knowledge dropper
Footballguy
No. We And our leader have more patriotism and class. We are not going to stomp and hold our breath for four years until we get our way.
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What happens if Trump loses in November and refuses to leave the white house? (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter wazoo11
- Start date
Ilov80s
Footballguy
roadkill1292
Footballguy
House Dems are reluctant to get behind any serious initiatives because (1) big changes might make them appear to be too radical to what is inherently a super-cautious electorate and (3) most impactful election reforms have a tendency to dilute the individual power of an incumbent U.S. congressperson. Self-preservation looms large and often works against what is better for we pobrecito citizens.
rockaction
Footballguy
You'd have to amend the Constitution. That would be difficult. You'd have to likely have the states call for it and have Congress ratify it by 2/3. I don't see that happening.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Ilov80s
Footballguy
He could leave the WH and still say he is the President and act like the President. We had a pope and antipope. We could be “2 Presidents” as well.
wikkidpissah
Footballguy
Fortunately for America (and surprisingly for an authoritarian), this President hasn't a cozy enough relationship with the military for me to be worried. I'd say it's a coinflip whether Trump invalidates a close election this fall and that worries me greatly, but not because he'll refuse to leave.
Again, i have always been far more worried about the America which put Donald Trump in office than the figure himself. A sizable element of the populace assumes themselves already to be at war with the gay & swarthy hordes of the land where they used to matter and are stockpiled and ready for any "go" order. If the President's megalomania forces Congress to say, "You must leave, sir" to him, a lot of cues will be taken, even if not specifically given. We will see militias active in this land.
Again, i have always been far more worried about the America which put Donald Trump in office than the figure himself. A sizable element of the populace assumes themselves already to be at war with the gay & swarthy hordes of the land where they used to matter and are stockpiled and ready for any "go" order. If the President's megalomania forces Congress to say, "You must leave, sir" to him, a lot of cues will be taken, even if not specifically given. We will see militias active in this land.
Summer Wheat
Footballguy
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Maybe. Donald Jr seems to follow his dad’s style much more though. Ivanka seems a little bland.
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
Have to say, if the President as the Chief law enforcement officer of the nation were to say that he had been illegally investigated and that was improper election interference, then I have a hard time seeing - so long as he did it in a classy manner - what would be wrong with a demand to remain and postpone transition pending further investigation.
Last edited by a moderator:
Leroy Hoard
Footballguy
Can't we elect them as a team? Kind of like the even/odd day lawn watering systems some areas have.
knowledge dropper
Footballguy
You are paranoid. RELAX. He’s not going to do something unprecedented like try to shake down members of the Electoral College to change their votes.
Oh wait....
SaintsInDome2006
Footballguy
I'm not suggesting he will, I'm pointing out to you the danger in letting a President assume this authority.
Sheriff Bart
Footballguy
We could build a facade of a WH to trick him into thinking it was the real thing. It has worked before.
Amused to Death
Footballguy
How Trump Could Lose the Election and Remain President
A step-by-step guide to what might happen if he refuses to concede.
by Daniel Block
At the end of his congressional testimony in February, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, floated a nightmarish possibility.
“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Cohen’s comments may seem hyperbolic, but they are worth taking seriously. In the aftermath of 2018, Trump told reporters, “Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes.” In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he declared. Since that election, Trump has routinely said that his popular vote defeat was the product of “millions and millions” of illegal ballots. Now, facing potential legal jeopardy from ongoing investigations into hush-money payments and any number of apparent financial crimes, he might reasonably conclude that staying in office is the only way to avoid being indicted.
So what would it look like if Trump refused to concede? Is there really a way he could stay in office? It’s unlikely. For starters, successful autocrats rarely lose elections. “They take steps to rig it well in advance,” said Steven Levitsky, a comparative political scientist at Harvard University and the coauthor of How Democracies Die. They pack electoral authorities, jail opponents, and silence unfriendly media outlets. America’s extremely decentralized electoral system and powerful, well-funded opposition makes this very difficult to pull off.
The U.S. also lacks the kind of politicized military that lets some discredited autocrats, like Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, hang on. “I can’t imagine the military accepting an effort to turn them into a partisan arm of the executive,” said Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who researches the history of authoritarianism in the American South.
