How Trump’s draft executive order could have led to 'coup d'état': analyst

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24 January 2022

Pastor John Pavlovitz wrote in December that he’s lost respect for the Republicans he often finds himself surrounded by, those he considers friends. Once just considering them ignorant of the true inner-workings of the party they belong to, he said their continued support even after former President Donald Trump’s attempt to lead an insurrection against the very nation he was tasked with protecting eliminated all possibilities of ignorance. A draft of an executive order Politico published revealed on Friday that Trump was considering deploying the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election loss. News had already broke that the former president’s campaign established fake electors in seven swing states at the command of Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

"They know Donald Trump is a lying, vile, incompetent, traitorous monster who hasn’t had a noble instinct in his lifetime," Pavlovitz wrote. "They know that their party is on balance, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-Semitic, and anti-women. They know all these things. They just don’t care."

A fake elector CNN cited from Michigan bragged at a Republican event that the Trump campaign spearheaded the entire fake elector operation. "We fought to seat the electors. Um, the Trump campaign asked us to do that—under a lot of scrutiny for that today," Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, said. “My husband has, he's suffered for that a little bit in Lansing because it's not very popular, but you know when you represent the whole state of Michigan and that's what I see it now. I realize that even though you're going to vote for somebody to be your next state representative, your next state senator, the truth is, this body of people, they represent all of us.” Maddock is hardly the only Trump-apologist. Pavlovitz named Republicans like Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Greene who repeatedly defend Trump’s intolerable actions at all costs. “They are ‘winning,’ in whatever way they define that, and so the intoxicating ends justifies the sickening, violent, shameful means,” the pastor wrote of Republicans. “They no longer have a need to weigh the morality of the people they are in bed with, no longer worry about abiding the teachings of Jesus, no longer have to do the uncomfortable work of examining their own hearts. The victory trumps decency.”

That much was even clearer after reading the draft order Trump considered. The order would’ve utilized the power law granted the defense secretary to protect election records to instead “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under.” Another part of the order would have allotted the defense secretary 60 days to assess the election, an act Politico reported "suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021."

Terrorism analyst Malcolm Nance told MSNBC if Trump had issued the executive order, it would've been "immediately dismissed" by every officer in the armed forces because it is an “unlawful order.” The bigger problem, he said, is what would’ve happened if National Guard units from states in favor of Trump were ordered by their governors to do what the armed forces couldn’t.

“This is literally the definition of a Latin American or Sub-Saharan African style coup d'état,” Nance said.

Read the full text of the draft order Politico published.

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