BREWING CRISIS

Greetings. I am a voting constituent in rural west Texas. Just finished the disturbing Atlantic article by Barton Gellman outlining all the ways the upcoming election could most likely evolve into not only a constitutional crisis, but a crisis with no proscribed outcome. To a lay person such as myself it was terrifying. To politicians and strategists I expect it’s just a primer. Both sides are already way into the weeds in elective strategies. But from all accounts, the Trump campaign has actively moved from the weeds into plain and blatant sight as it attempts to formulate a plan to achieve their desired outcome, no matter the cost. But to our democracy it is more than just who has the most power in the end. An election tainted, a presidential transition tainted, our faith in our democratic structure destroyed. “We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told [Gellman] “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.” It was distressing to read how a series of exercises (termed the Transition Integrity Project) conducted this summer by a group of former elected officials, academics, political strategists, and lawyers, modeled the election and its aftermath in an effort to find pivot points where things could fall apart. When Mr. Gellman followed up with one of the co-founders of the project, she said she did not know how the story turned out. In half of the simulations, the participants did not make it as far as Inauguration Day. “We got to points in the scenarios where there was a constitutional impasse, no clear means of resolution in sight, street-level violence,” she said. “I think in one of them we had Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and we had troops in the streets … Five hours had gone by and we sort of said, ‘Okay, we’re done.’ ” She added: “Once things were clearly off the rails, there was no particular benefit to seeing exactly how far off they would go.” No lessons were learned about how to restrain a lawless president once a conflict was under way, no alternative moves devised to stave off disaster. “I suppose you could say we were in terra incognita: no one could predict what would happen anymore.” I believe that this would be the point where Americans should leave ideology behind for the survival of the country. At what point do we realize we are destroying the very thing that sustains us as Americans? We cannot be complacent in the belief that the worst case scenario can never happen. Not here in America. Because it absolutely can. “We know this man. We cannot afford to pretend.” You better than I should know this to be true.