But while nationwide cheating may be impossible, the Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms where it has local control, and not every powerful institution is as neutral as the military. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president despite losing the election—breaking American democracy in the process.
“I think we know that Trump will certainly, no matter what the result is, be likely to declare that there was fraud and that he was the rightful victor,” said Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas who studies elections.
Let’s assume that Fishkin is right. Here’s what could keep Trump in power.
A step-by-step guide to what might happen if he refuses to concede.
by Daniel Block
At the end of his congressional testimony in February, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, floated a nightmarish possibility.
“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” Cohen said, “I fear that if he loses in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
Cohen’s comments may seem hyperbolic, but they are worth taking seriously. In the aftermath of 2018, Trump told reporters, “Republicans don’t win, and that’s because of potentially illegal votes.” In a 2016 presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he would accept defeat. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he declared. Since that election, Trump has routinely said that his popular vote defeat was the product of “millions and millions” of illegal ballots. Now, facing potential legal jeopardy from ongoing investigations into hush-money payments and any number of apparent financial crimes, he might reasonably conclude that staying in office is the only way to avoid being indicted.
So what would it look like if Trump refused to concede? Is there really a way he could stay in office? It’s unlikely. For starters, successful autocrats rarely lose elections. “They take steps to rig it well in advance,” said Steven Levitsky, a comparative political scientist at Harvard University and the coauthor of How Democracies Die. They pack electoral authorities, jail opponents, and silence unfriendly media outlets. America’s extremely decentralized electoral system and powerful, well-funded opposition makes this very difficult to pull off.
The U.S. also lacks the kind of politicized military that lets some discredited autocrats, like Venezuela’s Nicholás Maduro, hang on. “I can’t imagine the military accepting an effort to turn them into a partisan arm of the executive,” said Robert Mickey, a political scientist at the University of Michigan who researches the history of authoritarianism in the American South.
But while nationwide cheating may be impossible, the Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms where it has local control, and not every powerful institution is as neutral as the military. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president despite losing the election—breaking American democracy in the process.
“I think we know that Trump will certainly, no matter what the result is, be likely to declare that there was fraud and that he was the rightful victor,” said Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas who studies elections.
Let’s assume that Fishkin is right. Here’s what could keep Trump in power.
1. The election is close.
If Trump lost in a blowout, alleging fraud would accomplish little. Even entrenched autocrats are often forced from office when they are heftily defeated.
But that doesn’t mean the race would need to be a redux of 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency with an official margin of 537 votes, to spark a crisis. Given increasing polarization and the Republican Party’s growing impatience with democratic norms, experts told me the party might challenge even a clear defeat. “I am worried now, given the reaction to 2018, that you could get a dispute over a five-digit number,” said Edward Foley, a law professor and elections expert at Ohio State University.
Others suggested the margin could be even wider. When I asked Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, just how close the election would have to be for Republicans to support Trump in disputing the results, he said, “ ‘Close’—as Trump supporters define it.”
However you construe the word, a close election is well within the realm of possibility. In 2016, Trump won his three pivotal states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—by five-digit numbers. Indeed, most of the country’s twenty-first-century elections have hinged on a few states with narrow margins.
“[2020] will probably be a nail-biter election where the polls are mixed or indeterminate, where it’s really not clear who is going to win,” said Levitsky. “If it’s close, just as Trump kind of did in 2018, Trump could basically claim fraud. And we don’t really have mechanisms to deal with that.”
2. Trump claims fraud, and Republicans back him up.
It is Wednesday morning, November 4, 2020. At 7:15 a.m., after a stressful night of watching the returns trickle in, the Associated Press projects that the Democratic presidential candidate will win Pennsylvania, and, with it, the presidency. Sure enough, it’s a narrow victory—279 electoral votes to 258. When all is said and done, the Democrat wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by only about 77,000 votes combined, the same amount Trump won those states by in 2016.
Donald Trump, who spent the past five months warning about fraud, has been eerily silent for most of the night. But as soon as the Democrat takes the stage to give her victory speech, he unleashes a barrage of tweets claiming that over 100,000 illegal immigrants voted in Michigan and that Philadelphia kept its polls open for hours later than allowed. “Without PHONY voters, I really won!” he tweets. “This is FRAUD!” Needless to say, the president does not call to congratulate his opponent. At an afternoon press conference, Trump’s press secretary announces he will not concede.
