A 20-Year-Old GOP Strategy Drew the Road Map for Trump’s Attempted Coup
Why George W. Bush succeeded where Trump failed
Supporters for George W. Bush stand outside Al Gore’s residence in November 2000. Photo: Shawn Thew/AFP via Getty Images
Over the past five weeks, Donald Trump has led a series of bumbling, incompetent, and spectacularly unsuccessful efforts to undo the results of an election he has clearly and decisively lost.
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/top/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/hot/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/new/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/gilded/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/rising/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/wiki/index/
https://www.reddit.com/r/joshuapulevlivestfree/comments/kbn1k2/rjoshuapulevlivestfree_lounge/
https://steemit.com/joshuapulevlivestfree/@miaoliviamiavia/joshuapulevlivestfree
https://piteralanusus.medium.com/joshuapulevnow-e38f7b7620d4
https://steemit.com/joshuapulev/@miaoliviamiavia/joshuapulevnow
https://paiza.io/projects/0TyUBp3i7R3p3UTjQFaS9A
https://piteralanusus.medium.com/we-need-to-talk-about-your-christmas-decorations-e165d5d831c2
https://www.topfind88.com/post/1147857/joshua-vs-pulev-live-stream-reddit
https://www.posts123.com/post/1147857/joshua-vs-pulev-live-stream-reddit
https://blog.goo.ne.jp/fseferw/e/36c6933942939ab24673b7a00b6b7f50
https://okwave.jp/qa/q9835933.html
https://dcm.shivtr.com/forum_threads/3280039
https://brainly.co.id/tugas/37106669
http://recampus.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
http://millionairex3.ning.com/profiles/blogs/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
https://caribbeanfever.com/photo/albums/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
http://webhitlist.com/profiles/blogs/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
http://www.onfeetnation.com/profiles/blogs/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
https://www.postads.ph/ad/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
https://www.guest-articles.com/sports/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit-12-12-2020
https://www.trends.kukooo.com/sfgsdgftetget4/
https://www.topsearch123.com/link/863515/joshua-vs-pulev-live-stream-reddit
https://www.88posts.com/post/285481/joshua-vs-pulev-live-stream-reddit
https://sidim80871.tumblr.com/post/637294083029778432/sdsdfaswgf
https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/2302873-joshua-vs-pulev-live-streams-reddit
https://note.com/lehawe2545/n/nd4bd303f10b1
http://www.mpaste.com/p/biIr7tT
https://paste.centos.org/view/bb261560
https://paste.tbee-clan.de/P59ZG#
https://slexy.org/view/s2yxD7iXcu
https://jsfiddle.net/mkL43tg7/1/
https://www.page2share.com/page/547421/tggtrtyertfgbdgdrg
https://piteralanusus.medium.com/aj-joshua-vs-pulev-livestream-free-tv-channel-2020-21ac251bdb61
https://www.postads.ph/ad/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streamreddit
https://www.guest-articles.com/sports/joshua-vs-pulev-live-streamreddit-12-12-2020
His increasingly unhinged attempts have sparked a wave of apprehension. Pundits have thrown around terms like coup, autogolpe (Spanish for “soft coup”), and sedition to describe his actions.
Writing in The Atlantic, Zeynep Tufecki captured the sentiments of many when she argued that Trump is “establishing a playbook for stealing elections by mobilizing executive, judicial, and legislative power to support the attempt.” A smarter politician will have greater success, or so the argument goes.
But, in reality, that playbook is well-established and has already been executed.
It was 20 years ago this week that the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush for an election he quite likely did not win.
The 2000 election was the most contested and narrowly decided presidential vote in more than 120 years. Bush lost the popular vote by half a million votes to his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, and his margin of victory in the decisive state of Florida was a mere 537 votes.
It’s almost certain that more people in Florida intended to vote for Gore, and had all the state’s votes been counted, Democrats would have kept control of the White House. But due to an aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach by Republicans, as well as the unprecedented intervention of the United States Supreme Court, the doomsaying predictions of 2020 came true two decades ago.
In2000 in Florida, minority votes were systematically suppressed, in part through the use of a so-called felon list that kept tens of thousands of Black voters from casting a ballot because of past criminal convictions but also included an estimated 20,000 wrongly included names. In Florida, typically more than 85% of Black voters vote Democratic in presidential elections (it was 89% this year). More than 50% of the names on the felon list were Black.
And while this year, Republican secretaries of state are by and large standing up to Trump, even in the face of death threats, in 2000, Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, put her thumb on the scale for Bush. She and her staff attempted to short-circuit vote recounts requested by the Gore campaign in largely Democratic counties.
