The Desperation Play: Inside the GOP’s Strategy to Subvert Democracy and Reinstate Trump
Donald Trump and the Republican Party are in a desperate panic.
If the polls are accurate, Trump is trailing Joe Biden, and in some key battleground states, the gap is significant. COVID cases and deaths were rising again, and no amount of spin or denial from Trump could hide the facts. While the GOP tried to point to the stock market as a sign that the country was doing well, the reality was much harsher. Millions of Americans were unemployed, and during the 2020 campaign season, 751,000 people filed jobless claims in a single week.
As pressure mounted, the Republican strategy shifted to survival mode. But this wasn’t about protecting the country. It was about protecting one man’s political future. What came next wasn’t just a campaign. It was a coordinated attempt to manipulate the system, block votes, and spread doubt about the foundations of American democracy.
Step One: Suppress the Vote Before It Happens
Before a single vote was cast in the 2020 election, the Republican Party was already hard at work trying to tilt the playing field. They knew they couldn’t win on equal ground. What started years earlier as a quiet campaign of voter suppression turned into a full-scale assault on access once Trump’s poll numbers began to fall and the pandemic disrupted traditional voting patterns.
At the center of their plan was a familiar strategy: purge voter rolls, restrict ballot access, and intimidate likely voters—especially in communities of color, among young people, and the working poor.
Voter Roll Purges
Heading into 2020, states like Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina carried out massive voter roll “cleanups.” These purges disproportionately removed Black, Brown, and low-income voters. In Georgia, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp oversaw a purge that removed over 300,000 registered voters. Investigations later showed that nearly 200,000 of those people had not moved and were wrongly labeled as “inactive” or “ineligible.”
This was not routine maintenance. It was calculated disenfranchisement.
Polling Place Closures
After the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, Republican-led states no longer needed federal approval to change voting rules. The results were swift and sweeping. Nearly 1,700 polling places were closed across the South, many in Black communities. In Texas, counties with growing Latino populations saw the steepest cuts. Voters were forced to travel long distances and wait in hours-long lines during a pandemic just to cast a ballot.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials opened only five polling locations to serve a city of nearly 600,000 people, many of them African American. This was not poor planning. It was intentional obstruction.
Attacks on Mail-In Voting
As COVID-19 disrupted everyday life, mail-in voting became a critical option for millions. Trump and the GOP saw it as a threat and launched a widespread campaign to discredit it. Trump claimed voting by mail would lead to massive fraud, even though he voted by mail himself. He later admitted in an interview that if vote-by-mail were expanded, “you’d never have a Republican elected again.”
To back this effort, Trump appointed major donor Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General. Under DeJoy, mail sorting machines were dismantled, delivery times slowed, and overtime cut. All of this happened during the most mail-in-heavy election in U.S. history. Ballot drop boxes were pulled from key counties, and lawsuits were filed to restrict how ballots could be submitted or counted.
Intimidation and Surveillance
Republican groups and far-right operatives organized aggressive “poll watcher” programs under the banner of “election integrity.” These efforts were often designed to intimidate rather than observe. In states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, untrained volunteers were sent to minority precincts, where they hovered near voters, challenged eligibility, and spread misinformation while posing as law enforcement or official observers.
These tactics echoed the Jim Crow era, when legal barriers were used to hide the real purpose; fear and suppression.
In the end, the GOP wasn’t just trying to win. They were trying to prevent a loss by stopping people from voting in the first place. When your policies can’t attract the majority, and your candidate is behind in nearly every major poll, democracy becomes a threat. In 2020, the Republican Party treated it exactly that way.
Step Two: Undermine Faith in the System
Once voter suppression efforts were in motion, the next phase of the Republican strategy emerged just as aggressively: destroy public confidence in the election itself. The goal wasn’t to prove fraud. It was to make enough people believe fraud could happen, especially if Donald Trump lost.
From the moment the pandemic made mail-in voting the safest option for millions of Americans, Trump and the GOP began a coordinated campaign to delegitimize it. Not only was this disinformation campaign unprecedented in scale, but it was also strategically timed to land before a single vote had even been counted.