What happens next?
“In the best-case scenario, key Republicans would either talk him down or defect from Trump and say, ‘He’s wrong,’ ” Levitsky said. Most of the academics I spoke with also thought that this was likely. “I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around even this polarized and often radicalized Republican Party going along with that,” said Mickey. “This is kind of the limit condition of scenarios and surprise.”
But they acknowledged that defections were far from guaranteed. “Trump is still far and away the most popular Republican,” Levitsky said. “If Sean Hannity is claiming fraud on television and Rush Limbaugh is claiming fraud and Mitch McConnell is not willing to stand up and say, ‘No, there was no fraud,’ then we could have a real crisis.”
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what takes place. After forty-eight hours of silence, the Senate majority leader issues a terse press release in which he says he “recognizes the president’s serious concerns” about the election’s integrity. Some GOP representatives do break ranks and call for Trump to concede (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney), but most stay silent or back the president’s claims. In a monumental act of gaslighting, Lindsey Graham tells reporters that Democrats are the ones undermining democracy. “They are afraid of a thorough investigation into the fairness of this election,” he declares. “They’ll stop at nothing to get this president out of office.”
3. Polarized courts side with the GOP.
Almost everyone I spoke with told me that, at this point, the election results would be challenged in court. The Trump campaign might sue Democratic-leaning counties for alleged “irregularities” and ask that judges toss out their results. “I can imagine the litigation in Pennsylvania taking the form of saying voting booths in Philadelphia were held open an excessively long time, an unlawfully long time, or the vote counters in some Democratic-leaning county unlawfully refused to count late-filed absentee ballots,” Tushnet said. Victory for Trump would “mean throwing out the ballots and saying that when those are thrown out, Trump gets the state’s electoral votes.” That, in turn, would allow him to remain president.
This argument, and the many others that the Trump campaign could employ, would almost certainly be specious. But Tushnet cautioned against underestimating the power of creative attorneys and motivated reasoning. The legal justification for challenging the returns would develop, he said, “in some ways that we can’t really anticipate now but that lawyers will come up with when it matters.”
The Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president even after a clear defeat.
The academics I spoke with cited Bush v. Gore as evidence. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority shut down the Florida recount, giving the 2000 election to George W. Bush, it did so by reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause in an expansive manner totally at odds with typical conservative jurisprudence. The Court even told other judges that their decision could not be used as precedent.
“The justices, along with everybody else, seemed to view disputed facts through the lens of the place where they have been ideologically,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law.
Still, it’s one thing for the courts to interfere in an election with a three-digit margin. It’s something else to invalidate a five-digit win. That would be truly extraordinary.
But it is not unthinkable. Autocrats abroad often rely on packed courts to cling to power, and while the U.S. judiciary is far more independent than that of Honduras or Venezuela, there’s no doubt that Trump has made a substantial imprint. He has appointed a historically high number of federal appeals court judges. He has added two justices to the Supreme Court. One of them, Brett Kavanaugh, has been outwardly partisan, raving during his confirmation hearings that he was the victim of an “orchestrated political hit” designed to function as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” fueled by “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He obliquely warned, “What goes around comes around.”
4. Alternatively, Republicans play extreme constitutional hardball.
The courts aren’t the only mechanism Republicans might use to keep Trump in power. The Constitution gives state legislators free rein to decide how to select electors. Currently, most states legally require electors to vote the same way as the people. But in a state with complete Republican control over the government, the legislature and governor could, in theory, pass a bill that strips this power away from citizens between the election and the actual casting of electoral votes. (Indeed, in some instances, the state legislature alone might be able to usurp its constituents.) If this sounds far-fetched, recall that GOP governments in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin have all recently pulled lame-duck attempts to limit the power of incoming Democratic governors, with varying degrees of success.
