Rubin: Trump's not staging a coup, but attacking democracy and helping US enemies

Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / In this August 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump addresses a news conference at the White House in Washington.
Photo by Doug Mills of The New York Times / In this August 2020 file photo, President Donald Trump addresses a news conference at the White House in Washington.

People keep asking me whether I believe President Donald Trump is plotting a coup to prevent Joe Biden from taking office.

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 Belarusian dictator.

But what this president is doing is almost as ugly. He appears bent on undermining our national security during the transition, in pursuit of last minute revenge and domestic civil war.

"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 this week by H.R. McMaster, who served a rocky year as Trump's national security adviser.

Yet the president is stoking turbulence before Biden's inauguration in so many ways that gift our overseas foes.

Most petty is Trump's refusal to allow Biden security briefings - a practice adhered to by past presidents of both parties. This is no minor matter.

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.

As the two authors point out, in 2000 the dispute was over one state and 537 votes, not the situation now, where there is no way for Trump to win.

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, and U.S. intelligence agencies, 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 who have tried to discredit investigations that proved Russian interference.

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 in Afghanistan and hand the country to the Taliban before Jan. 20, so he can say he satisfied a campaign promise.

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.

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.

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