Republican partisans didn’t chant “Stop the Steal” that year, but they did pioneer the use of aggressive tactics to influence the election outcome after the fact. In Miami-Dade County, they staged a protest that bullied the local canvassing board into stopping a manual recount of votes in what became known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
In fact, the Bush team marshaled often contradictory arguments with the only organizing principle that it helped their candidate win — just like Trump forces have spent the past month doing, though far less effectively.
Harris, with the urging of Bush’s team, sought to dissuade local canvassing boards from doing a manual recount of votes in Democratic counties by citing a narrow interpretation of Florida’s election rules. At the same time, Bush’s legal team was fighting to ensure that overseas military ballots, which leaned Republican, were counted even if they didn’t adhere to the state’s electoral laws.
In 2020, Democrats openly fretted about the possibility that Republican state legislators in key battleground states would ignore vote tallies and award their state’s electoral votes to Trump.
In 2000, what may have stopped this from happening was not a fealty to the will of the voters but rather the fact that it wasn’t necessary. After the liberal-leaning Florida Supreme Court ordered a full recount in three Democratic-leaning counties, James Baker, the former secretary of state who spearheaded the Bush effort in Florida, publicly stated that “one should not be surprised if the Florida legislature seeks to affirm the original rules” that had given Bush his narrow vote lead. It was an open invitation to the state’s Republican-controlled House and Senate to ignore the final vote count if it favored Gore and hand the state and the presidency to Bush.
Finally, Trump’s oft-stated hope that the Supreme Court would award him the presidency did not come out of left field. It came out of Florida.
In 2000, the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court ruling that called for a broad recount of all so-called undervotes in the state — 60,000 votes that for a variety of reasons had been discarded (because it had been too difficult to interpret them or there had not been enough time to determine voter intent).
In a 5–4 vote, the Court’s conservative bloc, relying on the Constitution’s equal protection clause, used the dubious argument that since there wasn’t a uniform standard for determining voting intent when counting undervotes, it would disadvantage some voters. Never mind that each Florida county already had its own procedures and standards for counting votes or that the Court failed to identify any victims of this supposed violation, which is a crucial aspect of the legal interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Even more remarkable is that in a Supreme Court decision a week earlier, the Court had rejected an equal protection argument raised by the Bush lawyers. The conservative bloc, it seemed, had already made up their minds and was merely looking for an excuse to justify their decision.
As outrageous as the final Bush v. Gore decision was, the writing had been on the wall. Three days earlier, the Court granted the Bush campaign’s request for a stay in the voting in Florida. In case there was any question about the implicit message being sent by the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, in a brief concurring opinion, ended the mystery. He suggested that to allow the vote to go on would “threaten irreparable harm to [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election” if the recount found that Gore actually had the most votes in Florida. The implication was clear: that the conservative justices were more concerned about Bush’s “legitimacy” than the legal case they were being asked to decide.
After the Court’s stay made it was hard to imagine any scenario under which it would allow Florida to continue the count and give Gore the victory. On December 12, the decision in Bush v. Gore confirmed that assumption.
Yet, it’s what came afterward that is perhaps Bush v. Gore’s most benighted legacy.
After the divisive recount drama, many pundits assumed that Bush would strive to bridge the nation’s divide and reach across the aisle to Democrats.
Writing for the Brookings Institution, Thomas Mann said that Bush’s narrow victory, when combined with his loss of the popular vote and his reliance on the “judicial activism” of the high court, created “the most inauspicious of circumstances” for his presidency.
In the New York Times, R.W Apple, then the dean of the Washington political press corps wrote, “With Congress narrowly divided and his own mandate all but invisible, Mr. Bush will need to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation he promised during his campaign.”
Considering that in 2000, Bush had embraced the mantle of “compassionate conservatism” in direct contrast to the hard-edged conservatism of Newt Gingrich and his band of House Republicans, such a notion hardly seemed far-fetched.
But Bush governed with the same ruthless, win-at-all-costs strategy that his campaign team used during the Florida recount. Before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he rammed through a massive tax cut and pulled the United States out of international agreements supported by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
After 9/11 Bush’s efforts to unite the country were primarily focused on building support for the invasion of Iraq — and occasionally questioning the patriotism of those who opposed it. His chief aide, Karl Rove, would infamously slander Democrats by suggesting that after the 9/11 assaults, they “offer(ed) therapy and understanding for our attackers” while Republicans “prepared for war.”
In 2004, Bush would narrowly win reelection: His tainted victory four years earlier had long been forgotten by Republican voters and the media at large.
