It is somewhere on the outer edges of conceivable that a sitting president will refuse to step down if he loses his re-election campaign. Nothing close to that has ever happened before. If that scenario plays out, America could still be saved from tyranny — but our democratic institutions would need to rise to the challenge.
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently published a an article arguing that it’s possible — perhaps even likely — that President Trump will try to stay in office if he loses in next year’s election, most likely by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the results and hoping that Republicans, once again, will close their eyes tight and back him up. We should also remember that Trump ominously said during the 2016 campaignthat he would only accept the results of the election “if I win,” essentially making a veiled threat that he was likely to question the validity of any victory by Hillary Clinton, regardless of the circumstances.
Trump’s reasoning was perfectly circular: The only explanation he would require to “prove” that he had been cheated was that he didn’t win. Something vaguely resembling an actual case that he had been robbed could be constructed after the fact — which Trump did anyway with his repeated false claims that he had only lost the popular vote in 2016 because of millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants.
View the complete June 23 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.