"He can't do that."

Oh? I'll add that one to the pile.

Let me explain why I do care that he's calling to delay the election and why I don't care about the "only Congress has that power" and "Constitutionally his term ends".

At a minimum, at the very best, he's providing cover to dismantle the USPS and enforce in-person voting.

That's the big reason for why NOW, why *this tweet*, when he's had an interest in delaying/not holding the election for a while: he is an opportunist and he sees an opportunity. Democrats are using public safety to push for mail-in voting? He will claim the high ground there.

To his people, who see the virus as an overblown hoax, he is shrewdly calling the Democrats' bluff. "Oh, you're so concerned with safety? Okay. We just won't hold an election until you see it's safe. What's that? It's safe now? Time to open everything back up, then."

To the people in the Mild Moderate Middle, he is undercutting the Democrats and sowing seeds of doubt. The sort of people to whom "Why are people out protesting during a quarantine?" plays well will at least see this as highlighting the Democrats' seeming self-interest.

I know that talking about Trump like he's anything other than a flailing monkey toddler is always contentious, but he has at least one thing in common with fictional billionaire mastermind David Xanatos: he rarely attempts any course of action where he can't see profit in failing

Even if he fails to impact the election in any way, he can still use this as a rhetorical bludgeon, and give a potent weapon to his allies in Congress as they attack the USPS and fend off real coronavirus relief: if the Democrats care so much, why aren't they delaying the vote?

Now, even Kushner's data and the GOP internals have to show that there's a good chance Trump loses on November 3rd. Not having the election on November 3rd would eliminate that chance completely. And someone will say "Delaying is a prelude to canceling." but why ever cancel?

Why ever cancel when you can delay? "Free Beer Tomorrow" is a promise you never have to make good on because it's never tomorrow, it's always today. Trump understands the power of dangling something just out of reach.

"But he can't delay the election, legally!" Another way to phrase that is: he can delay the election illegally.

Just par example: Chad Wolf can't legally be the acting secretary of homeland security. He can't legally give orders to federal police forces, who can't legally obey.

But before we get to that worst case scenario, let's stick with the next best one after he has no impact on the election: he manages to instill massive doubt and distrust in his followers on the legitimacy of the November 3rd election, an election he's likely to lose.

You see how that is still a good thing for him, right?

Now, if the GOP sees a rout coming their way in November, their guiding principle of Hold Onto Power At All Costs kicks in and maybe they start to see this desperate gambit as less desperate than holding an election.

Elections under the US system of federalism are held locally and overseen by the state governments. The GOP has been holding onto its power bases there even more tenaciously than it has on the national stage. So imagine some GOP states heed their president's call.

"Well, that just hurts him and them because we'll have Democrats sending people to Congress and assigning electoral votes while the GOP doesn't."

In an election that half the country's government doesn't recognize as legitimate.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: *any* institution you think is likely to depose him on January 21st if he's not the legitimately elected president *will* treat the matter as a difference of opinion, as the sort of politics it would not be proper for them to decide.

The sort of military commander or law enforcement agent who would topple a president for lack of legitimacy rather than regarding that as a worse nightmare scenario than the worst president... is in Donald Trump's corner. I guarantee it.

Now, it's possible Trump still gets pushed out of office after instilling doubt as to the legitimacy of the election, in which case he can spend the rest of his life as The Real President In Exile to his fanbase, undercutting whatever is happening and staying relevant.

Any prosecution against him becomes immediately suspect, and while there's no legal impact to his quasishadow presidency, the institutional and liberal/Democratic impulse towards trying to show one is being fair and balanced means this slows down any accountability.

After the scenario where Trump has some impact on the election but is still pushed out, I'm not sure what the next best scenario is. I can name the branches of fate that can follow; I cannot rank them. I cannot, nor do I believe can any living human, say which is worse.

What follows may be that he holds onto power because he has it and no one is both willing and in a position to take it from him; he will have shown that the highest law of the land does not constrain him, he will have shown he is above elections, he will rule absolutely.

Or what follows may be that he destroys the republic entirely; that the country cannot survive an event in which half of us hold an election while the other half is saying, "this doesn't count, he didn't have a full term with all the Russia hoaxes and fake news impeachments."

And both of those outcomes, for Trump, are better than losing on November 3rd, yielding power to someone who might use it against his interests, who might use a fraction of it to hold him in any way accountable or what he himself did with it.