To imagine how this would play out, consider Florida, where the GOP controls the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. If the Democratic presidential nominee narrowly won the state in 2020, Trump might cry fraud and demand an investigation—as he did in the aftermath of the state’s 2018 Senate race, when it wasn’t yet clear that Republican Rick Scott had won. The legislature could establish an investigatory commission stacked with partisans and designed to sow doubt about the outcome. Perhaps Kris Kobach, vice chair of Trump’s erstwhile Commission on Election Integrity (and the patron saint of franchise restrictions), would lead it.
The courts might still refuse to intervene. But Trump allies in the Florida legislature could pass a bill giving themselves direct power to appoint the state’s electors. Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken Trump ally, could sign it, claiming that the fraud allegations and “controversy” over the tallies make the popular vote untrustworthy, and that he’s merely implementing the voters’ “real” will.
This might sound too cynical, but in 2000, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature considered something similar. “They were effectively saying, ‘Hey, if it turns out Gore wins in court, we’re not going to accept that, and we’re going to assert an authority to appoint the electors directly,’ ” said Edward Foley, at Ohio State. Such a move would also invite a Fourteenth Amendment challenge, this time on behalf of Democrats. But it’s unclear if the conservative Supreme Court would intervene.
Foley, for his part, is more concerned about this kind of scenario than he is about judicial manipulation. “Judges are fact based and evidence based,” he said. “We know that Justice Clarence Thomas is a very different person than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but I do think that with most election results they would agree as to what the answer was.” But he worries that politicians might refuse to accept the Court’s decision. “The judicial process is going to be slower than the Twitter process,” Foley told me. “If the Twitter process forces or causes politicians to dig in, then can a unanimous judiciary unstick the politicians?”
The Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution gives Congress final say over who becomes president. In some instances, the procedures for how Congress handles election disputes are clear. If there are three or more candidates and nobody wins a majority of electors, for example, the House decides who wins. But if it’s a two-way race where both candidates claim an Electoral College majority, Foley said, it’s unclear which chamber has the last word.
What would happen next is anyone’s guess. But it wouldn’t be pretty. “I think you could have a long, drawn-out crisis in which our institutions lose credibility,” Levitsky said. Even if Trump were eventually forced out, “we’ll be left with a situation where maybe 30, 35 percent of our population believes the election was rigged.”
It’s in this kind of crisis that Michael Cohen’s fears are most likely to be realized. “I could imagine some rioting, some civil violence,” said John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies comparative democracy and who cofounded Bright Line Watch, which monitors the health of American democracy. “We just can’t imagine all the possibilities.”
Hopefully, we won’t have to. Trump may lose decisively, rendering his claims of foul play empty. He may win. Or he may lose a tight race and cry foul, but still ultimately accept defeat. In the aftermath of the midterms, for example, Trump groused about fraud without seriously contesting the outcome.
Trump, of course, wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Losing in 2020 would be far more personal. But even if Trump refused to concede, it doesn’t mean he’d manage to remain in office. John Roberts has worried publicly about the credibility of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that he would “save” Trump from a less-than-ambiguous electoral defeat. Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin form a formidable roadblock against local Republican power grabs. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost—and no plausible pathway to mess with the outcome—Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Pence would probably tell Trump to pack his bags.
And if Trump still refused to go?
“I’m not sure which branch it would be, but it must be the case that somebody would be responsible for taking one elbow and somebody would be responsible for taking the other elbow,” Carey said. “I can imagine the feet going kind of crazy. But I like to think that it would be without too much damage to anyone.”
If Trump lost in a blowout, alleging fraud would accomplish little. Even entrenched autocrats are often forced from office when they are heftily defeated.
But that doesn’t mean the race would need to be a redux of 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency with an official margin of 537 votes, to spark a crisis. Given increasing polarization and the Republican Party’s growing impatience with democratic norms, experts told me the party might challenge even a clear defeat. “I am worried now, given the reaction to 2018, that you could get a dispute over a five-digit number,” said Edward Foley, a law professor and elections expert at Ohio State University.
Others suggested the margin could be even wider. When I asked Mark Tushnet, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, just how close the election would have to be for Republicans to support Trump in disputing the results, he said, “ ‘Close’—as Trump supporters define it.”
However you construe the word, a close election is well within the realm of possibility. In 2016, Trump won his three pivotal states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—by five-digit numbers. Indeed, most of the country’s twenty-first-century elections have hinged on a few states with narrow margins.
