In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, a former Texas police officer allegedly ran an air-conditioning repairman’s truck off the road and held him at gunpoint in an abortive citizen’s arrest. According to court documents, this alleged vigilante told police that the driver was part of a plot to transport hundreds of thousands of counterfeit ballots that Hispanic undocumented immigrants had forged. (A devious strategy, supposedly, because their fingerprints would not be on record.) Instead of fake ballots, police found air-conditioning parts in the man’s van and, at his home, “a family conducting ordinary business.”
The episode illustrates the alarming implications of President Donald Trump’s campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election and deny his loss — and the widespread belief among Republicans that his lies are true. When one side claims its political opponents are literally ending the republic, nearly any effort to fight back, no matter how dangerous or illegal, can seem justifiable. The ironic result could be the destruction of the very democracy it claims to want to save.
Houston prosecutors have charged both the former officer and his alleged funder, Texas Republican donor Steven F. Hotze, with assault with a deadly weapon and unlawful restraint. Earlier this month, prosecutors released a transcript of a phone call they say Mr. Hotze had with a U.S. attorney two days before the alleged ramming that paints a chilling portrait of a zealot dangerously committed to the fantasies and paranoia that Mr. Trump cultivated among his followers.
“We’ve surveilled them for the last two nights,” Mr. Hotze said of the repairman. “They literally have boxes with thousands of votes in it, and they’re just taking these down and voting them.” According to the transcript, Mr. Hotze disclosed that a private investigator planned to “run into him,” “make a citizen’s arrest” and force a confession, in part by threatening the repairman with deportation. Though Mr. Hotze later admitted the gambit turned up nothing nefarious, he continues to raise money to sniff out voting fraud.
There are many ways U.S. democracy could fail. A 2024 presidential candidate’s political party could use cockamamie legal arguments and anti-democratic procedural maneuvers to overturn a legitimate election or throw the results into question. A more chaotic scenario is also possible, in which vigilantes whom politicians have whipped into a frenzy take drastic action on their own. Both could happen simultaneously. Not only would the Donald Trumps of the world bear blame but also those who have enabled the spread of his election lies — by sowing doubts about the 2020 results, talking about how voters have lost trust in voting integrity, pressing for unnecessary new election laws, objecting to swing states’ 2020 electoral college votes or simply saying little as the rest of the Republican Party has embraced Mr. Trump’s fiction.
The nation is not prepared for such an assault. Congress must close the legal avenues that partisan extremists might try to use to upend free and fair election results. And those Republicans who sit back expecting other officials to preserve the democratic order must wake up and speak up. Either one is defending democracy — or aiding in its downfall.
