It can't happen here

 Alarmed by the popularity of his challenger, the president orders his arrest.  In the violence that ensues, at least 19 people are killed by shooting, tear gassing or being run over, and 350 are arrested.  

Alarmed by his opponent's victory, the president pressures local officials to refuse to certify the result, flies them to Washington, and encourages armed storm troopers to intimidate vote counters.

Did you guess that the first was Uganda and the second Michigan?  Who's the shithole country now?

We would be in trouble if Trump didn't rely on people as intelligence-deprived as he is.  Brad Raffensperger is talked up for Profiles In Courage:  The Sequel for simply, if reluctantly, doing his job, but the real hero of democracy so far has been gormless advocate Rudolph Giuliani.  After the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania sent him on his way with a "bu-bye" and an English lesson (opacity -- use it in a sentence!), he hurried to Michigan to convene another of those press conferences that make Sacha Baron Cohen question his career choice.  Rudolph doesn't have much hair and he doesn't like to waste money on the high-priced dye, so brown streaks ran down his face as he ranted about trash cans filled with bogus ballots, voting machines remotely controlled by Venezuelan communists, another "star witness" ordered to cheat, Republican observers confined in "pens and corrals" as if they were asylum seekers at the southern border, child voters, dead voters, pre-natal voters.  He threw in a reference to My Cousin Vinny, perhaps signaling he would like Joe Pesci to come out of retirement and play him in the movie.  Inherit the Derp?  Anatomy of a Clusterfuck?  BadLosers?

Undeterred by courtroom failure, Giuliani has withdrawn the Michigan lawsuit but promises more in Georgia, Arizona, Virginia and New Mexico.  Why not New York and California, as long as Trumpanzees are paying for it with their sad little contributions?  It's so over that nothing is left but delay.  The Republican members of the Wayne County board of canvassers have changed their minds more than Ross Perot in 1992, so Trump is flying them to the White House for junk food and pressure to Save America from the Demon-crats.  If they can prevent certification long enough, maybe the election never happened and he gets to remain forever in a job he hates and doesn't even pretend to do anymore.  New Mexico?  Maybe it's not really a state.  It has "Mexico" in its name, doesn't it?

Beneath it all, of course, is the tell-tale heart beneath America's floorboards, racism.  Wayne County's voters are 75 per cent Black, not unlike the voters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Atlanta, while Latinos and Native Americans were largely responsible for Biden's victory in Arizona and Nevada.  In the minds of the Trumps and Giulianis (and the Tucker Carlsons and Sean Hannitys) any vote the unwhite cast is by definition suspect.  The street thugs are the manifestation of this rage at the loss of their assumed entitlement.  I don't see BLM protesting Lindsey Graham's re-election or Mitch McConnell's.  Black Americans have never assumed they were entitled to power -- even asserting that their lives matter is regarded as dangerously radical.  "I am not going to be comfortable until Joe Biden's hand comes off the Bible," Charlie Pierce wrote this week.  Of course he knows that's just the beginning.  I am not going to be comfortable until the Republican Party is broken up under the RICO Act.