Politics

Trump’s Military Coup Moment Has Arrived

Will Trump cross the proverbial Rubicon?

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If you’re not slightly terrified, filled with a state of unease at the present moment, you should be. What’s so special about this moment, you might ask? One can only guess at what must be going on in the mind of U.S. President Donald Trump, as he contemplates his options. Over the past five years, anyone with a sound mind and rational thinking capabilities has been downright alarmed at the president’s autocratic tendencies, his complete inability to understand the basic functioning of our government, and his insistence on using the proverbial broad sword of the military where the surgical precision of political savvy is necessary.

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.

Senators like Mitt Romney have long stood against Trump’s antics. And now even Bill Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general is fleeing and making statements that distance himself from the President’s lies and undemocratic pronouncements.

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. That was bad enough.