Trump’s Preemptive Strike on the Election’s Legitimacy
Trump spent months on Twitter, at rallies, and during press briefings attacking the process of mail-in voting. He didn’t just suggest it was flawed, he insisted it was inherently fraudulent, despite no evidence supporting the claim and a long history of successful absentee voting in every state.
In fact, he said it plainly during a Fox News interview in March 2020:
They had levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.
This wasn’t speculation. It was admission. Trump knew a high-turnout election would likely not go his way, so instead of adjusting his campaign to appeal to more voters, he decided to undermine the entire election process itself.
The Misinformation Machine
Trump didn’t act alone. His claims were echoed by right-wing media outlets, amplified by fringe conspiracy groups, and solidified by Republican members of Congress who refused to push back. From Facebook memes to Fox News headlines, the GOP message was clear: “Don’t trust the results if we lose.”
By the time ballots began arriving at homes across America, a sizable portion of the Republican base already believed the election would be rigged against them.
Claims circulated about ballots being thrown away, despite later being proven false.
Footage of election workers was edited out of context to falsely show tampering.
Legal ballots were mischaracterized as “illegal,” and entire vote counts were questioned if they trended toward Biden, especially in urban, heavily Black cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
The most audacious part? Most of the lawsuits and claims were filed before the vote tallies were even finalized. The point was never to win in court. The point was to seed chaos and create just enough doubt to make the public lose trust in the outcome.
Dozens of Lawsuits, Zero Evidence
In total, Trump and his allies filed over 60 lawsuits in battleground states. They lost nearly every single one. Judges, many of them Republican appointees, dismissed the cases for lack of evidence, hearsay, or outright fabrication.
A Pennsylvania judge wrote in one scathing decision:
One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations…
Even Trump’s own Department of Justice, under Attorney General Bill Barr, found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
But none of that mattered.
Because the goal wasn’t to win in court, it was to win in the minds of Trump’s supporters. To build a story that they could carry with them beyond Election Day. A justification to reject the outcome before it arrived.
The Damage Was Done
This strategy didn’t just set the stage for post-election unrest; it undermined the foundational belief that elections in America are fair and decisive.
By Election Day, polling showed that nearly 70% of Republican voters believed the election would be or had already been stolen. After the election, that number only grew, bolstered by high-profile Republicans who refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s win, even after all legal challenges had failed and the results had been certified by every state.
What we witnessed wasn’t just political rhetoric; it was an attack on the democratic compact itself. By encouraging millions to believe the process was illegitimate, Trump and the GOP set fire to the very system they claimed to defend.
This wasn’t about a single race or a single candidate. It was about conditioning a political base to reject any outcome that didn’t go their way—and laying the psychological groundwork for insurrection.
Step Three: Overturn the Will of the Voters
By November 7, 2020, the results were clear: Joe Biden had won the presidency, flipping key battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The popular vote margin exceeded 7 million votes. In a normal democracy, the losing candidate concedes, the party regroups, and the nation moves forward.
But in Trump’s world, and in today’s Republican Party, there was no acceptance of reality. Instead, a coordinated, multi-layered attempt was launched to overturn the election outcome outright.
What followed wasn’t confusion or uncertainty. It was a deliberate and premeditated attempt to reverse the results of a democratic election. And it unfolded in four phases.
1. Pressure Campaigns on State Officials
Donald Trump and his allies didn’t just cry foul, they picked up the phone.
In an extraordinary moment of public corruption, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and said:
I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.
This wasn’t subtle. It was a naked attempt to coerce a state official into falsifying election results to keep Trump in power. Similar pressure was applied to officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, all states where Biden had won by tens of thousands of votes.
The calls weren’t isolated incidents. They were part of a wider push that included personal visits from Rudy Giuliani, letters from Republican members of Congress, and threats against election workers. In Michigan, Republican members of the Wayne County canvassing board initially refused to certify votes from Detroit, until public outcry forced them to back down.
These actions had a common thread: ignore the votes of Black and Brown Americans in urban centers and swing the election by fiat.
