Forget Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and roughly 66-million Democrat voters, Donald Trump’s imperial march toward the White House might have just been stopped by an altogether unexpected source...
Saul Goodman, Martin Sheen and Moby.
Just when you thought news in 2016 couldn’t possibly get more unashamedly demented, the stars have bandied together alongside fellow US celebs – including Debra Messing, James Cromwell, BD Wong, Noah Wyle, Freda Payne, J. Smith Cameron, Michael Urie and more, under the banner Unite For America – to implore the American Electoral College to vote “your conscience” on 19 December, when the destination of the presidency will be ratified.
“As you know, our founding fathers built the electoral college to safeguard the American people from the dangers of a demagogue,” begins Martin Sheen in the video, “and to ensure that the presidency only goes to someone who is, ‘To an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications’.”
The celebrities go on to claim that should the Electoral College block Trump’s election win, and instead choose “any eligible person, no matter which party they belong to”, that they’d “go down in the books as an American hero who changed the course of history.”
While the entire thing sounds like a half-baked crossover episode between The West Wing and Better Call Saul, Unite For America’s plea is something that, under US law, could legitimately happen.
Electoral College voters are free to defy the 8 November result, and while Trump is widely expected to receive the 270 votes necessary to remove the latter part of ‘President-elect’ from his name, College members could point to the fact that Clinton actually received over two million votes more in the popular vote.
...and then there’s the whole ‘dangers of a demagogue’ stuff, isn’t there?
But don’t get your hopes up. Despite the impassioned plea, which has clocked approximately a million years on YouTube and elsewhere in less than 24-hours, it would be a spectacular feat of defiance for America’s Electoral College to boldly reject their own election system – and tens of millions of Trump-voting Republicans – to put forth an alternative candidate for the White House.
It certainly wouldn’t help Trump’s (thus far baseless) moans about a rigged system, and would ultimately be like Theresa May flipping Brexit the bird because she couldn’t be arsed with the paperwork.
Except much, much worse – the American people have guns.
