What If Trump Loses And Refuses To Leave? Would America Want A Satwant Singh and Beant Singh To Step Up To The Plate?

I've been a Biden watcher since the 1970s and, although my disdain for him has ebbed and flowed, my opinion of him has never gotten as high as "tolerable"-- and most of the time it was far lower. He has never been someone I would have ever considered voting for-- and still isn't. The lesser of two evils is still evil... and Joe Biden is not some minor evil, not by a long shot. I don't need any excuses to sit out a Trump-Biden contest (God forbid) but one would be my absolute certainty-- as a 4 decades Biden follower-- is that he would quickly pardon Trump and his family to, you know, unite the country. Did you hear Eric Holder getting people ready for it yesterday on CNN? He agreed with Ford's decision to pardon Nixon and told David Axelrod that the costs to the nation of putting Trump on trial might be too great. "I think there is a potential cost to the nation by putting on trial a former president, and that ought to at least be a part of the calculus that goes into the determination that has to be made by the next attorney general. I think we all should understand what a trial of a former president would do to the nation."

In a discussion with national security expert Josh Geltzer, Dahlia Lithwick tacked an even more disturbing question: What Happens if Trump Won’t Step Down? Trump is, in all likelihood, going to be defeated a year from now. He'll be squealing like a stuck pig and accusing everyone and everything on cheating him out of his second term. Geltzer, former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council wrote that Trump "has repeatedly shown a willingness to overstep his constitutional authority" and wouldn't be surprised if he just flat out refuses to step down. Recall Michael Cohen testifying that "given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power?"

Lithwick: When did you actually start thinking about the possibility that Trump might simply reject the 2020 election results?

Geltzer: July 24, 2018. Let me tell you why it’s that exact date. By then, I’d pretty much forgotten Trump’s comment from the October 2016 debate amidst everything else. But his answer snapped back in my mind on July 24, 2018. The midterm elections were approaching, and President Trump tweeted that he was “very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election,” adding that the Russians “will be pushing very hard for the Democrats.”

That tweet just didn’t make sense. It was, of course, the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election specifically to help Trump against the Democratic candidate, among other goals. And there had been nothing-- no intelligence community public statements, no scholarly analysis, no media reporting-- suggesting that the Russians were poised to push for the Democrats in the 2018 elections. So what was Trump talking about?

That’s when I began to wonder if he was using the tweet as he seems to use many tweets: to test out new lines and see if he can get away with them. And this notion that there might be foreign election interference in favor of the Democrats seemed to test Trump’s ability to call into question election results he didn’t like. So, if the Dems won big in a way that embarrassed Trump, he might say the results were inflated-- and, at least conceivably, even contest them.

And that’s when I remembered his earlier refusal to commit to honoring the 2016 election results. It made me worry a bit about 2018, but after all, Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot then. The real thing to worry about seemed to be 2020, which would once again be, for Trump, personal. And let me be very clear what the worry is: It’s about Trump not honoring valid election results if he in fact loses. If he wins, he wins! But if he loses, he needs, well, to lose.

...[T]here’s been another development: change in intelligence community leadership. Think about the departure of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. Coats more or less stood up for the intelligence community-- publicly-- at some key moments, such as when Trump rejected its views in favor of Putin’s at Helsinki. I think it’s important to inspect whoever Trump nominates as DNI (there’s currently an acting) to make sure he or she will tell Congress and the American people whether there’s really been foreign election interference that casts doubt on the accuracy of election results in 2020, or whether Trump’s just claiming as much...

Lithwick: When you wrote about this last winter you suggested that there were four powerful checks on this possibility: the Electoral College, Congress, state governors, and the Defense Department. I wonder if you are more or less sanguine about each of them, seven months later?

Geltzer: I’m an optimistic guy, but I have to be less sanguine-- because, seven months later, I haven’t seen any of these checks taking seriously this concern. In fairness, some need prompting to do so. For example, it’s the political parties that should require their electors for the Electoral College to pledge that they won’t withhold, delay, or alter their votes based on the claims or protestations of any candidate, including Trump himself. But I don’t see the parties requiring that, or even discussing whether to require it. And others-- such as Congress or state governors-- don’t need prompting at all to make the sort of commitments I urged back in February. Yet they don’t seem to be making those commitments. And remember: This is about ensuring that valid election results are respected, whichever way that cuts. That shouldn’t be controversial.

...The four checks I listed are all actors that, either without prompting or with it, could make commitments right now that, to my mind, would at least mitigate the risk we’re discussing. That’s not true of the courts: They wait until cases or controversies are brought to them and only then get involved, though of course their role at that point can sometimes be the most important of all. So I think there are probably other checks, like the courts, that would, I hope, play their own important roles if this nightmare scenario really played out. But my goal in writing the piece in February wasn’t just to flag a possible problem, but specifically to encourage those who might be able to get ahead of that problem to do so. And that’s why I focused on actors suited to that...

Lithwick: What’s your best advice on what we should be doing to at least prepare for the possibility that at minimum, Trump will dispute the election results and that should he do so, many of his followers will similarly reject them?

Geltzer: We need political leaders-- especially Republicans-- to make clear, both publicly and privately, that for Trump to contest the valid results of an election would be a redline, and that he’d have zero support from them-- indeed, impassioned opposition from them-- should he cross it. We need it sooner rather than later, too.

By the way, after Satwant Singh and Beant Singh assassinated Indira Gandhi in 1984, thousands of their co-religionists were slaughtered in retaliation. Satwant and Beant themselves were tried, found guilty and executed in 1989. This movie of their lives-- and deaths-- was never released: