I'm thinking that the possibility that Trump is plotting a coup perhaps deserves it's own thread, rather than the topic being buried in this one ... but I'll leave that decision up to the mods.
Consider this article in The Guardian, of which this is an extract:
"[The] continued leaks about the Trump team’s long-shot strategies for overturning the election result, and references such as one by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on Tuesday to a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”, fed a sense of alarm that America was witnessing more than just hardball politics, cynical fundraising or Trumpian sour grapes.
'What Donald Trump is attempting to do has a name: coup d’état,' said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University specializing in authoritarianism, on
Twitter. 'Poorly organized though it might seem, it is not bound to fail. It must be made to fail.
'Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless.'
... Simultaneous to the Trump campaign’s move against election results in six key states, Trump was installing loyalists in the defense department and in other key security-related government posts. That was activity that might have prompted a warning from the United States about an authoritarian takeover if it happened in Turkey or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Trump fired the defense secretary, Mark Esper, by tweet on Monday and appointed as chief of staff Kashyap Patel, a key Republican operative during the Russia investigation. Trump also replaced the heads of intelligence and policy inside the Pentagon with political apparatchiks, while a fourth Republican political operative, Michael Ellis, was installed as general counsel of the national security agency. A further move by Trump to fire the FBI director was also reportedly under consideration.
'That is dangerous,' said Corey Brettschneider, a professor at Brown University specializing in constitutional law and politics, of the 11th-hour personnel changes. 'We have other checks, and I don’t believe that the military would go along with a coup, but we need to have people at the top of those departments willing to say what democracy demands.' ..."
‘It must be made to fail’: Trump's desperate bid to cling to power