Mary Trump, President Donald Trump’s niece, warned late Thursday that the President’s threat to potentially not accept a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the November election should not be taken lightly.
When asked by HuffPost during a virtual fundraiser for an LGTBQ political group how far she thinks her uncle would be willing to go to remain president, Mary Trump replied, “farther than you can possibly imagine.”
On Wednesday, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition from power if he is not reelected in November.
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing when asked if he would accept the results.
Many Republican lawmakers — without naming the President’s remarks directly — have sought to brush away the comments, Sen. John Thune (R-SD), and others, affirmed that Republicans “believe in the Constitution.” Others have suggested that the President is known to say “crazy stuff,” but is not always meant to be taken seriously.
“To over-dramatize it, is to over-dramatize it,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told a CNN reporter when asked about Trump’s remarks on Thursday.
Making light of Trump’s comments, Cramer said that “the President speaks in very extreme manners, occasionally.”
“I didn’t find what he said last night to be overly extreme, quite honestly,” he added.
But Mary Trump, a vocal critic of the president said at the LPAC fundraiser, that the comments should be taken as a clear warning.
She named a series of challenges that await President Trump when he is no longer commander-in-chief, including charges for various wrongdoings, among them potential tax fraud. There’s also a host of allies who the President has shielded while in office who risk exposure when he’s stripped of presidential power.
“He’s cheating. He’s been cheating for a while now,” Mary Trump told HuffPost. “He’s cheating when he tells people that mail-in ballots are fraudulent somehow. He’s cheating when he started calling into question the legitimacy of the election before a vote was even cast. He’s cheating when he says if Joe Biden wins, it’s rigged.”
“We need to be clear about what we’re potentially facing here,” she added.
Mary Trump knows her uncle as well as anyone but we need to remember that he is also disloyal and a bully. Any action he takes from the election on will depend on whether he gets sufficient support from cronies and hangers on and that will depend on how many think they can still ride his train.
ETA: stated another way, the jackals following Trump’s rogue lion are facing a prisoners dilemma. My own conjecture is that most will, quite wisely, choose betrayal; considering who Trump is and who they are, no other course of action seems likely.
A very important post. McConnell and Barr prop up Trump.
I absolutely don’t think he is bluffing and I never have. How far he gets depends on his enablers.
ETA: Same thought in first 3 posts.
Let me expand on this a bit:
I believe that the most significant enabler of Trump is the assumption of normalcy and the METAPHORS of normalcy. The GOP and Trump are destroying norms using the procedures commonly used in more normal times. Most people need some prompting to imagine things. Here is a tool: Imagine Trump, Barr and McConnell as three military commanders who are blowing up our country with weapons. Real Ones.
I expect he is fishing for a pardon or a guarantee of immunity from prosecution in return for vacating promptly.