Annie Karni of the New York Times, took a crack at understanding what Donald Trump meant when he said at his Madison Square Garden rally that he and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have a secret that will help them “do really well with the House.” Here is her set-up:
Speaker Mike Johnson was taking in former President Donald J. Trump’s grievance-fueled closing rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday afternoon when the main actor onstage turned to him and drew him into the drama.
“I think with our little secret we’re going to do really well with the House, right?” Mr. Trump said, addressing Mr. Johnson directly. “Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret — we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”
This aside, delivered with a small chuckle, set off a frenzy among frightened Democrats who have been living with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the last two presidential election cycles, and who are now primed to fear the worst.
In this case, the worst is very bad: It is a scenario in which Mr. Johnson, who worked with Mr. Trump to undermine the 2020 election results, would again be in cahoots with the former president to steal the election and stop the certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2025, should Vice President Kamala Harris win.
The most innocuous interpretation of Trump’s remarks is that he was referring to maintaining majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives, but in context that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which is why many people assumed he was referring to the House’s role in choosing or certifying the winner of the presidential election.
When asked about it, Mike Johnson got very prickly, and he confirmed that whatever the secret might be, its main feature is that it “might help Donald Trump.”
In a statement provided to The New York Times, the mild-mannered Mr. Johnson did nothing to alleviate those fears. Instead, he seemed to confirm that there was, in fact, a “little secret” — and that he planned to keep it that way.
“Speaking of secrets,” Mr. Johnson said, “Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret. The F.B.I. knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real and kept it secret. They also knew Russia collusion was fake and kept that a secret, too.”
Mr. Johnson added: “It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump, and now they care? By definition, a secret is not to be shared — and I don’t intend to share this one.”
Now, if Donald Trump wins the Electoral College, he won’t need any help from Mike Johnson. But if he loses the Electoral College and still wants to become president somehow, he most definitely will need Johnson’s help. And here is how they can pull off a coup.
Let’s start with what happened in 2020. Trump lost the Electoral College so he went to court to challenge the results and lost in state after state. When he couldn’t prevent the states from certifying the results, he set up “alternate electors” to certify phony results in a half dozen states, and asked Vice-President Mike Pence to use these fake electors on January 6, 2021 when Congress met in Joint Session to certify Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the winners. When this effort failed, he unleashed a violent mob on Congress to try to do by force what he could not do by persuasion. This coup attempt was deadly and destructive, but it ended in six hours or so with Trump defeated. But please keep in mind that he was prepared to try to serve out a second term in office using whatever force was necessary to stop the backlash against a nakedly stolen election. Remember this if you think what I’m about to say is outlandish.
So, to begin, this plan will probably not work unless the Republicans maintain control of the House. They are not currently favored to stay in the majority, largely because they are expected to lose a bunch of seats in New York and California. If you’re wondering why Trump has been campaigning in New York and California when they are not considered competitive in the presidential race, you now have your answer.
So, in the event that the Republicans win the House but Trump loses the election, the coup will look like this:
The first step is to dispute the results and say he was robbed. This will again involve fruitless court cases and a firehose of lies. This is just to create a lack of consensus about the winner.
The second step comes on January 3rd, 2025, when the new Congress is sworn in. In the House, this will involve all 435 members. Their first order of business will be to elect a new Speaker. If the Republicans have a narrow majority, as would be almost inevitable, they may not be able to settle on a Speaker in one day, or two days, or even three weeks. That’s what happened in 2023 when both Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson struggled to win the Speakership. But dysfunction won’t be part of the secret plan. The plan is to intentionally fail to elect a Speaker on the third of January.
Then comes January 6th when, in this scenario, Vice-President Kamala Harris is to preside over a Joint Session of Congress to count and certify her victory with Tim Walz over Trump and J.D. Vance. This is when the House Republicans will use their lack of a Speaker to refuse to cooperate. They might not have a leader but they will have a majority, and they’ll be able to defeat any motion to force them into the Joint Session. They’ll throw a lot of arguments in the air. They’ll say the election was rigged but also that they need to settle on a Speaker first. And so they’ll go into private caucus meetings and pretend to be working on electing a Speaker. But they will not choose one.
And this will go on, day after day, as the country howls in outrage, until noon on January 20, 2025, when President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will constitutionally no longer be in charge. Without a president or vice-president, the Speaker of the House becomes president. Since this will now be an emergency, the Republicans will quickly elect Trump as Speaker and immediately elevate him to the presidency.
This will again leave them without a Speaker. It will also mean that Harris, since she is no longer vice-president, could not preside over any resumption of the Joint Session to certify the November election results. They will argue that the November election is constitutionally mooted anyway because it wasn’t certified before noon on January 20, and Trump is the rightful and constitutional president.
Then they will challenge anyone to do something about it.
The Supreme Court will not likely be an eager participant in this process, but they are sympathetic to Trump and intimidated by his supporters, and most importantly, they will have to acknowledge that Trump assumed the presidency because of he was in the line of succession when the country found itself without a president or vice-president. In other words, they’d have to invent some theory for why none of this should have ever happened and is illegitimate.
At this point, the country will be in crisis. Somewhere around 80 million people will have voted for Harris and Walz and many of them will be willing to use violence in an effort to set things right. Trump and Johnson know this, but they’re prepared to do this anyway, just as they were prepared to do it four years ago.
Now, you probably have some objections. And I’m here to tell you that many of your objections are probably, hopefully correct. This is a hare-brained scheme that should not work, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be attempted.
What we know is that Trump and Johnson have a secret plan to help Trump get elected and that it involves the U.S. House of Representatives. There are very few ways that Trump can become president, even in theory, using the House of Representatives if he loses the Electoral College. The scheme I have laid out here is the only one I can think of that would work in theory.
But it depends on a lot more than the Republicans maintaining control of the House. It also will require near unanimity among the House Republicans to go along with the scheme. This is a multistep plan, that requires they stay united against any effort to force them into a Joint Session on January 6th, or any time before noon on January 20th. It requires them to agree to make Trump their Speaker with the intention of elevating him to the presidency.
It also must overcome efforts by the Democrats to thwart their plans. It’s unclear what Harris can do on January 6th in the face of House Republicans refusing to join the Joint Session. It’s unclear what the Supreme Court might do to intervene at that stage. It’s unclear what the Senate Republicans are prepared to do whether or not they are in the majority, although the only thing they’d really need to do is acquiesce to Speaker Trump assuming the vacant office of the presidency. Finally, this wouldn’t be unfolding in a normal or peaceful environment. Washington DC is an overwhelmingly Democratic city and the people will revolt.
My guess is that the plan would falter because of House Republican defections. The effort to prevent this will be frightening, but I hope unsuccessful. I hope that the plan is exactly as fanciful as it sounds and that will fail on launch. But I have little doubt that this, or something very much like it, is what Johnson and Trump are calling their “secret plan.”
There’s just nothing else it really could be. It exploits weaknesses in our constitutional system and built-in advantages the Republicans enjoy to ensure Trump cannot lose, and it addresses a problem Trump did not have four years ago. Four years ago, Trump was already in the White House and he wanted to stay. This time, he has to find a way to get back in, and the only way is if he is elevated from the Speaker’s position.
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