“[2020] will probably be a nail-biter election where the polls are mixed or indeterminate, where it’s really not clear who is going to win,” said Levitsky. “If it’s close, just as Trump kind of did in 2018, Trump could basically claim fraud. And we don’t really have mechanisms to deal with that.”
2. Trump claims fraud, and Republicans back him up.
It is Wednesday morning, November 4, 2020. At 7:15 a.m., after a stressful night of watching the returns trickle in, the Associated Press projects that the Democratic presidential candidate will win Pennsylvania, and, with it, the presidency. Sure enough, it’s a narrow victory—279 electoral votes to 258. When all is said and done, the Democrat wins Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by only about 77,000 votes combined, the same amount Trump won those states by in 2016.
Donald Trump, who spent the past five months warning about fraud, has been eerily silent for most of the night. But as soon as the Democrat takes the stage to give her victory speech, he unleashes a barrage of tweets claiming that over 100,000 illegal immigrants voted in Michigan and that Philadelphia kept its polls open for hours later than allowed. “Without PHONY voters, I really won!” he tweets. “This is FRAUD!” Needless to say, the president does not call to congratulate his opponent. At an afternoon press conference, Trump’s press secretary announces he will not concede.
What happens next?
“In the best-case scenario, key Republicans would either talk him down or defect from Trump and say, ‘He’s wrong,’ ” Levitsky said. Most of the academics I spoke with also thought that this was likely. “I’m just having trouble wrapping my head around even this polarized and often radicalized Republican Party going along with that,” said Mickey. “This is kind of the limit condition of scenarios and surprise.”
But they acknowledged that defections were far from guaranteed. “Trump is still far and away the most popular Republican,” Levitsky said. “If Sean Hannity is claiming fraud on television and Rush Limbaugh is claiming fraud and Mitch McConnell is not willing to stand up and say, ‘No, there was no fraud,’ then we could have a real crisis.”
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what takes place. After forty-eight hours of silence, the Senate majority leader issues a terse press release in which he says he “recognizes the president’s serious concerns” about the election’s integrity. Some GOP representatives do break ranks and call for Trump to concede (I’m looking at you, Mitt Romney), but most stay silent or back the president’s claims. In a monumental act of gaslighting, Lindsey Graham tells reporters that Democrats are the ones undermining democracy. “They are afraid of a thorough investigation into the fairness of this election,” he declares. “They’ll stop at nothing to get this president out of office.”
3. Polarized courts side with the GOP.
Almost everyone I spoke with told me that, at this point, the election results would be challenged in court. The Trump campaign might sue Democratic-leaning counties for alleged “irregularities” and ask that judges toss out their results. “I can imagine the litigation in Pennsylvania taking the form of saying voting booths in Philadelphia were held open an excessively long time, an unlawfully long time, or the vote counters in some Democratic-leaning county unlawfully refused to count late-filed absentee ballots,” Tushnet said. Victory for Trump would “mean throwing out the ballots and saying that when those are thrown out, Trump gets the state’s electoral votes.” That, in turn, would allow him to remain president.
This argument, and the many others that the Trump campaign could employ, would almost certainly be specious. But Tushnet cautioned against underestimating the power of creative attorneys and motivated reasoning. The legal justification for challenging the returns would develop, he said, “in some ways that we can’t really anticipate now but that lawyers will come up with when it matters.”
The Republican Party has proven more than willing to violate democratic norms. There is a sequence of events, each individually plausible, that would allow Trump to remain president even after a clear defeat.
The academics I spoke with cited Bush v. Gore as evidence. When the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority shut down the Florida recount, giving the 2000 election to George W. Bush, it did so by reading the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause in an expansive manner totally at odds with typical conservative jurisprudence. The Court even told other judges that their decision could not be used as precedent.
“The justices, along with everybody else, seemed to view disputed facts through the lens of the place where they have been ideologically,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law.
Still, it’s one thing for the courts to interfere in an election with a three-digit margin. It’s something else to invalidate a five-digit win. That would be truly extraordinary.
