The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power

Donald E. Pease

On November 5, 2020, President Donald J. Trump claimed that at polling stations throughout the United States large-scale and possibly centrally organized electoral fraud had happened, was happening, and that, without an intervention, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., would illegally be declared president-elect of the United States. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us” (Trump, “Deflated”). In April, presidential candidate Biden said: “I view myself as a transition candidate” (qtd. in Martin and Burns). Upon announcing his intention to continue his election cam- paign into the post-election interim, Trump took Biden, quite literally, at his word. Rather than making preparations to take up the next episode in his career, Trump turned the interlude between the reported election results and Inauguration Day into a space for a battle with Biden over control of the transition’s procedures and outcomes: “Frankly, we did win this election” (qtd. in Chalfant and Samuels), “The concept of losing to this guy!” (qtd. in O’Toole). Trump received 11 million more votes in the 2020 election than he did in 2016 and a greater number of votes (74 million) than had any other Republican candidate in history. Yet, over the next two days, with each new tally, the votes from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsyl- vania, and Michigan were slowly but purposively building back the Blue Wall Trump had toppled in 2016. With prospects of the likely addition of Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia (which Democrats had not won since 1992), Biden was expected to run up in 2020 the exact same number of electors, 306-232, in the Electoral College as had Trump in 2016. Following his November 5 remarks, Trump set up post-election teams with marching orders to saturate the media and political and juridical landscape with charges of rigged elections, fraudulent votes,

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 143-53 143 Donald E. Pease and secret algorithms, along with instructions to ignore, shout down, or trample every evidence-based response. Trump divided his teams into units that operated on legal, extra-legal, and paramilitary fronts. The close to sixty cases his lawyers have presented before judges, some of whom Trump appointed to serve, in local and federal districts as well as state and United States Supreme Courts have, with unusual consistency, been defeated for lack of credible evidence, dismissed for the omission of a coherent legal argument, or refused a hearing altogether. Trump’s contestation of election results was built on the infrastructure of an entrenched culture of minority rule buttressed by an insurrection- ary populist movement whose members considered the 2020 election re- sults a theft of their country. Trump based his claim that the election was stolen on the fact that Republican state legislatures in the swing states he won in 2016 had purged voter rolls, passed “use it or lose it” rights to vote laws, authorized retroactive signature checks, reduced or eliminated ballot boxes and drive-in registration sites, and enforced other voter sup- pression legislation that supposedly should have made it impossible for him to lose the 2020 election. Trump’s accusation of widespread voter fraud targeted the increase in the time period for casting and counting absentee ballots that state courts in the battleground states had put into place to address the problems that COVID-19 posed to in-person voting. For reasons I will take up shortly, Trump also declared that millions of the votes counted in Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin were cast by illegal voters. Initially, I thought Trump was modeling his post-election maneuver- ings on a scenario drawn from Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam War playbook of withdrawal through escalation: an aggressively prolonged deferral of the concession of election loss conducted slowly, aggressively, and compli- catedly enough as to make it seem unrecognizable as defeat. I soon real- ized that his ambitions leapt high above my horizon of expectations. Pundits have described Trump’s actions in this time of the transition as comparable to the behavior of a petulant child, or a mad king, or a sore loser. He was also working quite methodically and on multiple fronts to transmute the 2020 election into a reprise of his 2016 victory. Rather than conceding defeat Trump made clear his intention to turn what happened in the 2020 election into the portal for the uncanny return of previously unacted upon promises—to refuse to concede, to challenge the legality of the votes cast, to mount a populist revolt—he made during his successful 2016 campaign. The remarks that follow constitute a preliminary effort to explain how and why Trump turned the interim between the declaration of Biden as president-elect on November 7 and his inauguration on Janu- ary 20 into the stage-setting for the multi-pronged campaign he waged to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The rules and norms governing presidential candidates’ behavior during “the transition” customarily require that a defeated head of party “put on his nation hat” and concede that the will of the American people

