What will you do if Trump pulls a coup?

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Like most Americans, Lansing psychoanalyst therapist Peter Wood has been badly roughed up by this year’s cascade of dire news.

The next big abyss  — the prospect of a stolen election or post-election power grab by the Trump administration — has him on maximum alert.

Wood and his wife, Merry Stanford, are starting to wonder what they would do if Trump and his followers stop the vote count, declare the results invalid, refuse to leave or pull some other coup between November and January, and they’re not alone.

Wood has practiced psychotherapy for about 30 years, first for St. Vincent Catholic Charities, the last 15 years in private practice. Stanford has been psychotherapist and clinical social worker for 26 years.

Both of them are up to their scalps in stressed-out clients who are grieving for a normal life and feel helpless to deal with whatever’s coming.

“There’s been so much lost this year,” Wood said. “Family members who died of COVID, jobs, businesses, faith in government, the ability to hug loved ones. Now there’s the prospect of losing the democratic system we both grew up in and took for granted.”

Election year rhetoric is always hyperbolic, but Wood couldn’t shake off Trump’s refusal to commit to accepting election results.

“He’s refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, should Biden win, and in fact refuses to acknowledge that Biden could legitimately win,” Wood said. “About a month ago, we came to realize we need to take this situation seriously. People have been sounding warning cries.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks, hardly a radical firebrand, closed his Sept. 3 New York Times column with a challenge: “It’s time to start thinking about what you would do” if Trump won’t go.

In the column, Brooks urged “a new force” of center-right Republicans and center-left Democrats to come together and gird for “a sustained campaign of civic action, as in Hong Kong and Belarus, to rally the majority that wants to preserve democracy.”

A series of online training sessions in nonviolent non-cooperation led by George Lakey, a longtime activist, sociologist and writer, fleshed out the concept for Stanford and Wood. (Future sessions can be accessed on the Choose Democracy website, but they have a way of filling up as soon as they are announced.)

“We took the training as a way of overcoming a feeling of helplessness and terrible anxiety,” Wood said.

Lakey, a gay Quaker, literally wrote the book on direct action — a manual used by civil rights activists in Mississippi in 1964 — and put his shoulder to many progressive causes since then, from “ban the bomb” and early gay rights to pushing banks to stop financing mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

Lakey is optimistic that quick and nonviolent mass action can stop a coup in the United States, most likely in days.

“Non-cooperation” would likely take the form of a nationwide general strike, “not allowing society to function until the illegitimate authority has left,” Stanford said.

In 2017, Stephen Zunes, an international relations scholar at the University of San Francisco, released a study of 12 attempted coups around the world since 1958. Lakey refers to the study as a sign of hope in his workshop. Zunes found that eight of the coups were stopped by nonviolent resistance, including the Soviet Union in 1991, Thailand in 1992, France in 1961 and Argentina in 1987.

Lakey is hopeful that in the United States, where political power is decentralized, effective mass action would be galvanized by local leaders’ refusal to go along with a coup. The groundwork for such resistance was laid, he maintains, when governors, mayors and other local officials broke with the Trump administration on a range of issues in 2020, from pandemic policy to immigration policy to civic unrest.

“Refusing from the outset to recognize the authority of Trump’s claim to office — or the authority of anyone who answers to him — is key,” Lake wrote in an online article for the “Waging Nonviolence” website.

The Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group of over 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders and other experts, reached similar conclusions in an Aug. 3 report finding that legal and political chaos is “highly likely” this November. The group was organized by Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley.

The group found that “a show of numbers in the streets, and actions in the streets, may be decisive factors in determining what the public perceives as a just and legitimate outcome.”

But the report also warned that street actions came with the danger of violence, possibly incited by embedded Trump surrogates, that the administration could use as a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act and sending the military into US cities “to ‘restore order,’ ‘protect’ voting places, or confiscate ‘fraudulent’ ballots.” That’s just what happened in one of the project’s scenario exercises.

Stanford said nonviolence is key to recruiting people who might be on the fence if Trump pulls a coup. Another key element to broadening the movement, she said, is to frame the action as a defense of the Constitution and democracy rather than pushback against Trump.

She was also careful to distinguish being prepared from living in fear.

“All of this is not because we necessarily expect a coup to happen, but we want to be prepared if it does,” she said. “It requires holding more than one possibility in your mind.”

The best way to deal with an impending crisis is to avert it, if possible. To that end, Wood and Stanford have been working on voter registration by phone.

“This is all the backup plan,” Stanford said. “To vote is the first and primary priority. If Trump wins the election fairly, we’d all have to recognize that he’s the president for the next four years.”

It’s not very Quaker to bring this up, but in the face of a volatile Nov. 3 and beyond, many Americans who own guns are dusting off the gun cabinet. Others are asking themselves, perhaps for the first time in their lives, whether they should buy a gun.

Wood and Stanford offered this advice.

“If you haven’t lived with guns, if you’re not seasoned and matured with gun use, if you’re not an expert user of a gun, this is not the time to buy a gun,” Stanford said. “You’re more likely to misuse it than use it correctly.”

Wood says there’s a risk no matter what you decide. “If you carry lethal weapons, then you are prepared to die by violence,” he said. “If you decline to carry a weapon, then you are prepared to die by violence you refuse to participate in.”

It may not be safer, Wood said, but there are other compelling reasons to choose nonviolence.

“There is a saying: ‘there’s no way to peace — peace is the way,’” Wood said. “Choosing nonviolence is a way to say that this is the way we engage with difficulties if we want the kind of society we’re glad to live in, and for our grandchildren to live in.”

LAWRENCE COSENTINO

This story is paid for by readers like you through  contributions to the CityPulse Fund for Community Journalism. To contribute, please go to lansingcitypulse.com/donation.

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