“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action’.”

That Ian Fleming line (from Goldfinger) came to mind with news that not one or two but multiple efforts to rationalize setting aside the results of the November election were circulating in the Trump White House in the weeks leading up to January 6.

We already knew about the most putatively respectable of these, the John Eastman memos. As law professor Jonathan Adler, a member of the academic advisory board of the Cato Supreme Court Review, has written, this memo in both its versions relies “on the false claim that there were ‘dual slates of electors’ transmitted to the Senate, adopts an expansive (and unjustified) interpretation of the Vice President’s authority under the Twelfth Amendment, and urged Vice President Pence to unilaterally disregard the Electoral Count Act and reject slates of electors certified and transmitted by seven states on the grounds that such a move would avert a ‘constitutional crisis.’”

But there’s more. On Friday Politico reported that Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis “wrote two legal memos in the week before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack that claimed then-Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to count presidential electors from states that delivered Joe Biden the White House.” While the quality of Ellis’s work on the memos may leave much to be desired, Jonathan Karl in his book Betrayal reports that one of them (to quote Politico) “was delivered to Trump’s office by Mark Meadows, then White House chief of staff.” That is among what appear to have been numerous steps by the chief of staff to circulate theories within the executive office that might justify overturning the election results.

Yet another document to surface in recent days is a slide deck based on wacky theories of imagined foreign interference and urging ways to nullify state results. A retired colonel who promoted the theories appears to have been given considerable access to and by the White House, Trump campaign lawyers, and members of Congress.

It’s all getting to look like more than happenstance, no?

That doings of this sort were afoot is not exactly a surprise. On Dec. 29, 2020, I published a post in this space marching through the logic of why President Trump could not, in fact, keep himself in office following his electoral defeat by declaring martial law or invoking the Insurrection Act. That such a piece was relevant at all was only due to such options’ having become a part of the conversation in TrumpWorld in the weeks after the election. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, declared in an interview with Newsmax that his former boss could “take military capabilities, and he could place them in those [swing states], and basically re‐​run an election” in those states.

Flynn’s former boss did little, we might say, to discourage such talk. Trump throughout his career has denounced his own losses and setbacks as the result of fraud and rigging, even including Ted Cruz’s victory in the 2016 Iowa Republican caucuses. Before beating Hillary Clinton he had prepared the way for claims that his expected loss was the result of fraud, and so forth.

Political scientists who study irregular power successions have a Spanish term I find fascinating, pronunciamiento. It can refer to a coup itself (typically by the military) but it can also mean the detailed explanation (or “pronouncement”) put out for wider consumption – read aloud in public squares, for example – of why an unexpected person was now occupying the presidential palace, or why an incumbent was still there despite the expiration of his term. Part of the idea here was that some gesture of persuasion was needed to paper over the raw exercise of power, even if its only effect was to confuse the issues sufficiently that relevant constituencies could shrug and go along, saying no one is really sure who’s right.

It doesn’t seem like coincidence that the Trump administration in its closing weeks had multiple pots of prospective pronunciamiento simmering away on the stove.