The Atlantic published an article this week, “The Unraveling of the Trump Era,” by Olga Khazan, who notes: “Trump’s team fell short because it often made mistakes in the nitty-gritty work of rule-making… That might come as a relief to Democrats, but it’s actually a warning: All it will take is someone with the same priorities as Trump, but better discipline, to reshape the way the government works.”

The comedian and host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver, referred to the Trump administration’s all-thumbs approach to governing as “Stupid Watergate,” which he described as “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.”

The Faithless Elector series (while not about Trump) mines and articulates the very real dangers of what could happen if a group of ruthless, disciplined and canny political operators were to try to seize control of government—and then cement their grip.

We’ve seen the lock (goose) step of the vast majority of the GOP. If such a president had majorities in both houses of Congress, he could enact what he wanted. If he had a pliant Att’y General and had successfully remade the Office of Personnel Management to be under the aegis of the White House as he tried to do (thus a return to the spoils system of patronage government), the few things such an administration enacted that were contested might easily be upheld by a craven Supreme Court, bent on returning the nation to the 19th century. And the DOJ could become solely the tool of the president.

Also from Khazan’s article: “The rule process is specific, technical, and tedious, which did not exactly fit Trump’s style. Some experts say Trump’s agencies wrote their rules carelessly…”

The genesis of Faithless Elector books and the conspiracy bent on seizing control and remaking the nation in their own bloodless image was not Trump, but the W Bush administration–and the work of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Carl Rove. Cheney and Rumsfeld cut their teeth under Nixon, and they were aggrieved by the rejection of their candidate and the repudiation of the so-called Imperial Presidency. They were savvy, cunning, and understood intimately how government works. They set about bending it to their oligarchic will. It was Rove’s job to ensure a “permanent Republican majority.”

It’s touching that fewer than 20 years ago the GOP still cared about elections.

Beginning with the first book, Faithless Elector (published in spring 2016 before Trump was even the Republican candidate), the conspirators recognize that they do not have a majority, and so they set out to manipulate the Electoral College. In Dark Network, they work on the rules and try to manipulate a Contingency Election. In the final book, Emergency Powers, the conspiracy starts working hard on eating government from the inside out.

It’s worth noting that while the Faithless Elector series was prescient in many ways, the era in which we find ourselves may not be a rebirth of freedom and democracy but–for the forces arrayed against democratic accountability and the rule of law–nothing more than an unfortunate, regrettable interlude in their dark march. And they will delay, distract and bide their time.

People like Mitch McConnell play the long game, and they’re patient. And ruthless.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector , Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

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His work, “Numbers Don’t Lie” also recently appeared in the 2020 short-story anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 2, and his short story “Ultimatum Games” will appear in Rock and a Hard Place in issue #7 this fall. His next book, w/t Bastard Verdict, is a noir political thriller set in Scotland.

A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the newly elected vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.