But it is not unthinkable. Autocrats abroad often rely on packed courts to cling to power, and while the U.S. judiciary is far more independent than that of Honduras or Venezuela, there’s no doubt that Trump has made a substantial imprint. He has appointed a historically high number of federal appeals court judges. He has added two justices to the Supreme Court. One of them, Brett Kavanaugh, has been outwardly partisan, raving during his confirmation hearings that he was the victim of an “orchestrated political hit” designed to function as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons,” fueled by “millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” He obliquely warned, “What goes around comes around.”
4. Alternatively, Republicans play extreme constitutional hardball.
The courts aren’t the only mechanism Republicans might use to keep Trump in power. The Constitution gives state legislators free rein to decide how to select electors. Currently, most states legally require electors to vote the same way as the people. But in a state with complete Republican control over the government, the legislature and governor could, in theory, pass a bill that strips this power away from citizens between the election and the actual casting of electoral votes. (Indeed, in some instances, the state legislature alone might be able to usurp its constituents.) If this sounds far-fetched, recall that GOP governments in North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin have all recently pulled lame-duck attempts to limit the power of incoming Democratic governors, with varying degrees of success.
To imagine how this would play out, consider Florida, where the GOP controls the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. If the Democratic presidential nominee narrowly won the state in 2020, Trump might cry fraud and demand an investigation—as he did in the aftermath of the state’s 2018 Senate race, when it wasn’t yet clear that Republican Rick Scott had won. The legislature could establish an investigatory commission stacked with partisans and designed to sow doubt about the outcome. Perhaps Kris Kobach, vice chair of Trump’s erstwhile Commission on Election Integrity (and the patron saint of franchise restrictions), would lead it.
The courts might still refuse to intervene. But Trump allies in the Florida legislature could pass a bill giving themselves direct power to appoint the state’s electors. Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken Trump ally, could sign it, claiming that the fraud allegations and “controversy” over the tallies make the popular vote untrustworthy, and that he’s merely implementing the voters’ “real” will.
This might sound too cynical, but in 2000, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature considered something similar. “They were effectively saying, ‘Hey, if it turns out Gore wins in court, we’re not going to accept that, and we’re going to assert an authority to appoint the electors directly,’ ” said Edward Foley, at Ohio State. Such a move would also invite a Fourteenth Amendment challenge, this time on behalf of Democrats. But it’s unclear if the conservative Supreme Court would intervene.
Foley, for his part, is more concerned about this kind of scenario than he is about judicial manipulation. “Judges are fact based and evidence based,” he said. “We know that Justice Clarence Thomas is a very different person than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but I do think that with most election results they would agree as to what the answer was.” But he worries that politicians might refuse to accept the Court’s decision. “The judicial process is going to be slower than the Twitter process,” Foley told me. “If the Twitter process forces or causes politicians to dig in, then can a unanimous judiciary unstick the politicians?”
The Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution gives Congress final say over who becomes president. In some instances, the procedures for how Congress handles election disputes are clear. If there are three or more candidates and nobody wins a majority of electors, for example, the House decides who wins. But if it’s a two-way race where both candidates claim an Electoral College majority, Foley said, it’s unclear which chamber has the last word.
What would happen next is anyone’s guess. But it wouldn’t be pretty. “I think you could have a long, drawn-out crisis in which our institutions lose credibility,” Levitsky said. Even if Trump were eventually forced out, “we’ll be left with a situation where maybe 30, 35 percent of our population believes the election was rigged.”
It’s in this kind of crisis that Michael Cohen’s fears are most likely to be realized. “I could imagine some rioting, some civil violence,” said John Carey, a political scientist at Dartmouth who studies comparative democracy and who cofounded Bright Line Watch, which monitors the health of American democracy. “We just can’t imagine all the possibilities.”
Hopefully, we won’t have to. Trump may lose decisively, rendering his claims of foul play empty. He may win. Or he may lose a tight race and cry foul, but still ultimately accept defeat. In the aftermath of the midterms, for example, Trump groused about fraud without seriously contesting the outcome.
Trump, of course, wasn’t on the ballot in 2018. Losing in 2020 would be far more personal. But even if Trump refused to concede, it doesn’t mean he’d manage to remain in office. John Roberts has worried publicly about the credibility of the Supreme Court. It seems unlikely that he would “save” Trump from a less-than-ambiguous electoral defeat. Democratic governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin form a formidable roadblock against local Republican power grabs. Faced with incontrovertible evidence that Trump lost—and no plausible pathway to mess with the outcome—Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Pence would probably tell Trump to pack his bags.
And if Trump still refused to go?
“I’m not sure which branch it would be, but it must be the case that somebody would be responsible for taking one elbow and somebody would be responsible for taking the other elbow,” Carey said. “I can imagine the feet going kind of crazy. But I like to think that it would be without too much damage to anyone.”
kwille
Footballguy
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
What happens if Trump is reelected and then Christine Blasey Ford and an underground army of mental health professionals get Trump declared unfit mentally. Pence is bribed by Pelosi and the Clinton foundation and he steps down so Pelosi takes over. Names Hillary VP then Pelosi steps down and Hillary becomes president naming Chelsea as VP and the dynasty is in place.
Shula-holic
Footballguy
parasaurolophus
Footballguy
Shula-holic
Footballguy
This is an excellent point. Leave Trump aside for a moment; as long as the stakes keep getting ratcheted up for each election, it’s inevitable that there will be a Bush v. Gore-style squeaker in which neither side is willing to confront the possibility of giving up power
rockaction
Footballguy
BladeRunner
Footballguy
There is no way he would.
This type of nonsense from the over-the-top conspiracy crowd is ridiculous. These guys think of new, outrageous things every day that have no place in logical conversations. It's a hysteria mentality.
Herb
Footballguy
Your skepticism is deserved. On its face this is ludicrous. But you're thinking in traditional terms.
Imagine it's election day. MSM has been pounding the drum about election interference and voting integrity and Trump and the Russians and whatnot. Social media propaganda is rampant on all sides. Right wing media pounds the Dem nominee Sanders into oblivion, calling him a commie that wants to take everything you have and give it to immigrants or whatever. Every single talking head of every political stripe is going crazy for 3 months.
Sanders wins a tight election. Say he wins PA, MI and WI each by 50k or less votes. Trump refuses to concede, does his Trump thing and gets everyone everywhere in a tizzy. Tensions are high and everyone is crying foul.
Then we find out electronic voting machines in a couple key states were compromised somehow. Bad software, a hack, ineptitude on the part of the locals, whatever. Doesn't even matter really what sort of event would be the catalyst for disputing election results. Trump just needs to be able to cast enough doubt on the process to justify recounts and court battles. That can be done any number of ways and the media (RW and MSM) would take it from there.
And let's not forget a couple points. You said Trump wouldn't have enough support to overthrow the government. This isn't overthrowing the government, this is Trump making sure the will of the people is done. And if this all has to go to the courts, where Trump has appointed a record number of federal judges, then so be it.
Also there's an extremely high chance he gets indicted very shortly after exiting the WH. He is HIGHLY motivated to stay there. This is the biggest red flag to me.
I really hope this is just a political fever dream. The scenario seems unlikely. But far from impossible.
BladeRunner
Footballguy
Yeah, the human brain can convince itself anything is possible.
Aliens could come down from space and install tromp as potus for life too. I mean, it's unlikely but not entirely impossible.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Or at least a significant faction of the military backing the person that eventually tries a coup.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
It’s incredibly unlikely of course, but the conversation around the idea that eventually there will be a major challenge to the democracy is an interesting one. Nobody at the time thought Caesar would March his army into Rome but he did and their long standing Republic fell. It’s highly unlikely The US just carries on into eternity like this. Thinking about worst case scenarios is how we can best safeguard against them.
rockaction
Footballguy
Actually, I'm not sure what it is about this current President, but there's definitely a thought that a peaceful and lawful succession tradition will be thwarted by him.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
I’m just speaking from my end on the hypothetical future. It’s pure hubris to think this constitution will go on forever without a challenge from a tyrant. We already had a massive civil war so we know the US is susceptible to all the same pitfalls of any other state.
rockaction
Footballguy
Yeah, I gathered that it was a long-term view on the sustainability of the democracy in America. We indeed have had a civil war and tyrants masquerading as democratic politicians. We've had our share of corruption, too. It behooves us to be civic-minded and to really understand the underpinnings of our country lest we slip into tyranny.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Right and whoever the sitting President is will almost always be the greatest threat to our system just given the power of the position. If a person can firmly control the justice system and the military, anything is possible. The courts are just the cherry on top. Just like when king Obama jokes were made, it was ridiculous but also came with a ring of truth. We entrust an increasing amount of power to the person we elect and it’s always going to be playing with a bit of fire.
I agree if it was a clear loss, but think back to Bush v. Gore for a moment.The thing no one likes to admit about that election is that it was so close, any counting method was going to have a higher margin of error than the actual margin of victory. It was, for all intents and purposes, a tie. But we can't have ties in our system; we have to pick a winner.
Now imagine that scenario playing out in today's environment (or in a future one that's grown even more polarized). Let's say the election comes down to another 500-vote margin, this time in Wisconsin. Trump contests the results, even after the state election board certifies them. The GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature invokes its power to simply award the electoral votes to Trump (back in 2000, the Florida legislature debated taking that step). The Democratic House refuses to recognize the electors appointed by the legislature. And now we're in a stalemate.
Nitpick these details however you want. Point being, whoever is declared the winner, the other side will have some grounds for contesting that decision that will likely be plausible for a good chunk of their supporters. It's not about whether Trump is uniquely bad or selfish or contemptuous of the Constitution. I happen to think he is all of those things, but that may not be what ultimately dooms our system. The bigger danger is that, as I said in my previous post, the stakes will get so high that, in a close election, any remotely plausible scenario for contesting the results will be invoked.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
1876 was a borderline apocalyptic election. In 3 key States, both parties declared victory and in another members of the electoral college were removed under questionable circumstances. In the shadow of the civil war and Lincoln’s assassination, the voting was almost split again with North vs South. It could have ended the country really but the 2 parties were able to come up with a behind closed doors compromise. The Democrats allowed the GOP to have all the disputed States (even though the Democrats won the popular vote by 3%) in return for the GOP to promise to pull Federal troops from the south ending Reconstruction and making way for all of the horrible treatment of blacks that we saw with Jim Crow, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, etc.
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Highly recommend Gore Vidal's 1876: A Novel for a (lightly fictionalized) account of that election. As I recall, there was a ton of cheating in those disputed states and it was hard to say conclusively who had won them, so any resolution was going to be decided by politics rather than discovering the empirical truth.
And you're right, that is a good analogue for what we could see in the future. Though it's hard to imagine a dispute being resolved by that kind of horse trading. The presidency has become so powerful, there's really nothing you could give the losing party that would make up for it. Whereas 19th century Southern Democrats so hated Reconstruction that they were willing to trade the presidency to see it end.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Thanks. Would Democrats be willing to step aside in exchange for a single payer Medicare for all type plan? That’s about the only thing I could see big enough to move the needle.
I don't see either side agreeing to a deal like that. Logistically, I'm not even sure how it could work.
Ultimately, a disputed election will come down to raw political power, and whichever side can get their guy declared the winner will do so, while the other side seethes.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Pretty much and it’s hard to see the current configuration of then Democrats winning a struggle like that. A tie is a GOP win since they are so much more united.
That plus most of the potential tiebreakers work in GOP's favor. For example, they control the legislature in just about all of the potential swing states (Dems do at least have many of the governorships, but I'm not sure how it would work if, say, the WI legislature voted to award the states electoral votes to Trump). If there's no Electoral College majority, the election goes to the House, where each state delegation gets one vote (ie, CA counts as much as WY). In the past, I've heard theoretical discussions of that scenario where people wonder whether representatives would feel pressure to vote for the popular-vote winner, or their state winner, or whatever, but the answer is clearly that they would vote on partisan lines. And that would benefit the GOP.
And then of course, there's the Supreme Court. We already have evidence of how that would go.
Godsbrother
Footballguy
If the election is close all he needs to do is say the election was rigged and remain in power while it gets battled in court. And he would have at least 90% of the Republican party and most of the Trump supporters on this board behind him.
Ilov80s
Footballguy
Thunderlips
Footballguy
I think just about all the candidates up there will just walk in, grab him by the scruff on the top of his head and start to walk him out. When that comes off....they'll just grab his ear and walk him out.
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