Democrats signal they will refuse to certify a Trump victory
House Democrats say they will refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election results if Donald Trump wins unless the election is “honest” — which they expect it will not be.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) last week told Axios that if Trump "won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it,” though he “definitely” does not believe that will be the case. Raskin, who refused to certify Trump’s victory in 2017, sat on the January 6th Committee and spent years villifying Republicans as “election deniers.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) similarly said she doesn’t know “what kind of shenanigans [Trump] is planning.”
"We would have to, in any election . . . make sure that all the rules have been followed,” she added.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) said Democrats will only certify a Trump victory "assuming everything goes the way we expect it to."
"We have to see how it all happens,” he said, adding: “My expectation is that we would."
Like Raskin, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson last month said Republicans would certify a “free, fair, and safe election,” though this sparked pearl-clutching from top Democrats who said his remarks “threaten our democracy.”
Democrats prepared for a Trump win
Assuming a Trump win is certified, reports suggest the Democrats’ strategy may be to sabotage his presidency with mutiny.
NBC reported in January that “a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater to his political needs.”
The report also hinted that members of the military are being conditioned to refuse orders from Trump if they are “illegal”:
The military’s role is unique in that soldiers and sailors are trained to obey the commander-in-chief but are told not to follow illegal orders.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) was quoted as saying that the United States can survive a Trump presidency if “the military itself resisted what they deemed to be an unlawful order.”
In the meantime, politicians like Blumenthal are working to make Trump’s agenda unlawful. Blumenthal, for instance, is trying to pass a bill that would forbid a withdrawal from NATO, a move Trump has openly supported.
A mutiny under Trump is probable considering it happened before.
Military went rogue under Trump for ‘unlawful’ orders
In May, Colonel Earl Matthews revealed how in 2021 Pentagon officials effectively stripped President Trump of his authority as commander-in-chief. At the time, Matthews served the as a staff judge advocate in the Department of Defense.
According to Matthews, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy plotted to disregard orders from Trump after January 6th, 2021. They “unreasonably” believed Trump would order the DC National Guard to intervene with the certification of the election results. Matthews testified about these matters before Congress as a whistleblower in April.
“Army leadership had unreasonably anticipated an ‘unlawful order’”
“I think a very plausible argument can be made that, through no fault of his own, President Trump’s command authority over both the D.C. National Guard and the U.S. Army itself had been surreptitiously curtailed by the senior leadership of the Army on January 6, 2021,” said Matthews.
He continued: “Army leadership had unreasonably anticipated an ‘unlawful order’ from the President, an order that the President had no plans to issue, and were preemptively seeking to curtail his discretion to issue such an order.”
Matthews’ version of events aligns with that of others. In the book Peril, journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that on January 8th Milley held a secret meeting at the Pentagon. In the meeting, Milley instructed senior officials in the National Military Command Center to refuse orders from the president unless he, Milley, approved. This included, Milley clarified, orders concerning the nuclear arsenal.
According to the New York Times, the meeting came after Milley received a call from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was looking for a way to “have the Pentagon leadership essentially remove Mr. Trump from his authorities as the commander in chief.”
