John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist documents disturbing developments in the months leading up to the November election.
It’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat of articles and think-pieces over the past few months about Election Day war games and post-election planning underway on the left, rooted in obsessive fears that President Trump will refuse to accept an electoral loss, triggering a constitutional crisis and maybe even widespread civic unrest, all in a desperate attempt to cling to power. …
… The news hook for most of these articles is a series of elaborate election war games hosted in June by a newly formed organization called the Transition Integrity Project, touted by the media as a bipartisan group of experts consisting of former elected officials, high-level government staffers, consultants, and journalists like David Frum, who wrote the Atlantic piece referenced above.
In other words, the Transition Integrity Project is a cross-section of our elite ruling class. In its own executive summary of the war games, the group states it was founded “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process” — never mind the many ways Democrats in Congress and the executive bureaucracy, aided by the media, have been doing just that since before Trump won the 2016 election. …
… Whether they realize it or not, Podesta and Frum and the others are acting out a present-day version of the election of 1860, only they’re playing the role of the secessionist South. Indeed, well before Abraham Lincoln won the election, even moderate “unionist” southern leaders warned that their states would secede if the vote didn’t go their way. It amounted to mass political blackmail, and after Lincoln’s decisive victory the South followed through on its threat. For slave states, the Union was conditional, not perpetual, and Lincoln’s election violated their conditions.