What Can You Do If Trump Stages a Coup?
Citizens prepare to take on a would-be
regime.
Ah, election season. There’s a patriotic
buzz in the air. Bumper stickers and lawn signs all over the neighborhood. Now
comes the time when we check the location of our polling places, make a plan to
vote—and pack a “go bag” in case we need to take to the streets in sustained
mass protest to protect the integrity of the vote count. That last one is not
something you’d expect to be doing in the United States, but things are
different in the Trump era.
For months, the President has been warning that he might not concede the
election in November if he loses, telling reporters who asked him to commit to
a peaceful transfer of power, “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be
a continuation.” It sounded ominous, although it was hard to imagine how he
could make good on the threat to stick around no matter what. Then, media
organizations began publishing pieces outlining the
myriad ways in which the President and his allies might turn a narrow loss into
a win. The possibilities include familiar tactics—contesting mail-in ballots
and turning the process into Bush v. Gore on steroids—and others that sound straight
out of a police state. For example, Trump could summon federal agents or his
supporters to stop a recount or intimidate voters. According to some experts,
this would constitute an autogolpe, or “self coup”: when a President who
obtained power through constitutional means holds onto it through illegitimate
ones, beginning the slide into authoritarianism.
O.K., then. Time to start getting ready.
But how, exactly, do we do that? In September, a group of organizers and
researchers published a fifty-five-page manual called “Hold the Line: A Guide to
Defending Democracy,” which has been downloaded more than eighteen thousand
times. And the Indivisible Project, along with a coalition called Stand Up America,
are preparing their members to take to the streets if Trump contests the
election results. “I’ve been beating the drum on this particular cause since
July, and I’m delighted to see so many people coming around to it,” the
activist and sociologist George Lakey said recently. His own “Aha!” moment came
when Trump sent federal agents in military fatigues to Portland, Oregon, to
tangle with protesters. “It hit me, the way Trump is dealing with Portland,
Oregon, that’s a test,” he said. He guessed that Trump was hoping to provoke a
violent backlash from the protesters, so that he could lay the groundwork for
not accepting the election results, under the pretense that the country had
descended into violent chaos. “Trump can be underestimated by the left,” Lakey
said. “He gets made fun of, but he’s shrewd.”
Lakey, who is eighty-two, is best known
for his book “A Manual for Direct Action,” from 1964, which was often
referred to as a bible for the participants of the civil-rights movement. Since
then, he has trained activists in countries including South Africa, Thailand,
and Sri Lanka in their struggles against repressive regimes. “In the U.S.,
we’re used to waiting for social change,” he said, referring to multiyear
efforts like the civil-rights or women’s-rights movements. But defeating a coup
is different. “Everything happens really fast. You’ve got sometimes three days,
sometimes a week, sometimes three months to beat a coup.” The average American
activist needed a new skill set. “This is the teen-ager who’s been playing
excellent football, and now he wants to play baseball,” he said. “He can’t just
walk on the field and be great. He needs to learn a new set of rules.”
In August, Lakey helped form a group
called Choose Democracy that has been circulating a pledge committing people to
“nonviolently take to the streets if a coup is attempted,” which has more than
thirty thousand signatures. And he began giving a series of training sessions
via Zoom called “How To Beat an Election-Related Power Grab.” On a recent
Thursday, at 7:30 p.m., more than five hundred concerned citizens tuned
in. They exchanged greetings on the group chat:
Hello from “Bad things happen” in
Philadelphia!
Please do more of these!!! I know lots of
white suburban women who are interested.
Lakey, who has white hair and bushy white
eyebrows, is a Quaker, and brings a cheerful, Sunday-school-style delivery to
lessons about overthrowing authoritarian regimes. He began with the work of the
political scientist Stephen Zunes, who has studied occasions when the citizens
of a country managed to rise up and defeat a coup: Bolivia, in 1978; the Soviet
Union, in 1991; Thailand, in 1992; and Burkina Faso, in 2015. According to
Zunes, these movements had several things in common: they were nonviolent, and
they drew from a broad cross-section of society. And they refused to
compromise. So, Lakey emphasized, there could be no cutting a deal with Trump.
“That is reeeeally important,” he said, citing a demand from the
Choose Democracy pledge: “Every vote must be counted. And we refuse to accept
the authority of someone who is practicing something different.” Another
takeaway, for activists, is to focus “on the center of the political spectrum,”
Lakey said. “We’re looking to influence them to tip the outcome of the struggle
in our direction.” Will they side with the protesters or with Trump?
