Thirty-four days before Election Day, U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a former CIA analyst and Defense Department official, laid out the “authoritarian playbook” a leader facing defeat might use to interfere with the midterms, in remarks C-SPAN described as a warning about President Donald Trump. “Do not let him get away with that,” she warned.
“The authoritarian playbook is very clear,” Slotkin told attendees Wednesday at an event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program.
“When you’re at risk of losing, you either, A, make up a threat that only you can protect the American people from, or, B, find a way for federal law enforcement or the military to seize ballots or voting machines,” said Slotkin, who once served as the acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.
“In Hungary, Orbán used Plan A,” Slotkin explained. “One week before his election, he falsely claimed that there was a major threat to an oil pipeline — an attempt to be seen as the only true protector of the state. Luckily, Hungarians saw right through it. They knew it was a ruse.”
“So there’s a lesson for us,” she warned. “In the run up to Election Day, we need to be alert and ready. If you hear in the next 34 days that there is a new security threat that you’ve never heard of, that somehow requires federal law enforcement or the military and not local police, an alarm bell should go off in your brain. Do not let him get away with that.”
Coincidentally, perhaps, also on Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called voting machines “a concern,” and claimed, “we've had some trouble with some machines.”
“Can’t say that it was fraud or not fraud, that may had [sic] a glitch, may have been something else,” Mullin said.
President Donald Trump earlier this month led supporters at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in a pledge to “cheat like hell” in November, because Democrats, he claimed, do.
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