A 'sobering 87-page document' predicted violence weeks before the 2020 election
Before the United States' 2020 presidential election, Bill Maher — the political comedian who hosts "Real Time" on HBO — warned that if then-President Donald Trump lost to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, he would refuse to concede and do everything he could to remain in the White House. Maher's Republican critics accused him of suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome," but in fact, his prediction was spot on.
Trump lost to now-President Biden by more than 7 million in the popular vote, and Biden won 306 electoral votes. Regardless, Trump and his team of lawyers — including Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him and tried to get the election results overturned. And on January 6, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying Biden's Electoral College victory. Trump, to this day, refuses to admit that he lost the election — just as Maher predicted.
But Maher was hardly alone in worrying that the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election could bring violence, unrest and chaos. Politico's Alexander Burns reports that "weeks before" that election, a group of Washington, D.C. insiders known as The Hub privately circulated an "87-page document" warning that things could get nasty. That document, according to Burns, "outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump's still-to-come campaign of election denial."
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"The report carried a plain title: 'Plan D,'" Burns reports in an article published by Politico on March 9. "Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for 'doomsday'…. The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump's opponents to 'assume the worst' would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president, but with 'institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.' The document forecast 'militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden Administration.'"
Burns continues, "'Plan D' is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue — defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures. Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, 'layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.' It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated."
The 87-page document warned that democracy itself was under attack in the United States.
The Hub, according to Burns, wrote, "A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy. Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis, but rather, in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy."
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Burns notes that he found out about "Plan D" from one of his sources in 2020 but was sworn to secrecy. In 2023, however, that source finally gave him "permission to write about it."
Measures that The Hub, in "Plan D," recommended in order to prevent the United States from sliding into authoritarianism included pushing for statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and the "more aspirational goals of ending the Electoral College and establishing a constitutional right to vote."
"'Plan D' was no game," Burns emphasizes. "It was devised as a battle plan. Reviewing the report years later, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of urgency in the text — and the speed with which the impatient demand for fundamental change to American politics has dissipated among most Democrats…. Back then, the group behind Plan D saw deep reform to the political system as a survival imperative for Democrats."
Read Politico’s full report at this link.