To illustrate, he told the story of the
Kapp Putsch, in the Weimar Republic. In 1920, a group of soldiers, veterans,
and civilians tried to seize control of Berlin, under the right-wing leadership
of Wolfgang Kapp. The legitimate government fled, and Kapp proclaimed himself
the country’s leader. “He walked into the capitol building ready to run the
country,” Lakey said. “However, he found that the government workers had all
gone on strike. There was nobody in the building except him.” He wanted to
issue a proclamation that he was running the country, Lakey added, “But he
didn’t know how to type. So, the next day, he had to bring his daughter to type
out the manifesto.” The coup collapsed within days. Lakey said, “The magic in
that situation was the rapid alliance that was built, over a weekend, between
the left”—trade unions, Communists—“and the center. It could overcome the right
wing, even though they had the Army.”
He said that his listeners should start to
build similar alliances. “Go beyond the usual suspects: the progressives, the
left.” One woman asked in the chat, “Who is the Center in the US these days?
Dems? Church? Libertarians? Moderate Republicans? Ha. How to trust them?” Lakey
assured his audience that, while the U.S. may feel extremely polarized, “the
truth is we’re not nearly as polarized as we may become.” He said that
centrists could be found everywhere from the business world to the medical
establishment. “Bank presidents. People who manage schools or
colleges . . . you name it, if it’s some kind of institution
that expects to have a future.”
There were questions about tactics.
“What
does refusal to recognize illegitimate authority look like?
” one participant
wrote. Mass protests? Lakey warned that, while marches may be useful, “in my
opinion they are wayyyy overrated.” (It is hard to imagine a Trumpist
regime being swayed by a mob of citizens in pussy hats.) Instead, he encouraged
his audience to think strategically. He pulled up a slide titled “Pillars of
Power,” which showed a classical edifice. The roof was labelled “Regime/Status
Quo.” The pillars were labelled with the words Business, Politicians, Military,
Media, Judiciary, Police, and Bureaucracies. “Obviously, the Trump family is
not going to be able to run the government by itself,” he said. They’ll need
institutional support. “The question is how do we, as activists, go after these
pillars in such a way as to encourage them to buckle, and allow the Trump
regime, or his attempted regime, to fall?” Participants in the chat then came
up with politicians they might approach:
“State officials in PA will be
critical!!!”
“Retired politicians can be powerful and
are less constrained by their funders.
”
Last, Lakey clicked to a slide that said,
“What about Violence?” This topic had been hovering over the proceedings.
Zunes, the political scientist, had said in a recent interview, “The thing that
scares me the most is, unlike all these other countries I’ve studied, this
country has millions of people who have guns—and not just guns but
semi-automatic weapons—that are loyal Trump supporters, and whom he can call
out to suppress such a nonviolent uprising.” Several attendees had expressed
concerns in the chat about groups like the Proud Boys and right-wing militias,
writing things like, “
I have never been in a demonstration where some people
are likely to have automatic weapons.”
Lakey acknowledged, “There are a lot of
alarming things going on already in this country with regard to what I call Trump’s
‘irregulars.’ ” He said that protesters should plan their rallies for
places where it would be difficult for violence to break out: in the lobby of
an office building or in a car caravan. He told participants to imagine that
they were Proud Boys looking to “rumble.” “Ask, ‘What would they welcome?’ And
then not do that!” he said. One tip, from the civil-rights movement: “When in
doubt, sit down. It’s counterintuitive. But it has been used in multiple
cultures, and it works.” (Except with tear gas. Then, he said, “walking slowly
would be best.”)
If things do get ugly, he noted, it could
be useful for the cause. “Get your smartphone and expose what happened. Offer
yourself for interviews,” he said. The key is to draw a contrast between the
violent regime and the peaceful protesters. That’s what happened during
Thailand’s military coup, in 1992, when soldiers shot into a crowd of
nonviolent demonstrators. The public was horrified. “It brought a surge of
people into the struggle that overthrew the coup plotters,” Lakey said. “What
we’re teaching tonight is evidence-based. It’s how baseball is played.”
Frances Brokaw, a retired physician and
Quaker in Hanover, New Hampshire, attended the Zoom training and came away
feeling better about the coming weeks. “I found it helpful and hopeful,” she
said. She’d written to New Hampshire’s secretary of state, a Democrat, and its
governor, a Republican, asking them not certify the election results until all
absentee ballots have been counted. The secretary of state’s office had
responded affirmatively. “I haven’t heard back from the governor,” she said.
But she plans to keep writing. And she will join in street protests if
necessary, despite the spectre of election-related violence and the threat of
the coronavirus.
“If need be, I’m ready,” she said. “If we’re talking about the well-being and
safety of millions of people in this country from this President—who is totally
off the rails from what I’ve seen—yes, I’ll put myself on the line for that. I
have a grandson who’s five months old, and I want the world to be safe for
him.”
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