This analogy makes sense for me, right up until last week. How is staging the most incompetent coup ever demonstrating anything except that he actually doesn’t think ahead and just does whatever in the moment to further his own personal whims?
An angry mob sacked the Capitol. If #ZipTieGuy and friends had arrived mere minutes earlier, they'd have walked into a joint session of Congress containing every member of succession to the President that he did not appoint himself. It's easy to call it incompetent now that it failed but we might have just avoided a revolution by the skin of our teeth.
Not checkmate by itself, but very scary.
In any case though, if this hypothetical is not hyperbole (and I still suspect it is), it would seem prudent to remedy ASAP.
Here’s the relevant process per the constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
Basically, if there is no absolute majority of electors, each state gets one vote in the house for president and two votes in the senate for VP.
All of that only comes into play if there is no majority winner though, so I don’t think just keeping them from voting would do the trick.
The Presidential Succession Act only covers succession in case of removal from office and only until an election can be held, so it is technically true that Pence would be in line, but that assumes Trump was removed and the electoral votes had still not been counted, a highly unlikely combination. Even then just counting the votes would resolve this problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act
I agree, though, that recent events seem to have finally answered the question of whether or not Trump has a plan. It seems not, but you can get very far by just falling forward and refusing to admit defeat, ever. The sheer cognitive dissonance of the idea that a US president could be so far off his rocker and still be highly popular forces us to look for any explanation, however contrived, that means there's some master plan behind it all.
But nope, it's been option A all along: A charismatic manipulator really was elected president despite never knowing what he was going to do with the position when he got there, and despite being constitutionally unable to take advice from people who do understand strategy.