2. The “Fake Electors” Scheme
Perhaps the most brazen, and under-discussed part of the coup attempt was the creation of false slates of electors in seven states that Biden won.
Here’s how it worked:
Groups of pro-Trump Republicans met in secret or behind closed doors.
They signed fake electoral certificates claiming Trump had won their states.
These false certificates were sent to the National Archives and even presented to Congress as if they were legitimate.
This wasn’t a protest. It was fraud; an attempt to create a pretext for overturning certified election results during the January 6 joint session of Congress.
Trump’s team hoped that Vice President Mike Pence would reject the real electors in favor of these phony slates, triggering a constitutional crisis and opening the door for state delegations or the Supreme Court to intervene.
This wasn’t a wild theory. It was openly discussed in White House memos and legal briefs written by figures like John Eastman and circulated among Trump’s inner circle.
3. Mobilizing Congress to Block Certification
When state-level pressure failed, Trump turned his focus to January 6, 2021, the final, ceremonial certification of the Electoral College results.
He lobbied Republican members of Congress relentlessly, urging them to object to the certification of key states. And many complied. Senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz took the lead, while 139 House Republicans prepared to vote against the will of their own constituents.
What they were planning was not a legal challenge, it was an attempted subversion of the Constitution under the guise of procedural objections.
Even after the Capitol was attacked, after members of Congress had fled for their lives, and after police officers were bloodied and beaten, 147 Republicans still voted to reject the results.
4. The Insurrection
While Trump worked the levers of government, his supporters prepared for battle. On January 6, Trump held a “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. From the stage, he told the crowd:
If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
Minutes later, the mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Armed with flagpoles, bear spray, zip ties, and pipe bombs, they broke through barricades, smashed windows, and chanted for the hanging of Mike Pence, who refused to violate the Constitution by rejecting certified results.
The world watched in horror as the seat of American democracy was overrun. Five people died, hundreds were injured, and the peaceful transfer of power, one of our nation’s most sacred traditions, was shattered in real time.
And yet, in the aftermath, Trump refused to take responsibility, and the majority of Republican lawmakers either excused or minimized the attack.
This wasn’t democracy faltering under pressure. This was democracy under attack by the very people sworn to uphold it.
What made it all the more dangerous was how close it came to succeeding, not because of some genius strategy, but because so many Republican officials either enabled it, stayed silent, or acted too slowly to stop it.
And far from being ashamed, many of those involved in this effort remain in power today, some of them now running elections in their own states.
Step Four: Rewrite the Rules for Next Time
When the legal challenges failed, when the vote counts were certified, and when the violent insurrection failed to stop the transfer of power, you might’ve expected a period of reflection. A reckoning. A commitment to safeguard democracy moving forward.
Instead, the Republican Party did the opposite.
They looked at the 2020 election not as a wake-up call, but as a blueprint. And in its aftermath, they launched a sweeping, coordinated campaign to change the laws, reshape the systems, and consolidate power, ensuring that next time, they wouldn’t have to rely on pressure, lies, or a riot to stay in power. They’d just rig the rules.
This effort was immediate, aggressive, and national in scope.
A Wave of Restrictive Voting Laws
In the first year after the 2020 election, 19 states passed 34 laws making it harder to vote. The Brennan Center for Justice called it the “most aggressive wave of voter suppression legislation in decades.” And this wasn’t organic, it was Republican lawmakers in state after state, using Trump’s Big Lie as a justification to clamp down on access to the ballot.
Here’s just a glimpse of what these laws included:
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Georgia (SB 202): Made it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in long voting lines. Cut the number of drop boxes. Limited early voting hours. Gave the GOP-dominated legislature power to control local election boards, specifically targeting counties like Fulton, home to Atlanta’s large Black population.
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Texas (SB 1): Banned 24-hour voting and drive-thru voting which were methods that were heavily used in Harris County (Houston) during the pandemic. Required new ID provisions for mail ballots. Empowered partisan poll watchers to have greater access inside polling locations.
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Florida: Restricted the use of ballot drop boxes, imposed limits on third-party voter registration efforts, and made it harder for voters to remain on mail-in ballot request lists.