144 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power has spoken to mark the official inception of a peaceful transfer of power. However, after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, self-declared rule-keepers of the interregnum all but weap- onized customary protocols when they over-idealized “the concession speech” and “the peaceful transfer of power” as the foundational tropes of U.S. liberal democracy and exceptionally good examples for countries all over the world to emulate. Critics and political commentators joined a chorus of bipartisan voices to express indignation at Trump’s adamant refusal to conform his illiberal behavior to the normative procedures adhered to by the entire slate of his twentieth-century predecessors. Trump proceeded to conduct unconventional warfare of his own by re-purposing the protocols with which his critics attacked him into weapons of his own design. His counter-attack involved the inversion of the concession speech into ongoing acts of aggression, the radical revision of the conventional understanding of the transfer of power, the refashioning of the latter into a warrant to disqualify the votes of mil- lions of African Americans, and the convoking of an insurrectionary force in Washington, D.C., to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A defeated incumbent’s concession speech usually precedes an op- ponent’s victory address and customarily includes as key elements the acknowledgement of defeat and the expression of a willingness to assist the incoming administration. Rather than composing such a speech, Trump devised a series of what might be called anti-concessionary devices targeting the aspirations that Biden articulated in his victory speech. After major news networks called the election for Biden on No- vember 7, the president-elect stated the American voters had “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, and systemic racism” (qtd. in Martin). In response, Trump used executive orders and directives to department heads with provenance over these matters to construct “delayed-action” political devices that would, if Biden should become president, implant intransigent impediments to the accomplishment of each mandated aim. Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, installed bureaucratic stumbling blocks sure to delay the Biden admin- istration’s access to economic and budget-related information needed to finalize its COVID-19 plans (Breuninger). On the economic front, Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin completed paperwork for the future shut-down of the temporary lending programs the Federal Re- serve Commission allotted to assist mid-sized businesses and municipal governments. With the assistance of , Trump devised a legislative instrument that would make it impossible for the Senate to approve Biden’s rejoining the Paris climate accords (Garber). Trump engaged Biden’s resolve to end systemic racism by expanding the ban on racial sensitivity training in the nation’s military divisions, federal construction programs, and police departments. Calling it a web of lies, Trump replaced with the 1776 Commission.

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Days after the election, Trump directed Attorney General William Barr to expedite the executions of Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, and Dustin Higgs, the five African American men imprisoned on death row (Major). On December 24, he refused to sign the defense budget until the Pentagon abandoned the policy of renaming military bases that presently bear the names of Confederate officers (O’Brien). This includes commanders like General Henry -Ben ning, who, in the course of arguing that the abolition of would lead to the destruction of the White race, declared, “I say give me pesti- lence and famine sooner than that.” The norm of “the peaceful transfer of power,” to turn now to the topic of Trump’s more dangerous unconventional weapon, resembles the concession speech, in that both conventions presuppose a modicum of continuity between the incoming presidential administration and the preceding regime. It also assumes that the defeated incumbent under- stands time in office as an effort to safeguard what describes as the foundational premise of a democratic republic: “A re- public works only when the losers of elections accept the results and the legitimacy of their opponents” (Editorial Board). Trump had made clear why he could neither offer such an assurance nor undertake a peaceful transfer of power years earlier, when he added the following passage to the Inaugural Address that he delivered on January 20, 2017: Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another—but we are transferring power from Washing- ton, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People […]. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country […]. What truly matters is not which party controls our gov- ernment, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. (Trump, “Inauguration”) The 2017 inauguration ceremony might have accomplished the official work of legally recognizing Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. But Trump gave the occasion a “very special meaning” when he stipulated the recipient (“you, the American People”) of this transfer of power (rather than the election), as what authorized his taking up the office of the president. Upon making this statement Trump acted as a usurper, a person who performs an action— the transfer of the sovereign power of president to the American peo- ple—that he has no legal authority to enact. Trump intends the phrase “[t]his, the United States of America, is your country!” to place the Make America Great Again movement in a position of minority rule over the U.S. political order. In 2016, Trump did not run as the head of the Republican Party and he did not govern as a president whose actions and policies were authorized by the guardians of the sacred epistemes of U.S. liberal democracy. Trump campaigned

