society’s p*ssy, and never letting go? And isn’t that what a real man has to do?

A doubt crosses your mind. What if you lose the election, though, and they send in the military to remove you from office? What then?

Ah, but you’ve been making deals your whole life long. You realize that all you have to do is make the military a deal it can’t refuse. Maybe this general becomes the ruler of this province, or that general owns this energy grid, water system, utility, company, stock market, or that general simply inherits the entire nation’s treasury. That’s what every good dictator does, in the final moment, when the military challenges him. He strikes a deal.

It’s never cheap. That’s how the war criminals of the world buy penthouses in Paris and go on mega-shopping sprees at Harrods. They’ve gone from generals to oligarchs. Now they don’t just control a military — but they own a nation’s vital assets. How much money would you make if you owned an entire energy grid? You realize that you can offer payoffs that would corrode even the sternest, noblest heart.

Sure, the military’s made of fine and noble people. But how many will turn down a payoff so large that it would suddenly make you as rich as a king? Maybe they will turn it down, you brood.

And then you chuckle. But that’s the bet, isn’t it? That that last final safeguard will fall, too, because, now, as President, you can offer payoffs that nobody else can, buying off the last protectors of democracy — and thus become dictator.

You’re willing to take that bet. It sounds pretty good to you, actually. Who’s going to turn down a billion dollars? Five? Ten? Generals in places like Russia and Pakistan don’t. Do they ever? Have they anywhere? Didn’t they ultimately turn into decadent and fat fools in Rome, too?

You laugh. You know, suddenly, that it can be done. You are understanding how to become a tyrant.

The glimmers of a plan now flash through your mind. It glitters, like a great and vast scaffolding, made of silver and steel. You see its girders and bolts joining together. You frown, as you try to see the whole picture of it, this grand edifice, this plan. How to become a tyrant. So many have done it before you. Why can’t you do it, too?

Adrenaline surges through you. Dopamine rushes. Your blood roars and your heart pounds. This is how it can be done. This is how you become the dictator of a nation.

You shake with excitement. Your face is flush. Your lips are twisted in hot, thrilling rage.

What are you going to do these last five months? Govern? Lead? LOL.

You are going to hone your plan. Fine tune it. Account for every eventuality. Plan exactly how to fool the media and intellectuals again, which scandal to offer them, all over again. How to drive your base of American Idiots into a frenzy, all over again. When to drop your friends in the Kremlin a note for help, all over again. When to declare emergency, martial law, send the soldiers into the streets, put the nation under curfew. And what to offer those last few good souls standing in the way of your ascent, as glittering prizes that no one else can, to get the hell out of the way.

You have five months to think this all over carefully. How to steal an election. It’s plenty of time. And the more you think about it, the more you realize: it’s not even going to be that hard. In fact, the more surprising outcome would be if you didn’t.

You smile, the dopamine afterglow’s lightning sizzling across your cortex. You sneer at the stupidityEveryone’s. The ones who support you, and the ones who don’t. The ones who are against you, and the ones who are for you. All of them. Isn’t this how you rose? Because you were born for it? Because you were always better, stronger, smarter, cleverer than them — only no one knew just how much? Who’s laughing now?

Around you, the cities burn. A gigantic wave of death rips across society. The nation has fallen into poverty, despair, sickness, ruin.

Things have never been better.

Umair
June 2020

There’s a man sitting in an oval shaped office in a big white house, staring out across a lawn that ends in a chain link fence, thinking to himself: “How am I going to steal the next election?”

Trump’s approval ratings are plummeting. Even his hardcore supporters — that fringe of American Idiots — is being chipped away at.

Trump is going to try to steal the next election. The question is: is America prepared?

I know this next part will sound scary. Bare with me until the end. those of us who’ve both studied authoritarianism and survived it can tell you with near absolute certainty that not only is Trump going to try to steal the next election, he’s going to try to do it in a certain way. A way that those who hope to be tyrants and dictators always do.

Put yourself in Trump’s skin for a moment. Sorry. You’re going to need a shower afterwards.You’re a malignant narcissist. Nobody’s ever really loved you, because you’re not capable of warmth, empathy, shame, friendship, caring. The only thing you know, and crave, is power, admiration, respect. As you yourself put it, “dominating” others.

