Now that he no longer faces the threat of removal from office following his impeachment acquittal in the Senate on Wednesday, Donald Trump may take an even more drastic step to guarantee that he is not removed by voters, either, according to a speculative scenario laid out by former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. In that scenario, Trump would cancel the 2020 elections .
The longtime assistant U.S. attorney posted the scenario to his Twitter account shortly before the Senate vote, which ended with all but one Republican — Utah’s Mitt Romney — casting a vote to acquit Trump.
Kirschner, however, is not the first political observer to express worry that Trump may simply cancel the 2020 elections. In October of last year, bestselling author and journalist Kurt Eichenwald also raised the possibility that Trump may not only cancel the 2020 elections, but end presidential elections altogether.
Under Eichenwald’s imagined series of events, Trump and congressional Republicans would declare that Democrats’ refusal to approve funding for a southern border wall will allow “millions of illegal aliens” to vote. To prevent the supposed “illegal” voting, Trump would call off the elections.
In fact, following the 2016 election, Trump claimed that the only reason he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton was “the millions of people who voted illegally,” a statement that appears to lay the groundwork for a scenario like that spelled out by Eichenwald.
Under Kirschner’s scenario, Trump would use the threat of election interference as a rationale for canceling elections later this year — particularly if he finds himself trailing a Democratic candidate in the polls in weeks leading up to the November 3 election.
“My Attorney General has informed me that he has discovered a plot to attack our voting systems by a foreign country to assist the Democratic nominee,” Kirschner imagines Trump declaring, in a nationally televised address shortly before the November vote. “I am declaring a national emergency and postponing the presidential election.”
Trump would then announce that he has assigned Attorney General William Barr to “investigate” the fabricated “plot,” with Trump announcing that he will “continue serving as your president” until the “emergency” is over.
In December, conservative scholar Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, issued a similar warning . As a result of what he called Barr’s efforts to “whitewash” Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ornstein said that he believed Barr would support any measure, no matter how extreme, to preserve Trump as president.
Those measures, Ornstein speculated, could include suspending the elections, and even declaring martial law, allowing the military to forcibly suppress any opposition to the election cancellation.