146 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power and governed as the delegated voice of an insurrectionary movement whose members are contemptuous of the liberal democratic values upon which the notions of a concession speech and the peaceful transfer of power are based. Trump would never, not even if he could, transfer the sovereign power of the American People to a man who represents what they and he find abhorrent in U.S. liberal democracy. Members of the MAGA movement viewed Trump’s 2016 election as the result of a successful, non-violent, populist insurrection that enabled their chosen leader to usurp the sovereign power of the presi- dent to transgress the norms and rules of the liberal elites responsible 1 for making them feel “strangers in their own country” (Tabachnik). Throughout his illiberal presidency Trump went out of his way to set up a non-traversable barrier between his practices of governance and the liberal motifs, principles, and norms that political elites used to criticize him (Levitz). Participants in his movement regard what Trump’s critics consider impeachable offenses as evidence of his successful usurpation of the executive power needed to enact the sovereign will of the authentic American people, a. k. a. the MAGA populist movement. In the name of the sovereign power Trump transferred to them at his 2017 inaugura- tion, “the American People” thereafter endowed their president with a “legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking has the effect of rule- making” (O’Neill). The MAGA movement is not about citizens of the United States, and its members do not primarily identify as Republicans. Members of Trump’s populist movement fancy themselves the well-spring of nation- making power out of which the United States emerged, and believe in their bones that the bedrock America they inhabit constitutes the sa- cred homeland of true nativist belonging. America’s elect, the American people Trump represents, do not describe themselves as citizens of the United States, but real Americans first—and last. The Trump movement’s “populism” has always been about the con- struction of an internal border distinguishing who belongs and who does not; who counts and who should not; who can wield power and who must be subject to it. It is they, and not the liberal elite, who are the Americans who set the rules and model the behavior to which immi- grants who wish to become citizens of the United States must conform and who are ever-ready to take up arms against every threat—foreign and domestic—to the American Way of Life (O’Neill). Trump appealed to this White supremacist strain in his populist base when he aligned his 2016 presidential candidacy with what is popularly known as the “birtherism” fantasy, which falsely claimed that Barack

Obama’s supposed birth in Kenya made him an illegal president. 1 For an elaboration of The claim that Barack Obama lacks the identification papers to Trump’s role as a usurper, see Pease. For an elabora- serve as a legal president of the United States can be readily falsified, as tion of the MAGAers’ President Obama did when he put his birth certificate on public display. affective disposition, see However, the ingrained belief on which “birtherism” is based cannot be Hochschild.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 147 Donald E. Pease falsified because it is entangled in the conviction held by a hard core of Trump’s supporters who are convinced that no African American pos- sesses the identity credentials required to make them a legitimate candi- date for the office of president of the United States. Trump and the participants in the Make America Great Again movement believe that Obama’s election constituted a breach of what the African American political philosopher Charles W. Mills calls the U.S. racial contract. In the U.S. political order, the racial contract works by distinguished (White) persons who are full contractual parties to the U.S. social contract from (non-White) sub-persons who are not. Ac- cording to Mills, race regulates the American social contract by divid- ing the contractual parties into two asymmetrical incompatible groups: the persons who comprise the party to whom the social contract assigns its rights and liberties are white, unmarked citizens, the sub-persons who lack complete contractual identification with the rights and liber- ties of White U.S. citizens are racially marked. To the members of the Trump populist movement, the election of Barack Obama meant that a sub-person who lacked the full contractual rights and liberties of White U.S. citizens was now in charge of enforcing the U.S. social contract. In The Racial Contract, Mills defines the racial contract as that “set of formal or informal or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contract’s validity) between one subset of humans henceforth designated as White and coextensive with the class of full persons, and that categorizes the remaining subset of humans as non-White and of a different and inferior moral status, sub- persons” (11). The “full persons” referenced in this definition are contra- puntal ensembles that require their differentiation from sub-persons to achieve self-identity. In other words, no matter how universal the ap- plicability of this category, the figure of the person necessarily requires its distinction from the necessary and related category of the sub-person. Although the racial contract that underwrites the modern social con- tract is constantly being rewritten, it invariably establishes epistemologi- cal norms of cognition along racial lines. It prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, a resilient combination of disavowal and nonknowledge that guarantees that Whites “will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (45). In his monograph White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, the Lebanese anthropologist Ghassan Hage lays out, with admirable succinctness, the inequivalent practices of “national belonging” pertaining to persons and sub-persons in the U.S. racial con- tract: “The (white) nationalist who believes him or herself to ‘belong’ to a nation, in the sense of being part of it,” means that he (it is always he) inhabits the nation at the level of “active” governmental belonging, a sovereign expression of the “state’s will” (45). White nationalists, who perceive themselves as the enactors or the agents of the state’s will be- lieve they are entitled to give expression to this sovereign will by violent-