Becoming President was your one bid for the admiration and respect you’ve always sought — but never earned. But now that’s failing, too. The world laughs at you. The nation has begun not just to dislike you — but to genuinely abhor you, as a man of no honor, a person with nothing inside but a giant void.

Protests wrack the cities. Statues are pulled down. A pandemic rages. The death count spirals into the realm of world war. Your nation is a failure, and the world knows it. You can’t get re-elected legitimately with a record like this. You weren’t really “elected” in the first place.

Now your back is against the wall. What is a person like you — a power-seeking narcissist, a man without honor, shame, courage, or principles — to do? That is when you are most dangerous of all, like a wounded animal. When you’re backed into a corner. You are going to take by force what you can’t have freely. You are going to try to steal the next election.

And then you chuckle. Because you’ve said as much, over and over again. You’ve joked about it, and you’ve brooded on it publicly. Not just stealing the election, but never giving up power, handing it your kids, building a dynasty of dictators all your own.

Only not very many people seem to really believe you. People are gullible. They don’t believe you when you show them who are, when you tell them what you’re going to do. Instead, they say you’d never try that. Their denial is your greatest asset. You’ve shown them who you are — authoritarian, fascist, aspiring dictator. Isn’t that kind of folly why you have such contempt for the very people you are supposed to lead? Why bother caring for them at all — when they don’t believe you when you show them exactly who you are, over and over again? People are there to be used. They always have been. Especially people who don’t believe what’s right before their own eyes.

That snaps you back into focus. Right now, you are thinking very, very hard, about one thing, and one thing only: how to steal the next election. That, by the way, is why you don’t care about any of the terrible things happening to the country you purport to lead: the pandemic, the deaths, the economic fallout, the social upheaval, any of it. You only care about one thing — one thing — right now. How to steal the election.

How will you do it?

You have an endless list of tactics at your disposal. All you need to do is combine them into a strategy now.

You can deter minorities who vote against you — with dirty tricks, with the brutal policing your country’s famous for, with “voter challenges.”

You can mount legal challenges, in the event you lose by a narrow margin. The Supreme Court is on your side, thanks to your first term, in which you stacked it.

You can count on a supine Congress, and the party which you lead, which will follow you into the abyss — hasn’t it already — to back you in trying to steal the Presidency, whatever the outcome of the election.

You’ve already threatened to declare martial law.All you need is one more event, in a nation already on a razor’s edge, to go through with it. And if you can do that, then you can control who votes where and when, and — hey presto! — the election’s yours. You drool with anticipation, hoping for that one event which lets you declare martial law.

Your party’s already published a stance calling for shooting people on the streets. You smile to yourself. People who can just be…shot…don’t tend to vote. You know how easily it will be to steal this election.

Then there are your friends, in the Kremlin. They will do whatever they can to help you. Flooding social media with propaganda and disinformation, just like last time? Planting all kinds of fake news?

Even hacking the vote itself? You laugh. Sure, you’re under their thumb. But isn’t it worth it? They’re going to help you steal an election.

But not just them. You remember how, during the last election, the issue had become her emails. Your opponent’s. It wasn’t your lack of character, judgment, experience, or even any remotely positive human qualities of goodness and decency. Nope. Her emails. How easy was it to trick the media into doing what you wanted? Hadn’t you done it all your life? A lie here, a half-truth there — and weren’t they always ready to pounce on the nearest woman, minority, person of color?

But her emails! You giggle at the stupidity of it. And you know that this time around, you can misdirect the media with any number of similar scandals. Maybe that irritating woman who heads the opposition against you will have a scandal. Maybe this other woman will. Maybe that Latina in Congress will have one. Scandal after scandal appears before your eyes. And you remember how easy it is to pull the wool over the eyes of a nation that’s already gone half-blind with ignorance, fear, and rage. But her…emails. LOL.

You remember, too, then, how the warnings had been ignored. A tiny number had called it all correctly. That you’d do the things fascists do, because you were a fascists: camps, raids, bans, purges, Gestapos.

But nobody much had listened to them. The nation’s intellectual class had warned, instead, of calling you a fascist or an authoritarian.