I am for real going to start blocking people who leave this in my mentions. Do you think it's news? Do you think it's relevant to what I'm saying? The constitution is not magic and the GOP has shown time and time again they don't care what's in it. https://twitter.com/jgkoomey/status/1288830937409523713

Try this: "The framers didn't envision a situation in which a minority party spent four years so opposing everything a president did with hoaxes and fake news that he didn't even get a chance to lead. We're just giving the American people what they voted for in 2016."

Who is going to enforce it? The Department of Justice? They work for Trump. Bill Barr would not have looked into the matter of succession. The military? Anybody in the brass who wouldn't protect him would sooner fall on their swords than be seen to decide a US election.

The thing that will decide if Trump stays in the White House or not is not the law, it's what Trump feels he can get away with. And the higher the stakes, the higher the bar will be in terms of what will stop him.

It's worth telling TRUMP that he can't delay the election because the more pushback he gets, the less he'll feel he can get away with.

It's not worth telling each other, in order to reassure ourselves that the monster is not real and cannot hurt us.

Chad Wolf, under the law and under the Constitution, cannot be the acting secretary of the DHS. CANNOT. CAN. NOT. It is a legal and Constitutional impossibility.

Go look up his job title on Wikipedia. Call the DHS switchboard and ask who the secretary is.

The thing that would make the impossibility of a man holding office after January 20th without an election in which he was certified the winner under the law is the fact that trying to do so would break the republic to pieces if neither side backed down.

Does Trump care?

WHEN TRUMP WAS INAUGURATED, on the eve of his inauguration, I pointed out the significance of his inaugural dance number: a song about a man in a final showdown, facing the final curtain (that's DEATH), a man coolly staring down a firing squad.

He rang in his presidency with the words, "And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain." He has been chasing a bad end for his entire adult life. He has been convinced the world is against him for his entire life. In his mind, if he destroys the country? He wins.

Cast your mind backwards over the several centuries that have been the years 2016-2020. How many times were you told or did you say, "Well, he can't do that." How many times were you told or did you say, "This is too far. This is the end for him."

For years, for decades, for centuries... going at least as far back as Marbury v. Madison... the power of the presidency has not been what the Constitution says it is but whatever the president does that no one stops.

And for most people, for most presidents, for most people who would or could become president, there has been a point at which they would stop themselves, because they reached a point where they saw the level of opposition brought against them, and said, "Okay. Not worth it."

You want to talk about things Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of? He is constitutionally incapable of stopping himself. He must be stopped.

Sometimes the people closest to him can stop him with words.

He said, in debate to Hillary Clinton, he said the most terrifying five words he has ever uttered: "You should have stopped me." He said it was her job, the Obama administration's job, to stop him from having broken the law, and they didn't.

I know what the law is. I know what the Constitution says. I am therefore *not* reassured that all will be well if he tries to cancel the election by fiat and tries to maintain power in January 2021 without or in spite of an election, because that means someone has to stop him.

And when I say to you that I don't know what is the worse outcome: that someone does stop him, or that no one does, I do not say this to you because I lack imagination or foresight but because I have it. These are both nightmare scenarios that end the republic as we know it.

"So what are we supposed to do? You're telling us there's no hope."

Hope is not a noun, hope is a verb. Hope is an action. It is not a thing you have, it is a thing that you do. It is not time to abandon hope. It is time to start hoping with both hands.

Among the better things St. Augustine of Hippo said was, "Hope has two beautiful daughters, and their names are anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain so."

"Wait, are you about to tell us to vote? You just said Donald Trump can ignore an election and destroy the country no matter what we do, and you're about to tell us to vote anyway?"

MOTHER. FUCKER. YES. I. AM.

He wants to delay the election... he wants to destroy its credibility, and the two things are one and the same... because he fears the election. He fears the election. He is afraid of us voting.

"So you're going to tell us to just vote?"

I'm not going to tell you to *just* anything. Strike that word from your vocabulary. Nothing Trump does is *just* a distraction, even if it distracts. We should not do *just* anything.

Do all things justly; do just nothing.

It is not sufficient to vote; it is necessary to vote. It is necessary to vote loudly and largely, it is necessary to affirm and uphold the legitimacy and necessity of the election so that the most people around Trump and the most people in the Mild Moderate Middle see it.