And in states like Arizona, Iowa, Montana, and others, similar bills curtailed voting hours, slashed registration access, and criminalized minor errors in ballot collection procedures.
The justification was “election integrity.” But the real goal was to make it harder to vote, especially for the kinds of voters who don’t support Republicans.
Targeting Local Control and Election Officials
One of the most alarming shifts has been the GOP’s attempt to seize control of how elections are run at the local level.
Why? Because in 2020, local election officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, refused to cave to Trump’s pressure. They counted the votes. They upheld the law. They certified the results.
So now, those same officials are being replaced, harassed, or stripped of power.
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In Georgia, the new law allows the state legislature to remove and replace entire county election boards, giving Republican leaders a path to take over vote administration in predominantly Democratic counties.
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In Arizona, bills have been introduced to allow the state legislature to reject election results outright.
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Across the country, election officials, especially those who stood firm in 2020, have resigned under pressure, citing harassment, death threats, and political intimidation.
This isn’t accidental. It’s part of a deliberate strategy: if you can’t get officials to bend, replace them with people who will.
Normalizing the Big Lie
While these laws and changes unfolded, the Republican Party continued to normalize Trump’s lie that the election was stolen.
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State legislatures, like those in Arizona and Wisconsin, spent taxpayer money on sham “audits” designed to uncover fraud that never existed. The Arizona “audit,” led by a group with no experience in elections, not only failed to prove fraud, it found that Biden had won by an even larger margin.
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GOP candidates for secretary of state, the officials who will run the 2024 elections, openly campaigned on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. In Nevada, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Big Lie loyalists ran for office specifically to take control of election oversight.
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Conservative media outlets continued pushing baseless claims of ballot stuffing, dead voters, and rigged machines, all debunked, but repeated often enough to become gospel for millions of Americans.
This steady stream of misinformation serves a dual purpose: delegitimize future losses before they happen, and justify anti-democratic changes in the name of “fairness.”
The Return of Election Subversion
Perhaps most chillingly, many of the laws passed since 2020 have created new avenues for election subversion, the ability to reject results not based on fraud or evidence, but on partisan preference.
Instead of just making it harder to vote, Republicans are now putting mechanisms in place to ignore the outcome altogether.
In key battleground states:
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Legislatures are giving themselves the power to override local results.
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New “voter fraud” task forces have been created to surveil voters and cast a chilling effect over ballot access.
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Penalties for election officials who make good-faith mistakes have increased, driving experienced workers out and opening the door to partisan actors.
In short, the playbook for 2024 and beyond isn’t about preventing fraud. It’s about creating the conditions to claim fraud anytime they lose.
This is how democracies die…not always in flames, but in paperwork, legalese, and a thousand cuts.
The Republican Party couldn’t overturn the 2020 election. But instead of changing their policies or appealing to more voters, they’ve changed the rules, stacked the deck, and built a system where victory doesn’t depend on majority support—it depends on control.
And if we don’t stop this erosion now, the next coup won’t need mobs or lawsuits. It’ll be legal. It’ll be quiet. And it’ll be permanent
Conclusion: The Next Coup May Not Be Loud
What happened in 2020 and the years that followed wasn’t a fluke; it was a test. A dress rehearsal. A systems check.
And here’s the terrifying part: it nearly worked.
Trump didn’t lose because our system was perfect. He lost because just enough people stood up. Just enough officials honored their oath. Just enough pressure cracked the conspiracy.
But next time? The GOP has worked hard to replace those people, weaken those safeguards, and condition their base to reject any loss as illegitimate.
This is bigger than Trump. This is about a political party that has abandoned democracy in favor of authoritarian control. One that no longer believes in earning votes, only in limiting who can cast them and discarding the ones that don’t go their way.
We can’t afford to meet this moment with nostalgia or naivety. The institutions won’t hold unless we do.
The response must be strategic. Relentless. Unyielding. Not just for 2024, but for every school board, every statehouse, every judge, every race where democracy is on the ballot.
Because it is.
Every single time.
