Trump’s 3-Point Plan to Win in 2020

We don’t know yet exactly what Trump scandal is sought to be concealed by the dismissal of Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. In his memoir, John Bolton claims that Trump promised Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that he would halt a Berman investigation of a state-owned Turkish bank. But really, Trump may be seeking to cover up any number of scandals. It could be any of them, or all of them, or some other, as-yet-undisclosed scandal altogether.

As the BuzzFeed discovery underscores, Trump largely got away with welcoming Russian aid in 2016. To what extent his campaign was in direct communication with Russians remains uncertain, but we do know of the June 16, 2016, meeting with Russian agents at Trump Tower in New York. We know too that Manafort shared proprietary campaign information with Russian business associates. (The sharing of information by Manafort was reported by Mueller. This revelation was originally redacted. It was unintentionally revealed by a poorly formatted court document.)

Meanwhile, in the District of Columbia, we can already smell the thick stink of scandal from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s attempt to conceal the recipients of aid paid from the emergency pandemic-relief fund—possibly including Trump’s own companies. If Trump loses the election in November, he faces terrible legal exposure and financial trouble. Trump must win to survive, and in the face of low approval and high unemployment, he is unlikely to win if the vote is fair.

The impending chaos in Kentucky, following the chaos in Georgia earlier in June, shows the way to skew the vote. In Georgia, the lines were longest in heavily black areas near Atlanta. In an election suddenly dependent on mail-in voting, the once-obscure question of postage on absentee ballots suddenly matters a great deal. Military ballots can be mailed postage-free. Ballots are postage-free in 16 of the 50 states, especially heavily white states, including Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. But Georgia and other southern states require voters to affix postage, which has historically discouraged take-up of the right to vote absentee. Of the 2020 swing states, only two—Arizona and Wisconsin—offer postage-free voting.

Trump in 2019 sought to extort election help from Ukraine. Bolton’s new book confirms Trump’s televised statements that he has sought election help from Chinese President Xi Jinping. It worked last time, at a manageable political price to Trump. Why wouldn’t he try again?

In every respect, the Trump plan for 2020 is shaping up to be an election outside anything in modern American experience. Trump’s only hope is to manipulate, distort, and suppress. He is acting now to realize that hope. Be warned, and be prepared.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (2020). In 2001 and 2002, he was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush.