Lawrence Douglas

Lawrence Douglas' prescient book, "Will He Go?" was written several months before the 2020 presidential election. At the time of writing, President Trump was the obvious Republican Party nominee, and the front runner for the Democratic Party nomination was Joe Biden. So writing a book about the November presidential election, the nominees, the correct outcome, and the likely Trump response to a close election required a pretty good crystal ball.

What makes the book so impressive is that Douglas was able to predict the post-election turmoil which occurred. Dougles briefly allowed that there was a possibility that Trump could win re-election, or that Biden could clearly win with an overwhelming popular vote and electoral college majority. But in either of those cases, there would have been no drama, and the primary value of the book would have been it's discussion of a handful of past elections in which the Presidential election results were not immediately known and disputed.

Douglas focus is on the possibility of a Biden win with a slim margin. What would Trump do then? How would Trump respond? Others may have raised that question, but no one had ANSWERED those questions with such a detailed analysis and uncanny accuracy. Of course, we know now, after the election result are in, that the President is disputing the election results, and hope to win re-election through the courts, just as the author described in advance.

Douglas described how that would happen, and what avenues are open to a Presidential candidate hoping to overturn the election results. The discussion of how the Electoral College really works, and how each State picks its electors, whether they are bound to follow the popular vote in their State, and what role the state certification of votes play is truly informative and relevant. Douglas gives examples from past elections where several states were able to change the election results in their states. The controversial story of the 1876 election, in which Rutherford B. Hayes took the election over Samuel J. Tilden was eye-opening. And even better are the various scenarios which Douglas covered showing possible ways Trump could be declared the winner of the election. A few situations, not beyond the realm of possibility, shows why the President has his legal team fighting in so many court rooms around the Country. The Trump legal team seems to be following the outline of how to take an election from the winner of the popular vote as described by the author. It's all very interesting, and shows just how convoluted and archaic our electoral college and voting system really is.… (meer)

In as much as I originally hail from Cleveland, I was aware of the adventure of John Demjanjuk as a war-crimes defendant early on, and felt a certain level of hostility at the time. Don't get me wrong, if Demjanjuk could reasonably be proven to be Ivan "Grozny" I would have had no sympathy for him, but the quality of evidence, and the theatrical nature of the Israeli trial, made me dubious that anything worthwhile could come out of this endeavor. However, times change, as well as how one processes history, and that is the story that Douglas has to tell, of how we can now have an understanding of Demjanjuk, not as the victim he chose to portray himself as, but as a SS mercenary who would appear to have found this service tolerable enough not to choose other viable options (labor service or desertion), once it became obvious that his duty station (Sobibor) was a death camp. If I mark down this book for anything it's that the author's writing style can seem a little prolix at time, and there are some really dumb typos in this book, such rendering Brookpark (OH) as "Bookpart" and Fiume in Croatia as "Flume."… (meer)