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A shot from a video of supporters of US President Donald Trump uploaded to Trump’s Twitter account on Dec. 13. (Twitter screenshot)

Jung E-gil

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer

The refusal of US President Donald Trump and his followers to accept the results of the US presidential election is a game that’s unlikely to end. It could turn into a “soft coup” that plays out over a long period of time.

It’s obvious that Trump won’t retract his claim that the election was rigged and that he didn’t actually lose, and his base firmly believes that claim.

Around 40% of people who voted for the Republican Party in the last presidential election think the election was rigged. That represents about 20% of everyone who voted. In the end, Trump turned 20% of the voting populace into his own rock-solid base.

In the current situation, no one would be able to compete with Trump in the Republican primaries for the next presidential election. Trump’s energetic base is the reason he still refuses to concede, in the teeth of popular opinion.

That base is empowering Trump to severely damage the values and mechanisms of American democracy, including its electoral process. That includes the barrage of lawsuits he has filed with the hope of invalidating the election results. As Republican lawmakers have said, Trump has the legal right to raise objections to the election results.

This is where we find a blind spot of democracy. Legally guaranteed rights don’t always guarantee that justice is served.

If courts order mail-in ballots that arrived after the day of the election in Pennsylvania to be thrown out, as Trump wants, the election results could be reversed. In fact, a judge could slap together an argument for invalidating mail-in ballots as easily you could make a salad from a bag of groceries.

If the winds shift in favor of the Republican Party in the next presidential election, Trump’s claims about the election being rigged would gain even more support.

No one knows what will happen to mail-in ballots, which represent an attempt to expand voter participation in the political process. We got a preview of that in the debate over ballots in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.

The US Supreme Court rejected a request by Democratic Party candidate Al Gore for a recount of ballots in four counties of Florida, enabling the victory of Republican Party candidate George W. Bush, based on the previous tally.

A debate erupted about whether judges could exercise discretion over an act of popular sovereignty. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush in a 5-4 decision that pitted the court’s conservatives squarely against its liberals.

Trump and his supporters’ campaign to reverse the results of the presidential election using all available legal methods is itself legal. Gun-toting white militia members have assembled at Trump rallies in a show of force. That, too, is legal.

But those legal actions fragment democratic mechanisms that reach results through a series of procedures and processes, increasing the chances of results being distorted at each step along the way. That legal campaign is likely to suppress voter participation in the next election, whose results might misrepresent the popular will.

A soft coup plays out over a long period of time, as opposed to a standard coup, in which a government is overthrown through the temporary use of force in a short period of time.

We’ve seen this kind of soft coup before. The government of Mohamed Morsi, the first Egyptian president to be elected by popular vote, was strangled through concerted action by the courts and the prosecutors and ultimately finished off through a military coup.

Two days before Morsi was inaugurated, Egyptian courts aiming to hamstring the Morsi administration invalidated the results of a parliamentary election in which Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party won a majority of seats. Morsi tried to reconvene parliament, hold a constitutional convention, and even organize another round of parliamentary elections, but all those attempts were blocked by the courts.

When rioters murdered the protesters that had brought down the dictatorial regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, the prosecutors ignored their crimes. Enraged by their actions, Morsi sacked the prosecutor general, which the prosecutors refused to accept.

In some ways, the behavior of Trump’s supporters and Egyptian law enforcement parallels the actions taken by the South Korean prosecutors since the appointment of Cho Kuk as justice minister last year. The prosecution service launched a massive investigation of Cho and his family shortly before the confirmation hearings were held, digging up dirt among Cho’s relatives.

As a group, the prosecutors protest that the campaign to reform the prosecution service undermines their independence, without showing the slightest penitence for the behavior that created the demand for prosecutorial reform in the first place. In the end, Korea’s prosecutor general has shown no scruples about standing up to the president by filing administrative lawsuits over his position.

Technically, this all falls within the prosecutors’ legal authority. But it also represents the same type of arbitrary and excessive exercise of legal authority exercised by Trump’s supporters and Egyptian law enforcement.

If a government can’t control a group’s arbitrary and excessive exercise of the authority to mete out punishment, that too will lead to a soft coup that plays out over a long period of time.

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