John Kerry Warns of Revolution if Trump Re-Elected

“If people don’t have adequate access to the ballot, I mean that’s the stuff on which revolutions are built. If you begin to deny people the capacity of your democracy to work, even the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, we have an inherent right to challenge that. And I’m worried that increasingly, people are disaffected.”

John Kerry: Trump victory 

could provoke a revolution

Washington Examiner,

19 June, 2020

Former Secretary of State John Kerry raised the possibility that a victory by President Trump could provoke a revolution in the United States, claiming that Republicans have a history of denying voting rights to Democratic voters.

“If people don't have adequate access to the ballot, I mean that's the stuff on which revolutions are built,” Kerry said during a virtual appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. “If you begin to deny people the capacity of your democracy to work, even the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, we have an inherent right to challenge that. And I'm worried that increasingly, people are disaffected."

Kerry implied that such chicanery contributed to his defeat in 2004 and former Vice President Al Gore’s loss in 2000, maintaining that this pattern unfolded recently in Georgia — an apparent reference to Stacey Abrams’s defeat in the state’s 2018 gubernatorial race. That history, as he views it, undermines U.S. claims to Western leadership.

“We're not meeting the standard that we ought to be meeting, so I'm deeply concerned about protecting the vote,” he said.

Kerry didn’t mention Republicans explicitly, but he maintained that there was a history of "certain officials of a particular party purposefully [making] it difficult for the other party to vote where they control those matters.” He predicted that Trump would lose handily but warned that Republicans would "pull out every stop" in the closing weeks of the race.

And yet, Kerry remains optimistic about the outcome. “I'm going to continue to believe this election will not be close, we'll have a mandate in America,” he said. “And if it is close, we'll just have to deal with whatever the circumstances are at that time. Hopefully, we've laid enough groundwork, the legal barrier, that we will be well prepared."