By Andrea Widburg
Everything from here on out is a theory, but it’s a theory based upon readily available facts. If you look at them in a particular way, those readily available facts show a sustained pattern of subverting the will of the people to obtain total political power, something that culminated in the recently announced indictment against Donald Trump.
If I were trying to overthrow a duly elected president, I’d start by saying he conspired with a foreign power to cheat in the election. I’d believe I could get away with this charge because I would have the media on my side, relentlessly pounding away at the narrative. It would help that members of the president’s own party, despising him for destroying their cozy little arrangement with the opposition, refused to support him politically.
When it became apparent that the president was hugely effective at governing on those things that matter to ordinary people, such as the economy, national security, immigration, energy policy, etc., and that the false charges of treason and cheating weren’t sticking, I’d look ahead to throwing the next election.
What I would need is a way to prevent the president from campaigning and a way to institutionalize election fraud. Thankfully, I would have gamed out long before the election what a government can do if faced with a pandemic infection. COVID’s appearance was providential.
Please note before I continue that we knew by March exactly how bad COVID was and what the best approach was: the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship moored off Japan, was a perfect Petri dish. It revealed that the elderly and immune-compromised were at risk; everyone else was fine. The way to address the problem was to protect that small group and get on with life.
With help from that same compliant media establishment and fellow travelers in the social media and tech world, along with an administrative state that despised the president, I would quickly turn that flu into the newest incarnation of the Black Death. Once the people panicked, I would lock down the country while insisting that there was no viable treatment. This provided three benefits:
- it would destroy the thriving economy on which the president would run;
- it would prevent the president, a crowd-pleaser, from campaigning before crowds; and
- it would allow legislatures and secretaries of state across America to implement often unconstitutional, and always unreasonable, voting rules, such as months-long early voting, ballot-harvesting, and voting only by mail-in ballot. Add to this the ongoing refusal to check identification, and the election was in the bag before it started.
I would further destabilize things by using an ex-con’s drug death in police custody to set America on fire. The fuel would have been provided by years of anti-white and anti-police rhetoric, especially in the education world, from academia down to kindergarten.
At this point, I would select as my candidate a person who would get on board with every plan, no matter how nefarious. The perfect candidate would be both very corrupt and very stupid, so he wouldn’t balk at anything, no matter how wrong or ridiculous. Help would come from members of the president’s own party, who, as noted, despised him and were delighted to return to the cozy arrangement of polite, and enriching, opposition.
The beleaguered president would give me a gift by asking his supporters to come to D.C. to protest the Senate’s pro forma election confirmation. I would deny the president’s request for extra security on the day and plant untold numbers of FBI agents in the crowd, and then lob flashbangs at them without first telling them to disperse, inciting panic. I would instruct the Capitol police to open the heavy, sealed, unbreakable doors, forcing the crowd into the building.
Then I would spend the next two and a half years relentlessly persecuting and prosecuting the members of that crowd, 99.9999% of whom had no illegal intent and were instead subtly coerced into entering the building. I would deny them the right to a speedy trial, hold them for years without charges, hide exculpatory evidence, seize their funds to deny them counsel, and impose on them the strictest charges possible, even as my party ensured that violent criminals across America walked through the legal system unscathed. I especially would have given a pass to anyone on my side who violently protested the president. The president’s supporters would learn in the most brutal way possible that they no longer had the right to free speech and free assembly.
Once having taken over the government (and having already long owned the federal criminal justice system, from DOJ attorneys to the FBI), if the deposed president had the temerity to run again (and to look as if he was going to succeed), I would indict him for a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed: taking “classified” documents from the White House.
I would know that the president has plenary power to declassify documents, meaning that, by walking them out of the White House, he automatically declassified them. And to hammer home my total power, I would not indict the current president and the past vice president, both of whom lacked plenary power and admitted to possessing classified documents.
The best part of my coup would be knowing that, after I issued the indictment, the president’s supporters, having seen how the federal government deliberately and enthusiastically destroyed the lives of those who showed up on January 6, would be too cowed to protest.
The damage I caused to our constitutional system of government, the economy, and the lives of the American people would be irrelevant to me. I would have attained total power, and that was always the only thing that mattered.