The risk of a coup in the next US election is greater now than it ever was under Trump | Laurence H Tribe

Republicans are busy at work undermining the next election. And they don't need Trump in the White House to do so

Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime - one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights. So everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people's confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president.

A year has passed since Trump's attempted coup and his supporters' violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump's decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of US democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic. In the tumultuous year since, the immediacy of that sensation has waned - and the magnitude of the stakes has receded from memory.