If You Are Not Slightly Terrified, You Should Be

 There's another three weeks or so left in the Trump presidency. And Trump has abdicated any interest in governing the nation. 

Instead, he is wholly concerned with trying to remain in power. He has tried to bully election officials, gone to court about 60 times to overturn election results, and appealed to state legislators.

None of that has worked. Now he is only left with extra-legal actions -- like trying to pull off a military coup. And he does have some around him, like the criminal Michael Flynn, who is urging him to do exactly that.

Trump has always admired autocrats, like Putin, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he may resort to such extreme measures to remain in power. I doubt he could succeed in pulling off a military coup -- but it's terrifying that any president would even consider doing that.

Here is a small part of Joe Duncan has to say about this at medium.com:

If you’re not slightly terrified, filled with a state of unease at the present moment, you should be. . . .

If there was ever a time that many of our fears would be most likely to materialize, this would be it. As President Trump scrambles to buy time and figure out a way to overturn the legitimate election that unseated him, the President who’s shared all of the traditional hallmarks of the autocratic tendency is looking for any way to cling to power. And Trump has a lot of unsavory characters in his orbit these days.

Between Sidney Powell, the lawyer who stood in front of the nation and talked about “releasing the Kraken” before espousing a series of conspiracy theories that sought to explain why Trump lost the election; and Michael Flynn, the disgraced former National Security Advisor who now spends his free time talking about a military coup on live TV; it’s safe to say the better characters in Trump’s inner orbit have jumped ship. . . .

It seems like just days ago I was reporting on Michael Flynn’s live TV interview where he said the President could just install the military in the battleground states where he didn’t win, force them to hold another election — one where Trump, not Biden would win — and thus steal the election from the duly elected President-elect Joe Biden. . . .

Make no mistake, the stuff Michael Flynn has been talking about over the last few weeks are dangerous. He said Trump could give the order to steal voting machines in order to hold a new election, a mock election, functionally undoing the vote of the American People.

And Trump asked about the idea, poking around for details that might help him in his quest to remain president at all costs. . . .

For me, it’s hard to put myself into the mental state of the kind of person who would burn down the Republic because they couldn’t handle losing, but it seems that Trump, Flynn, Powell, and the surprising (read: alarming) amount of followers who’ve still clung to the Trump brand like a fading trend they’d invested their life savings on, are just those kinds of people. Incapable of accepting reality as it is.

The Republican Party Chair of Arizona is even urging Trump, in those words, to “cross the Rubicon,” an obvious reference to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon River and starting of the Roman Civil War of 49 B.C. This is just one more statement in a long lineage of Confederate apologetics and civil war rhetoric. . . .

I think it’s just about next to impossible. Trump would have to find military generals willing to carry out such commands in his name. Here we’d have a draft dodger ordering career military to essentially undo the American nation. Something tells me that conversation wouldn’t go over so well. . . .

But it’s scary that Trump’s military coup moment has arrived and the discussions about such a coup are literally underway.