148 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power ly subordinating non-Whites to the will of those who actively belong to the nation (Hage). With the racial contract as warrant, Trump extended birtherism’s jurisdiction, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, to effect the civic disenfranchisement of African American voters on the premise that they lacked the identity credentials required to render them legitimate voters in an American election. Blacks cannot belong to the America over whom MAGAers distribute the condition of national belonging, and they cannot cast genuinely legal votes because they lack the prop- erty, namely “Whiteness,” needed to belong. The fantasy through which Trump has advocated the disenfranchisement of African American voters revolved around the lurid spectacle of trucks dumping votes in the millions cast by dead—in the literal and social sense—Black people and other “illegal aliens” in unsupervised polling stations in the cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. To right this wrong, Trump’s legal team asked various courts to invalidate millions of Black votes and to continue his term in office. When President Trump’s attorneys presented briefs calling for the disqualification of African American voters in courtrooms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, the cases were either dismissed or refused a hearing altogether. However, upon hearing decidedly dif- ferent versions of the evidence concerning illegal voters, ballot tamper- ing, and hacked computers that Rudolph Giuliani and members of his extra-juridical “strike force” presented in courts of public opinion scat- tered across the battleground states, militantly supportive activist “ju- rists” and paramilitary groups gathered in the thousands on the steps of state legislatures and federal courthouses to demand that governors and state legislators nullify the verdicts handed down by judges. Scores of judges, governors, the Electoral College, the Justice De- partment, and the U.S. Supreme Court have repeatedly found no cred- ible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Although defeated all the time in the halls of justice, the champions of Trump’s cause continued to march unbowed through the precincts of this alternative jurisdiction that Trump the Usurper co-created with his increasingly emboldened insurrectionary movement. The paramilitary wing merged with the legislative branch when leaders of the movement succeeded in persuading Republican state legislators in Arizona, Geor- gia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to override the voters’ verdict and send alternate slates of electors for the January 6 confirmation of the result of the presidential election in the U.S. House and Senate (Gabriel and Saul). The insurrectionists, who had converged en masse to protest each in- flection point of the U.S. electoral process—from the counting of the votes in local polling stations, to their certification by the states, to the official December 14 tally in the Electoral College—planned a massive rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to demand that Vice