This time you laugh, hard, sneering in contempt. What fools! You told them exactly who you were, and what you were going to do. You spent election season rallying your base of American Idiots by calling refugees and immigrants vermin, promising to ban them and build walls. But these intellectuals — these ivory-tower fools — didn’t believe you when you said it out loud.

You guffaw, realizing: they probably don’t believe you’re going to try to steal this election, also, even though you’ve told them that, too.

You suddenly feel a surge of confidence.

You can steal this election. Why, it’s going to be easier than last time. This time, you’re already President. You can order the soldiers into the streets. You can create havoc on a scale the nation has never seen before. Your friends in the Kremlin will do anything to keep you there. And this nation, especially its intellectuals and media — how easy are they to fool? They still don’t believe you, every time you tell them exactly who you are, and what you’re going to do. LOL. You can steal this election just like grabbing a p*ssy. Isn’t that all it is? Grabbing a society’s p*ssy, and never letting go? And isn’t that what a real man has to do?

A doubt crosses your mind. What if you lose the election, though, and they send in the military to remove you from office? What then?

Ah, but you’ve been making deals your whole life long. You realize that all you have to do is make the military a deal it can’t refuse. Maybe this general becomes the ruler of this province, or that general owns this energy grid, water system, utility, company, stock market, or that general simply inherits the entire nation’s treasury. That’s what every good dictator does, in the final moment, when the military challenges him. He strikes a deal.

It’s never cheap. That’s how the war criminals of the world buy penthouses in Paris and go on mega-shopping sprees at Harrods. They’ve gone from generals to oligarchs. Now they don’t just control a military — but they own a nation’s vital assets. How much money would you make if you owned an entire energy grid? You realize that you can offer payoffs that would corrode even the sternest, noblest heart.

Sure, the military’s made of fine and noble people. But how many will turn down a payoff so large that it would suddenly make you as rich as a king? Maybe they will turn it down, you brood.

And then you chuckle. But that’s the bet, isn’t it? That that last final safeguard will fall, too, because, now, as President, you can offer payoffs that nobody else can, buying off the last protectors of democracy — and thus become dictator.

You’re willing to take that bet. It sounds pretty good to you, actually. Who’s going to turn down a billion dollars? Five? Ten? Generals in places like Russia and Pakistan don’t. Do they ever? Have they anywhere? Didn’t they ultimately turn into decadent and fat fools in Rome, too?

You laugh. You know, suddenly, that it can be done. You are understanding how to become a tyrant.

The glimmers of a plan now flash through your mind. It glitters, like a great and vast scaffolding, made of silver and steel. You see its girders and bolts joining together. You frown, as you try to see the whole picture of it, this grand edifice, this plan. How to become a tyrant. So many have done it before you. Why can’t you do it, too?

Adrenaline surges through you. Dopamine rushes. Your blood roars and your heart pounds. This is how it can be done. This is how you become the dictator of a nation.

You shake with excitement. Your face is flush. Your lips are twisted in hot, thrilling rage.

What are you going to do these last five months? Govern? Lead? LOL.

You are going to hone your plan. Fine tune it. Account for every eventuality. Plan exactly how to fool the media and intellectuals again, which scandal to offer them, all over again. How to drive your base of American Idiots into a frenzy, all over again. When to drop your friends in the Kremlin a note for help, all over again. When to declare emergency, martial law, send the soldiers into the streets, put the nation under curfew. And what to offer those last few good souls standing in the way of your ascent, as glittering prizes that no one else can, to get the hell out of the way.

You have five months to think this all over carefully. How to steal an election. It’s plenty of time. And the more you think about it, the more you realize: it’s not even going to be that hard. In fact, the more surprising outcome would be if you didn’t.

You smile, the dopamine afterglow’s lightning sizzling across your cortex. You sneer at the stupidityEveryone’s. The ones who support you, and the ones who don’t. The ones who are against you, and the ones who are for you. All of them. Isn’t this how you rose? Because you were born for it? Because you were always better, stronger, smarter, cleverer than them — only no one knew just how much? Who’s laughing now?

Around you, the cities burn. A gigantic wave of death rips across society. The nation has fallen into poverty, despair, sickness, ruin.

Things have never been better.

Umair
June 2020