In the words of Tom Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Bush’s victory in 2000 and his first term were the “first application of Gingrich-style politics to presidential politics.” This was “streetball politics” and one Schaller says that “cared little about elite opinion.”
In the years since, the “Gingrich-style” has come to define Republican politics up and down the ticket, whether it was the impugning of John Kerry’s patriotism by Bush’s allies in 2004 and the “lock her up” chants in 2016 or the mindless obstructionism of Senate Republicans for electoral benefit during the Obama years and their norm-busting blocking of a vacant Supreme Court seat in 2016.
Inshort, Republicans paid no political price for what had happened in Florida in part by acting as though it hadn’t happened. They were helped by the willingness of Democrats to quickly move on, ostensibly for the good of the country. Congressional Democrats made little concerted effort to obstruct Bush’s political agenda. When the new president nominated Theodore Olson, who had argued the Bush case before the Supreme Court, to become solicitor general, Democrats dutifully confirmed him.
Today, three members of Bush’s 2000 legal team sit on the Supreme Court, two appointed there by Trump: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and John Roberts.
In his book on the Florida recount fight, Jeffrey Toobin argues that the Democrats’ failure started from the top with Gore. “He agonized about the views of the columnists, newspaper editorialists and other elite opinion makers … Gore cared as much about their approval as he did about winning.” The result was a strategy defined by “hedging, compromising and, in effect, undercutting their own work.”
“The Bush forces,” writes Toobin, “always sought victory more than approval.” It’s difficult not to see the brazenness which allowed Republicans to emerge victorious in 2000 in the political tactics the party has adopted in the 20 years since.
For Republicans, Bush v. Gore offered confirmation that they could, in effect, muscle their way toward winning an election, use the courts as a partisan cudgel in that effort, and suffer little political blowback. It gave tacit permission for Republicans to stretch electoral rules to their advantage, to more openly try and suppress Black voters, and to use the judiciary to give their actions legal sanction.
We now take for granted that Republicans will try and use every means available to suppress minority votes, put obstacles in the way of expanded voting, and prune voter rolls. It’s not as if either party learned the art of dirty politics because of what happened in 2000, but there’s also little doubt that in the two decades since Florida, Republicans have polished and honed their craft.
And with the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, they were granted the legal imprimatur to do it. (The majority decision was written by none other than Bush Florida recount veteran Justice Roberts.)
Today, it’s so taken for granted that GOP election officials and judges will put their party’s interests over the rule of law that when it didn’t happen at the state level this year, it was met with surprise and wonderment.
Arguably, the primary reason why secretaries of state like Brad Raffensperger in Georgia did not act like Katherine Harris and federal judges did not invoke Bush v. Gore in helping Trump’s legal effort is that the election simply wasn’t close enough to steal.
For Democrats, the unfair outcome in 2000 did little to harden their approach to electoral politics. The most significant change, according to one former Democratic campaign operative I spoke to, was that after 2000 Democrats simply took into account the potential for recounts. “You had to think about voter protection,” he told me. “Democrats are prepared now” for a Florida-like situation, which “has added a new facet to campaigning that wasn’t there before.” Ironically, when these situations arise, “Republicans have been caught flat-footed in recount fights. Democrats have better recount infrastructure.”
Twenty years after the Florida fight, what stands out in Trump’s so far failed post-election campaign is the poverty of the effort. Jim Baker and Ted Olsen have been replaced by Rudolph Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. Trump is neither smart enough nor competent enough to pull off what would be required this year to overturn the election — though that hasn’t stopped him from trying, and from rallying a considerable fraction of GOP around his efforts.
But it would be a mistake not to learn from what happened in 2000. A party that thinks it can act with impunity in engaging in electoral malfeasance will continue to push the envelope. Indeed, perhaps the most poignant anecdote about how 2000 transformed the nation’s politics was the experience of former Missouri Sen. John Danforth as recounted in Toobin’s book. When asked in the wake of Election Day 2000 to represent the Bush campaign in federal court he demurred, arguing that Bush’s chances of winning were “close to zero.” Beyond that, Danforth told Baker that a court case like Bush v. Gore “would be a black mark that followed him forever. And it would destroy the reputation of everyone involved on the Bush side.”
Last month, Danforth penned an op-ed for his local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a lonely Republican voice deploring Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election. “Trumpism is not a template for future electoral success,” the former senator solemnly declared. “Delegitimizing the presidency and the election that produced it violates the most essential principle of conservatism.” But in a week when 18 states and 106 members of Congress have offered their support for a Texas lawsuit that would seek to invalidate the voters of tens of millions of Americans cast in the 2020 election, it seems that Danforth’s fellow conservatives do not agree. And the echoes of the GOP’s success in 2000 endure.