Make a joyful noise unto the Lord; make an angry noise unto your representatives in Congress and your state and local government that the election must be held, that it will be held; that its results must and will be upheld.

Trump will do what Trump will do; that is his power and his secret. We must do what we must do, regardless of what he will do. It's when we refrain from what we must for fear of what he will do that he wins. He treats everything as a game of chicken, knowing most will back down.

If we do everything we can do and it doesn't matter... then we move onto the next everything we can do. We keep going, until he finds that final curtain.

But fundamentally, even more than he's a nihilist? Trump is a coward.

He has backed down, temporarily, from things he desperately wants to do because he faced a big enough backlash. Some of that is the people around him, and we can't actually control them or how much he listens to them.

No one can say that he *will* back down in the face of a big enough backlash but we can be sure that without it, he won't.

So we hope. So we plan. So we vote.

Stay angry, stay brave. Don't tell *me* that Trump can't delay, cancel, or ignore the election. Don't tell your neighbors and your comrades who are worried that it can't happen, that "It can't happen here." because it can, and it is.

Tell Trump. Tell your electeds.

If we make enough noise, if we present a big enough backlash... then Trump will keep grumbling and grousing about how if the Democrats are so concerned they should delay the election and little will come of it, and some of you will think I was a foolish, ignorant fearmonger.

And I welcome that outcome. I would love it. I would be ecstatic to be seen as a wild-eyed prophet of doom crying to the rocks in the wilderness about the end of days, because nothing I said has come to pass.

You want to know something? We talk among ourselves, the people who have been saying how bad things will get since before the election in 2016. Even those of us who don't talk much in public.

I'm known in a certain crowd as the Sunny Optimist.

I'm the one who always pops up to say that if you're counting on the secretary of defense to countermand a plainly vindictive or destructive nuclear launch order from the Oval Office, you're sadly naive.

And I'm the Sunny Optimist.

I am the Sunny Optimist because I am strategically optimistic. Hope is an action, as I said, which means it's a choice. I make the decision, again and again... not every day, but every day I can... to proceed as though we can win, because if we can't, it won't matter.

If we can't win then it won't matter that we tried. If we can win, it will matter that we didn't try.

I quoted St. Augustine of Hippo earlier so I might as well quote a Joss Whedon show. It turns out if you say enough things, some of them will be pithy and true:

"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."

If you can be optimistic enough to believe that The Rule of Law will magically start working just in time to save us, that the constitutional balance of powers will start working just in time to save us, that institutions will remember their purpose just in time to save us...

...then please be optimistic enough to believe that we can win even in a world where magic isn't real.

Or if it is real, that it's not located in dead words on dead paper written by dead men, but in the hands and hearts and voices and minds of people like you and me.

Around the time that the GOP decided that Shakespeare in the Park was an anti-Trump conspiracy, I coined a catchphrase that I haven't used much lately:

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of civic participation."

Right now, those dogs are well and truly unleashed.

Civic participation isn't *just* voting (again, do yourself a favor and LOSE THAT WORD). Civic participation is happening in the streets of cities across the country, day in and day out, night after night.

Anger and courage. Hope with both hands, and keep those dogs off the leash (but keep your non-metaphorical dogs leashed, please) because that's how we win. That's how we can win. We can't win if we don't try.

Now through November and beyond, cry havoc and unleash the dogs of civic participation, because there are other, meaner dogs in the kennels that will have to come out if these ones can't do the job, and nobody's going to like what those dogs have to do, not for very long.

Call your electeds. Write letters to the editor of your newspaper. There are probably more people in this country who want the election than not; the question is, which group can make a bigger headache for people who would ignore them?

If you think there's no danger then you lose nothing if you're right but you proceed as though the danger is real. But if you do nothing, and you're wrong? You lose everything.

Take the threat posed by Donald Trump seriously. After four long years of penguin_club_911_call.png, stop saying, "He can't do that, it's illegal." and take the threat seriously.

And I leave you with one final thought: he is STILL fortifying the White House, STILL adding more layers of barricades around it.

At the same time he's establishing a precedent that any and all federal forces can be deployed to protect any federal facility.

Think about that.

Take the threat seriously.

And tip your weird Twitter pundit, who has been telling you he was chasing this showdown for four years now.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=RR84V5CDS9UP4