WILL HE GO?

What will Donald Trump do if he loses in November 2020? Amherst College law professor Douglas worries that he’ll lock himself in the White House and refuse to leave.

That Trump might refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election, should he lose, is not academic. After all, he said that the 2016 election was crooked, and even though he won the Electoral College, he was soon falsely claiming that he won the popular vote as well. Earlier, when Ted Cruz beat him in the Iowa primary, he tweeted, “either a new election should take place or Cruz [sic] results nullified.” About the best-case scenario, writes the author, is a massive defeat at Joe Biden’s hands, in which case Trump likely will depart in “self-pitying, peevish submission” and play the aggrieved victim card, claiming that he lost due to some coup d’état on the part of the Deep State. At least some portion of his base will follow him, offering the danger of civil war. Frighteningly, notes Douglas, suitable weapons are “in profuse supply and are largely concentrated in the hands of the president’s most fervent, distrustful, and easily unsettled supporters.” The author plays out numerous alternate scenarios, including the prospect of “faithless electors” who might deny the Electoral College vote to either Trump or Biden in the event of a close race by casting votes in favor of, say, Mitt Romney; an election whose vote count is settled, as in 2000, by the Supreme Court; and even a split vote in which the results from a state’s electors differ from the count certified by, say, the Democratic governor of Michigan, leading to the inauguration of Nancy Pelosi on one side of the Capitol while Trump insists on being inaugurated for a second term on the other. In almost every one of the scenarios he examines save an outright and unmistakable Biden win, Douglas sighs, “we are in for an unhappy time.”

Just the thing to give most voters terrible nightmares.