Senior Obama administration staffers planned a response to then-candidate Donald Trump’s potential rejection of the 2016 election results, New York Magazine reported Wednesday based on interviews with two such staffers, Deputy National Security Adviser for Communications Ben Rhodes and Communications Director Jen Psaki.
“It wasn’t a hypothetical,” Rhodes told New York. “Trump was already saying it on the campaign trail.”
At the time, Trump had said in a debate that he might not accept the election results, provoking an uproar.
The plan, essentially, was to flood the zone with a long list of “congressional Republicans, former presidents, and former Cabinet-level officials including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice,” in the magazine’s words, who would express their confidence in the election results.
The plan also called for senior Republicans and Democrats to assert that Russia had attempted to tilt the scales in Trump’s favor, as intelligence officials and some in the administration and Congress knew at the time.
“We wanted to handle the Russia information in a way that was as bipartisan as possible,” Rhodes said.
“There was recognition that we had a Democratic president who was quite popular but also divisive for a portion of the population,” Psaki told New York. “For them, just having him say the election was legitimate was not going to be enough. We didn’t spend a lot of time theorizing about the worst thing that could happen — this isn’t a science-fiction movie. It was more about the country being incredibly divided and Trump’s supporters being angry. Would there be protesting? I don’t want to say violence, because we didn’t talk about that as I recall.”
Might as well update the plan for the coming Blue Tsunami… Dotard will lash out …
“The plan also called for senior Republicans and Democrats to assert that Russia had attempted to tilt the scales in Trump’s favor, as intelligence officials and some in the administration and Congress knew at the time.”
In other words, they didn’t actually have a plan.
The problem is I worry they do have a plan for that themselves. Trump telegraphing that he might not accept the results during his campaign was as much to sow discord and chaos as a matter of fact statement. I can see it coming. I tend to lean towards this tactic as something inspired by the Kremlin versus original thinking.
Trump’s Kremlin assignment (in return for $$) was to delegitimize, cause chaos–the win came as a bonus. The logic of the assignment would be to dispute the election results, allege massive voter fraud, incite a constitutional and political crisis, pave the way for a Clinton presidency under constant attack from House and Senate, and a continued non-filling of the empty Supreme Court seat so long as Clinton was under congressional investigation for possible wrongdoing related to her emails. The basic GOP posture was that any Clinton presidency was illegitimate, and they would have deployed Trump’s antics as a way of empowering them. These midterms would have been a total wipeout, and Clinton herself would have been very damaged in advance of 2020.
In a way, his winning might be a blessing. Horrible yes. But thinking about what you said, the problems this §residency presents are far more in the open. Trump would have been a thorn in the side, playing his games but no longer under intense scrutiny. This way, we are all looking at him and in that process, all that brought him to this point of time. The Kremlin is unmasked and their influence. Trump’s finances and connections are also for questioning. While the war wages on, we all know we are in the war and not simply gawking at odd little things.