Soft Coup: MAGA's Simpleminded but Scary Election Scheme

A discussion with the journalist and author Nina Burleigh

Over the last 18 months, Nina Burleigh, my friend and guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, has produced some of the country’s most essential investigative journalism, one of the best and most reliable Substacks, and a stick-of-dynamite of a debut novel. If you want to know about subjects as diverse as Melania Trump’s early life, Leonard Leo’s dark money donor, Amanda Knox’s misadventures in Italy, or the CDC’s handling of the pandemic—or if you want to read a work of fiction that is The Crying of Lot 49 meets Network—she’s your go-to.

So I was eager to talk to Nina about, well, everything. Here are three takeaways from our all-over-the-map discussion, recorded on September 28:

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1. Outside the bubble, too many people are writing off Trump’s ominous campaign promises as “Trump being Trump.”

There are human beings in my orbit—kind, decent human beings; good people—who are going to vote for Trump. One of them has a grandchild who is a US citizen born in South America. Another has a son who is married to another man. Neither seem to understand that Trump’s re-election is not only a threat to our democracy, but to their loved ones specifically.

“That’s never going to happen” is the refrain—a familiar refrain, for anyone versed in the history of 1930s Germany. They may well be right, but why take the chance on your lone grandkid being deported? Or your son’s rights being taken away?

“One thing that’s clear,” Burleigh tells me, is that Trump voters “who are still sort of not like QAnon crazy cult…think that the Republican platform in general is more favorable to them and their way of life than the Democratic platform. For instance: lower taxes, and ‘let’s drill’ so that we can have cheap gas, and the tariffs concept…they think that those things are more in line with the way that they want the world to be. Okay.”

She continues:

But then…you point out [that] he’s going to deport 20 million people and, you know, he’s threatened to weaponize the DOJ and go after the Democratic Party lawyers and donors and strategists and put them in jail. He’s actually said those things.

And you have, you know, JD Vance running around…mainstreaming the idea that maybe women, single women with cats, shouldn’t vote because they don’t have a stake [in the country because they don’t have kids]. And it’s just, you know, the endless, constant down-pushing of women in this country that’s going on with these people.

And the supporters, when I talk to them—and I think pollsters are finding this as well—they don’t take seriously these promises. They say, “Yeah, well, that’s just how Trump talks. Come on. The Heritage Foundation? There’s lots of think tanks in Washington. They’re just—they’re spewing bullshit. They’re blowing smoke. They’re trying to scare the libs. They’re never going to get away with it.”

And the challenge for candidates up and down the tickets—up and down from local to Congress to the President—is to break through that wall of not taking them seriously, not taking Project 2025 seriously: not believing that it can happen. And that’s the challenge.

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2. If Trump loses, his MAGA allies have plans in place to try to steal the election.

As Burleigh wrote at American Freakshow back in July, MAGA has a scheme in place to ratfuck the election:

Recently, journalists have been revealing often obscure activities underway in red states that portend an operation to steal the 2024 election. 

MAGAs are simply refusing to certify the popular vote. The plan apparently is to send in Trump electors in December, no matter what the voters want.

Last month, the AP collected incidents from Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, in which Trump-affiliated officials refused to certify, or sued to stop certification, of results they didn’t like. 

Another ominous report published in Rolling Stone documents at least 15 instances since November 2020 in which local Republican officials in eight states refused to certify election results, “a typically routine matter that has become anything but” in the wake of Trump’s Big Lie. In one example, investigative journalist Justin Glawe recounted how, in a Georgia election, a MAGA official demanded a hand recount, then when the recount failed to change the results, simply walked out of the room “and got in his truck” (of course) to deny the certification process a quorum. 

He was eventually coaxed back in and lost. 

I’m oversimplifying here, but the concept of a plan is to try what failed to work at the Congressional level—refusal to certify the results of the Electoral College vote—on what Bureligh calls “the very granular level.”

What happens if Kamala Harris kicks ass in, say, Luzerne County, in Pennsylvania, but the officials in charge keep questioning the result to deny Harris the victory? And what happens when this juvenile strategy is repeated in counties in swing states all across the country? In a word, chaos.

“There’s going to be somebody there at the state or the local level that says…‘We don't certify that. It didn’t look right. Something was wrong with this,’” Burleigh explains. “And then they’re going to try to run it through again. And then they’re going to run it through again, or they’re going to do hand counts. You know, they’re going to try this. They’re going to try that.”

Delay until you get your way: a third grader could have come up with this plan. It ain’t complicated. But we know it works, because it’s worked before.

“In Florida,” Burleigh says, “we saw what happened in 2000.”

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3. Neither the DNC nor the White House appear to be ready for what’s coming.

“This government is not doing anything,” Burleigh tells me. “They’re not. The DOJ isn’t in there; I don’t know what they're doing. And the Democratic Party—they have money. It’s not like they don’t…They’re not donorless. They’re just—they’re in the game too. They have hundreds and millions of dollars.”

And they need to start spending it on good attorneys. Marc Elias, the elections lawyer, has done yeoman’s work, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to blow up MAGA’s steal-the-vote plans in courts all across the country. But he can’t do it alone, as she explains:

Where is the office in the DNC of election security and post-election legal issues? This is an emergency! And where is the white board with every county and every single election official being watched by a Democrat? Because if they’re not doing that—and even if they are doing that—it’s going to be a shit show between November [5th and] certification and maybe beyond.

Because they want it to go to Mike—Speaker Mike Johnson. They want him to make the decision, and his minions [like Matt] Gaetz. I mean, those people are going to…choose because they’ve got the majority. Or if they don’t, if they don’t go that way, they’re going to stick it in the Supreme Court. And we already know what the Supreme Court thinks about this. [Trump] should be king. He’s their guy. He’s the monarch.”

My hope is that the party is aware of threats of this kind. My real hope is that, in such a blatantly working-the-refs scenario, Biden would use his immunity powers to crush what would amount to a soft coup attempt.

Even so, it may well happen that Kamala Harris will win the popular election by 10 million votes, and still lose the White House because of MAGA shenanigans. We have to prepare for that challenge—legally and otherwise.

“Where is the Democratic Party?” Burleigh wonders. “Where is the sense of emergency? Where is the red light flashing? Where are the EMTs?”

And then, perhaps subconsciously using a pet phrase of the would-be beneficiary of this antidemocratic MAGA scheme, she adds: “This is a disaster.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S8 E6: American Freakshow (with Nina Burleigh)

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, best-selling author, documentary producer, and publisher of a Substack on politics called American Freakshow.  A contributing editor at The New Republic and frequent contributor to the New York Times and New York Magazine, she is the author of eight books on an array of topics including archaeological forgery, scientists in 18th Century Egypt, James Smithson, Amanda Knox in Italy, the Trump women, and the pandemic response. Her latest book, and first novel, is called Zero Visibility Possible.

In this conversation with Greg Olear, Nina discusses the ravages of climate change, her recent travels, access journalism and the Olivia Nuzzi imbroglio, her novel and the inspiration behind it, Melania Trump and the mystery of her activities in the 1990s, the current covid situation, and how Trump’s phalanx of evil attorneys plan to f*ck with the election results, no matter the result.

Follow Nina:
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https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Visibility-Possible-Nina-Burleigh/dp/B0D95GSJH4

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17

ROUGH BEAST is now available as an audiobook:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Rough-Beast-Audiobook/B0D8K41S3T

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