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President Pence replace the officially certified electors with the alternate slates of Trump electors from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Penn- sylvania. Members of the Arizona Republican Party indicated the life and death stakes of the insurrection when they reposted Ali Alexander’s tweet stating “I am willing to give up my life for this fight” alongside a clip from the movie Rambo, highlighting “This is what we do, who we 2 are. Live for nothing, or die for something” (qtd. in Renshaw). Numerous commentators have cogently analyzed the historical, po- litical, and psycho-social significance of the January 6 insurrection and the part Trump’s “Save America” rally at the Ellipse played in inciting it. However, in keeping with the restricted focus of these remarks, I want to explain briefly how this event coheres with Trump’s anti-concession- ary and “non-peaceful transfer of power” strategies. On January 20, 2017, Trump the Usurper, whose 2016 election resulted from a non-violent insurrectionary movement, stated that he was “transferring (sovereign) power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the Ameri- can People” (Trump, “Inauguration”). On January 6, the “American People” returned to Washington, D.C., as an insurrectionary movement authorized by the sovereign power Trump had transferred to them to use whatever force necessary to keep their leader in the office he had usurped in their name. As was the case with Trump’s anti-concessionary weapons, the primary target of his movement’s insurrectionary power was President-elect Biden. Biden traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War, on October 6, the day af- ter President Trump was released from Walter Reed Hospital where he received emergency medical treatment for COVID-19, to explain what motivated his decision to campaign for the presidency: I made the decision to run for president after Charlottesville. Close your eyes, and remember what you saw. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK coming out of the fields with torches lighted, veins bulging, chanting 2 As prelude of events to come, the FBI arrested the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s. It was hate on members of Michigan’s the march, in the open, in America. Hate never goes away, it only hides. “Wolverine Watch- And when it’s given oxygen, when it’s given an opportunity to spread, when men,” a self-deputized paramilitary wing of the it’s treated as normal and acceptable behavior, we’ve opened a door in this insurrection, on October country that we must move quickly to close. As president, that’s just what I 8, 2020, before they could will do. I will send a clear unequivocal message to the entire nation, there is act on their plan to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the no place for hate in America. (Biden) governor of Michigan, and put her on “trial for Biden concluded his Gettysburg address with sentences that recalled treason” for imposing a state lockdown and refrains from Abraham Lincoln’s “A House Divided” speech and that other measures to curb would reappear in revised form in his January 20, 2021 inaugural ad- COVID-19 infections that, according to the dress: “You and I are part of a covenant, a common story of divisions brief prepared for this overcome and hope renewed. If we do our part, if we stand together, if “People’s” court, violated the freedoms and liberties we keep faith with the past and with each other, then the divisions of guaranteed by the U.S. our time will give way to the dreams of a brighter, better future. This is Constitution (Byman). our work. This is our pledge” (Biden).

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As a final anti-concessionary missive, President Trump decided to send a Colossal Charlottesville in full battle regalia to Washington, D.C., on the day the joint session of Congress officially certified Biden as the forty-sixth president. In place of a peaceful transfer of power, Trump devised a parting shot that would open President Biden’s eyes to the unforgettable spectacle of the unappeasable insurrectionary intran- sigence of “the American people” who would rather die than transfer their sovereign power to him. The 139 Republican legislators who re- fused to certify Biden’s election also left Biden with a divided House (and Senate) (Stevens et al.). In its prolongation of the gap between the votes cast on election night and the inauguration of the forty-sixth president of the United States, the period of transition has behaved like an incubator busily hatching as-yet-unacted-upon eventualities that had lain dormant in Trump’s 2016 election victory. “Stop the Coup!” might have been—and in some quarters was—taken as a realistic call to action during the early morn- ing hours of November 9, 2016. Now, however, in the wake of Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, sabotaging of the U.S. admin- istrative state apparatus, hollowing out of key institutions of the liberal international order, shattering bedrock principles of the U.S. political system (equality under the law; impartial and independent courts and tribunals; separation of church and state; the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property; checks on the power of each branch of government), the insurrectionary pillaging of the Capitol, the assembling of the National Guard to secure the 2021 inauguration cer- emony against domestic terrorist attack, and the drawing up of a second slate of Articles of Impeachment, time in the après-coup somehow makes these remainders of the Trump administration feel more REAL than the reality of Biden’s presidency.

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