Trump’s not staging a coup, he’s attacking democracy

People keep asking me whether I believe President Donald Trump is plotting a coup.

Those fears have arisen, of course, as Trump insists he won, and floods his fans with lies about massive voter fraud. Meantime, he sacks the secretary of defense and packs top Department of Defense posts with partisan cronies.

I don’t believe the U.S. president can or will call out the U.S. military to enforce a second term like a copycat Belorussian dictator.

But what this president is doing is almost as ugly.

“In a transition period there is already going to be turbulence, and leaders should try to provide stability so enemies don’t take advantage,” I was told last week by H.R. McMaster, who served a year as Trump’s national security adviser.

Yet the president is stoking turbulence. Most petty is Trump’s refusal to allow Biden security briefings. This is no minor matter, as new presidents have to be ready the moment they take office.

A Washington Post op-ed by Andy Card and John Podesta, White House chiefs of staff under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton respectively, points out the life-threatening cost of a delayed presidential transition. The 9/11 Commission report found that the delay in the 2000 transition hampered the speed of confirming key national security appointees to the Bush administration. This in turn slowed down the administration’s recognition of the looming al-Qaida threat. And a terrorist threat in the U.S. was foiled on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated.

Then there is the question of Trump’s intent in firing top Department of Defense leadership and replacing them with a bunch of underqualified ideologues.

Talking to former Pentagon officials, I found strong agreement that the military would resist being pulled into a political election process.

But what worries the Pentagon is Trump’s insistence that they turn over classified documents he believes will prove that Russia didn’t support him in 2016 — even if this reveals intelligence sources and methods.

Trump has now packed top DOD posts with four supporters. These include Anthony Tata, who has called Obama a “terrorist leader,” and close associates of GOP congressman Devin Nunes, who pushed the false claim that the Obama administration spied on Trump.

“Trump has struggled time and again to get the Pentagon to do his bidding,” says John Gans, former chief Pentagon speechwriter and author of “White House Warriors,” a history of the National Security Council. “These (four men) are the foot soldiers of Trump’s war on government, his war on what he calls the ‘deep state.’ They are willing to bend and break the rules.”

So there you have what I think is Trump’s obsession for the next two months: a last-ditch effort to get revenge for the “Russia hoax.”

Perhaps the president also wants to bring home the under 4,000 troops remaining in Afghanistan and hand the country over to the Taliban before Jan. 20, so he can say he satisfied a campaign promise.

But neither Russia “hoax” revenge, nor gifting the Taliban, has anything to do with securing America. Not only is Trump refusing bipartisan cooperation in confronting an out-of-control pandemic. He is also deliberately attacking the legitimacy of our democratic elections. Both feed the Chinese and Russian narrative that democracy is a failed system.

“I’m most worried about the effect on U.S. public opinion,” says Harvard’s Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of “How Democracies Die.” “Sixty percent of Republicans think the election is not legitimate, so (they will think) Biden is not a legitimate president.

“We’re in a situation where we have a state of permanent institutional warfare.”

A few GOP senators have woken up enough to call for Trump to give Biden security briefings, but not enough to denounce his attacks on democratic norms and his aid to our enemies.

The Biden administration cannot come soon enough to rid us of this Trumpian Nero who fiddles while America burns.