Trump Suggests Delaying The Presidential Election, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The 2020 Vote Would Be Held In 2020

The Filing

WASHINGTON. In a Thursday-morning social media post composed roughly 96 days before the polls were set to open, President Donald J. Trump floated the possibility of delaying the 2020 presidential election, resolving a long-standing concern within the administration that the vote would otherwise be held in 2020.

"Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???" wrote the President, who according to White House officials had been troubled for months by the prospect of an election occurring on a date he did not personally select. The post marked the first time in American history that a sitting president had publicly suggested postponing a presidential election, an arrangement that the Constitution and a federal statute dating to 1845 place firmly beyond the reach of the office he held.

The proposal capped a sustained, year-long effort by the President to inform the public, well in advance, that the coming election would be fraudulent. Since spring, Trump had warned at near-daily intervals that the expanded use of mail-in ballots during a respiratory pandemic would produce what he called "the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history," a forecast aides characterized as a generous heads-up. The President also drew a careful distinction between absentee voting, which he deemed legitimate, and mail-in voting, which he deemed criminal, two processes that state election officials confirmed are the same process.

"The President is simply being a responsible steward of the customer experience," said one source within the administration, speaking on condition of anonymity because the strategy works best when described out loud. "If the result comes back and he has won, the system worked. If the result comes back and he has lost, the public has been pre-notified that the system did not work. Either way, nobody can say they were not told." The source added that the approach carried the further advantage of being fully reusable in any subsequent election.

Election-law scholars praised the post as a uniquely transparent act of sabotage, noting that the President had managed to question the integrity of the vote, the timing of the vote, and the counting of the vote several months before any of those things had occurred. Trump himself went on to cast his own 2020 ballot by mail in the state of Florida.

At press time, the election had been held on schedule on November 3, after which the President announced that the fraud he had spent the year predicting had arrived precisely as forecast, vindicating him completely.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who spent the year constructing a complete, pre-approved explanation for a defeat he had not yet suffered.
§The Trump 2020 reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee, which raised enormous sums on "election integrity" appeals and stood up an "Election Defense Fund" to receive them.
§Republican election litigators, for whom a year of advance warnings supplied the ready-made premise of dozens of post-election lawsuits.
§Foreign adversaries, including the Russian Federation, whose long-running effort to corrode American confidence in democratic elections was now being performed, at no cost, by the President of the United States.
§Cable news networks, which converted the open question of whether the election would happen, count, or hold into months of uninterrupted programming.
§The future "Stop the Steal" movement, handed a fully assembled rationale four months before it would need one.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment