Pardoned criminal Michael Flynn calls for “suspension of Constitution, military-run re-vote”

Esquire said:

Many of the high clergy in the Church of the Savvy have been calmly explaining for weeks that although Donald Trump's brazen and pathetic post-election behavior is corrosive to democracy, it does not technically count as a coup attempt. The president's myriad lawsuits attempting to throw out the results of democratic elections have not worked, these folks explain, therefore they were never going to work (Logic), and concern about them working—on the basis that no Law or Norm has much mattered for four years—was hysteria. This is too stupid to be a coup! It's just a grift, because these things are mutually exclusive. And besides, a coup involves using the military or the security apparatus to seize power. He's just getting laughed out of court.

Welp, now his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a man the president pardoned just last week for "any and all possible offenses" related to the Mueller probe, has endorsed a call for the president to "temporarily suspend the Constitution," "declare limited martial law," have "the military oversee a national re-vote," and "silence the destructive media." Wow! Sounds a bit like a coup. Maybe the best part is the idea that you can have "limited" martial law, or that suspending the Constitution would just be "temporary," or that the only organization that could oversee a legitimate election—read: one where Donald Trump wins—is the military.

The military is not some repository of Real American sentiment—Donald Trump enjoys broad disapproval in the armed forces, including at the officer level, so it's not likely the army or navy will participate in the president's plot to overturn the election. But this stuff is metastasizing on the right. It's a natural extension of the Republican Party's growing belief that any democratic process that ends with a Democratic candidate getting elected is by-definition illegitimate. This is what was beneath the push from numerous Republican-led state legislatures in the last couple of cycles to strip their governors' offices of their powers in the lame-duck period before a Democrat could take office and wield them. Never mind that a majority of citizens had voted to give it to them. This is what's lurking under the voter-suppression tactics, and the post-election push to throw out the votes in predominantly Black cities. These Americans are not considered full citizens, in that they should not have the right to determine who the president is. Their participation in the polity is fraudulent.

Meanwhile, those preaching calm over the last few weeks have not merely ignored the guiding principles of the Trump era: never assume there is a bottom to the shameless depravity, and never bet against that shamelessness being rewarded. (This is a guy who has never faced consequences for a single thing he's done, and who continually gets things he does not deserve. Why would that stop now?) These Savvy Observers suffer from a failure of imagination. The increasingly deranged conspiracies propping up Trump's tantrum have had the desired effect: millions of the Republican rank-and-file do not believe Biden's (fairly decisive) win was legitimate. Very few Republican officeholders have openly acknowledged Biden's win—even if, as we were reminded by Senator Ron Johnson today, they very well know the truth and just regard speaking it as "political suicide"—and that number does not include anyone in congressional leadership. The official position of the Republican Party is that the outcome is in doubt and in need of investigation.

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