Trump’s Plan To Win In 2024:Hint-It’s Not By Getting The Most Votes

Trump’s Plan To Win In 2024: Hint-It’s Not By Getting The Most Votes

By

Leonard Zwelling

The United States was not designed to be a democracy. It’s a representative government and an unfair one at that because the electors who actually determine who is to be President do not represent the same number of voters. Usually, the electors from the smaller states represent fewer people than the electors from the larger states because each state, regardless of its size, has at least three electors (one for each senator and representative in Congress) and in Wyoming that translates into far fewer citizens per elector than in California. Nonetheless, that’s the system in the Constitution.

Perhaps you remember the furor surrounding the last presidential election wherein Donald Trump and his allies were trying to find a way to “Stop the Steal.” They were convinced that Joe Biden had not really won those crucial swing states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona) and were looking for a way to keep Trump in the White House. It didn’t work. Last time. It might in 2024.

Article II, section 2 of the Constitution is the longest clause in the document. It describes how the Founders designed the process to determine who would be President and it’s not what you think.

What you probably believe is that people vote and the person who gets the most votes in each state captures all of that state’s electoral votes. The person with the most electoral votes (the first to 270) wins. Wrong!

The fact is the power to select electors resides with the state legislatures of each state not with the people. It is only by the consensus of those legislatures and the time-honored historical precedent that the state’s electors all go to the winner of the popular vote. The state legislature can do what it wants. Trump has figured this out and is now (and I mean right now) installing as many loyalists as he can in key positions in state legislatures and as state election officials who certify the election results. The Secretary of State (e.g., in Georgia) refused his entreaties to declare him the winner in 2020, so Trump has gotten the Georgia legislature to weaken the Secretary of State’s power in the process and is running a challenger in the Republican primary against the incumbent. Trump is doing this everywhere so that he can be ready in 2024 to reverse an election result he doesn’t like by having his legislators synthesize their own list of electors (as is indicated in the Constitution) or to throw a contested election into the House of Representatives where each state gets one vote and the Republicans would probably win that. Trump doesn’t need to win the election to do any of this and let’s face it, he hasn’t captured the popular vote in either of his runs.

Some might say I am being a Chicken Little alarmist and that such a coup could not occur in America. Really? It can and it almost did on January 6, 2021. Mike Pence stood his ground. He won’t be Trump’s running mate in 2024. That you can go to Vegas on.

Don’t kid yourselves class, barring his dropping dead in the next three years, Mr. Trump is running again and as he himself said, all he cares about is winning. He will do anything to regain the White House, even undermining the United States election process using the Constitution to do so. It’s all perfectly legal and only Trump would try to pull it off. Unless Congress does something fast (and I am unsure they could pass an amendment through the complex process in time), the current rules will be in effect and Trump is plotting to use them to his advantage.

American democracy? Never was. A reasonably fair representative government? Well, we had one. As Ben Franklin asked, “can we keep it?”