Lawyers Are Already Working On Trump’s Next Coup Attempt

Donald Trump is a historically sore loser. 

When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, President Donald Trump refused to accept the results. He instead spread lies that the election outcome was swayed by voter fraud, harassed the Justice Department to pursue his false claims, and brought a slew of meritless lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the results. He bullied election officials to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss, badgered Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election, and coordinated false slates of electors so that the Electoral College could simply declare him the winner. 

And when all that failed, he sicced a deadly mob on Pence, members of Congress, and Capitol police.

Thanks to a helpful assist from the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, Trump has still not faced meaningful consequences for his role in the insurrection. As a result, what could have been a singularly egregious assault on democracy now seems more like a dress rehearsal. Earlier this week, Trump announced that his running mate will be J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator who has said he would have gone along with the fake electors scheme if he were in Pence’s position. As for this November, Vance has said that he will accept the results “if it’s a free and fair election.” The subtext here is: “If we win it.”

A Republican victory is the only election outcome that the Republican Party will deem legitimate, and the party apparatus and allies are working hard to illegally render any Democratic victory null and void. This would be impossible without the work of attorneys, who craft the legal strategies, file the lawsuits, and argue in court for the right to subvert the democratic process. The Republican Party poses a unique danger to multiracial democracy as it relentlessly seeks to cancel out the votes of people of color in order to install a white supremacist. Warping the legal system to overturn elections is an existential threat to the rule of law, and it is bitterly ironic that lawyers are at the center of it.

Earlier this year, the Republican National Committee announced that it plans to have over 100,000 attorneys and volunteers monitoring vote-counting in swing states in November. Historically, Republican “monitoring” of the vote-counting process has looked a lot like intimidation and suppression. Between 1982 and 2017, the RNC was subject to a consent decree limiting its ability to take “poll-watching” measures like, for example, sending armed off-duty cops to polling places in Black neighborhoods. Last month, RNC co-chair (and Trump’s daughter-in-law) Lara Trump remarked that the party has “a unique opportunity right now that we have not had in 40 years.” As the old saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mice will play, except the cat is a federal judge and the mice are racists.

Now, the GOP is openly coupling its so-called “election integrity” program with phony claims about preventing a repeat of “the Democrat tricks from 2020.” Already, the Republican Party and allies have filed over 100 lawsuits intended to make it harder to vote and harder for those votes to be counted—an unprecedented level of litigation this early in the election cycle. The RNC’s chief counsel, Charlie Spies, has described the goal as “making sure that victory can’t be rigged”—setting aside, of course, Republican efforts to do the rigging themselves.

The speed and intensity of these efforts may be partially attributable to experience: Some of the same attorneys who tried to overthrow the 2020 election are now spearheading the official effort to disrupt the 2024 election. Christina Bobb, who was indicted for her role in the fake electors scheme in Arizona, has been appointed as the GOP’s “senior counsel for election integrity.” And Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who was on Trump’s infamous phone call asking Georgia officials to “find” votes, has been recruiting and training election-deniers on how to surveil voters and challenge their eligibility.

This legal campaign to undermine the election is expansive. One lawsuit in Pennsylvania argues that voters’ absentee ballots should be invalidated if they accidentally put the wrong date on the return envelope. Another lawsuit in Mississippi seeks to disenfranchise voters whose ballots are mailed by, but received after, Election Day. A similar lawsuit in Nevada aims to end the state’s policy of counting votes mailed by Election Day and received within four days of the election. Still another in Georgia aims to transform the ministerial task of election certification into a vehicle for investigating and changing substantive outcomes. A lawsuit in Michigan aims to compel the state to purge its voter rolls. Another lawsuit in Michigan is trying to block the state’s veterans affairs, disability services, housing, and employment offices from providing voter registration services. For Republicans, rather than earn the votes of people of color, they’re going to court to make sure those votes don’t count: “Where we can’t get what we need,” said RNC Chairman Michael Whatley, “we’re going to be filing those lawsuits.”

Even if, as in 2020, these frivolous lawsuits do not succeed in altering the outcome, they can still win in the court of public opinion. During the 2020 election, for instance, conspiracy theories about election theft drove poll watchers in Detroit to try to obstruct ballot counting in a confrontational frenzy. In 2024, too, a barrage of lies and litigation can create enough confusion and inflame enough supporters to the point that they reject valid outcomes, empowering allied officials to alter the results. A Heritage Foundation lawyer involved in the RNC’s 2024 planning has already said that there is “zero chance of a free and fair election,” laying the groundwork to say any Democratic win is invalid, and the only real votes are for Republicans.

Lawyers’ role as the engine of election subversion points to a deep rot in the legal system. For literally all of American history, people have been fighting to make democracy real and actually achieve equal justice under law. Yet here lawyers are, volunteering for illegal stunts to make the country less equal and more unjust. These brazen schemes to grab power are a betrayal of the very principles lawyers are supposed to protect. They know better. Their failure to be better is an embarrassment to the profession and a danger to the nation.