Will Trump Leave Office Peacefully?

Just Beneath The Surface by Nancy Ohanian

LOL!

I know I'm always complaining how Inside-the-Beltway political writers are overly cautious and weeks behind in their prognosticatin'. Well... National Journal's Josh Kraushaar surprised me this week: Prepare For A Biden Landslide. Unless Trump figures out how to steal the election, Kraushaar is probably right on point. His set up was that Trumpanzee's Tulsa rally was a bust-- "empty seats, a canceled outdoor event, and a rambling speech that failed to land many punches against Joe Biden"-- and a "foreboding sign that his once rock-solid base is softening in the run-up to the election. Dealing with the triple threat of a pandemic, frayed race relations, and a battered economy, even some of the president’s supporters are questioning whether he’s up for the job." The latest Fox News poll shows Trump losing by 12 points, "the latest hint that some of the president’s closest allies are starting to lose the faith."

While his support among some rural and evangelical voters is getting shakier, for a president, wrote Kaushaar, "who has relied on a base-first strategy at all costs, hoping to win reelection without courting new voters, even the slightest slippage among rock-solid Republicans is alarming" and he asserts that while the revelations from Bolton’s new book may not matter to Trump’s hardcore base, "there are plenty of softer Republican voters already close to breaking away."

So what does it all mean for the November election? Right now, it looks more likely that Biden will win a landslide victory, picking up states uncontested by Democrats in recent elections, than it is that Trump can mount a miraculous turnaround in just over four months. Even as Trump tries to advance a law-and-order pitch amid growing violence and tumult in the nation’s cities, it’s unlikely to benefit the president because he’s the leader in charge. The chaos candidate is now the chaos president. Biden is the challenger pledging a return to normalcy.

Just look at the swing-state map: Biden is leading in every battleground state, according to the RealClearPolitics polling averages, with the exception of North Carolina where the race is tied. Trump trails by 6 points in the electoral prize of Florida, where the president’s newfound willingness to meet with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro prompted a fierce backlash and quick White House retreat. He’s down 4 points in Arizona, a state that has only voted for a Democratic presidential candidate once since 1964. He’s not close to hitting even 45 percent of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin-- the Midwestern states he flipped to win the presidency.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is airing ads in Iowa and Ohio, two states he won by near double-digit margins in 2016, as recent polls show Trump in precarious shape in both states. Public polling even shows Biden within striking distance in Georgia and Texas, two electoral prizes that would normally be safely Republican ... unless a big blue wave hits in November.

Right now, Biden leads Trump by 10 points in the RCP national average, a greater margin than former President Obama’s 7-point landslide victory over John McCain 12 years ago. A best-case Biden scenario would net him 413 electoral votes, which would be more than any presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush’s rout of Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Trump made history in 2016 with his stunning come-from-behind upset against Clinton. He’s at risk of making a different kind of political history unless he’s able to suddenly turn his fortunes around.

Two questions flow out of this newish conventional wisdom:

1- how big powerful will the reverse coattails be,.meaning how many seats will the Republicans lose in Senate, House and legislative races? and

2- what if Trump refuses to acknowledge defeat?

We'll be dealing with the House races over the next few weeks but in terms of the Senate, a "Biden landslide" (a misnomer since Biden has nothing to do with it whatsoever) is likely to yield the Democrats seats in Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Montana, North Carolina, Iowa, possibly Kansas, Alaska, Kentucky, South Carolina and one-- or even two-- Georgia seats.



As for the second question... Verdict published a worthwhile post by Neil Buchanan, a legal scholar at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, yesterday, Trump’s Upcoming Refusal to Leave Office: The Good News. He's optimistic that Trump will lose in November but decided to discuss what he calls the inevitability of a Trump coup attempt, given that "Trump will stop at nothing to hold onto power." He's been worrying that only a handful of national commentators have finally started to say that Trump will refuse to accept losing, "even as most commentators and Democratic politicians were pretending that the election will be fair and that Trump will leave office peacefully."

And it is not as if people have not been warned. More than a year ago, Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen stated plainly that “there will never be a peaceful transition of power” under Trump. Perhaps because Cohen is otherwise such a pathetic character, but more likely because people prefer to deny what they cannot face, that warning was soon forgotten.

In my Verdict column earlier this month, I imagined what would happen if a news reporter were to take my warnings seriously and try to get Republican politicians to affirm on the record that they would stand up to any attempt by Trump to defy the will of the voters. What would those Republicans say, given that they could never admit that they would abet him when it came time to stealing the election?

My prediction was that those politicians would feign outrage, denouncing the reporter for even asking such a question. We soon, however, saw an unexpected test run, when an enterprising reporter (Grace Panetta of Business Insider) asked a long line of Republican U.S. senators to comment on Trump’s gassing of protesters on his way to defiling a Bible as part of a political stunt near the White House.

It turned out that these senators could not even be bothered to answer the question at all, much less muster the energy necessary to fake a bit of righteous outrage. Most of the Republicans ignored the reporter entirely or claimed not to know what had happened.

This suggests that, if asked a hypothetical question of the sort that I imagined regarding a Trump coup, Republican senators would simply stare blankly and walk away. If they cannot even be roused to say something when the President of the United States abuses his powers to violently stop citizens from exercising their First Amendment rights, why would they say anything to warn Trump not to shred the rest of the Constitution?

Our Institutions Are Only as Strong as the People Who Inhabit Them

One possible answer to my question about how the American political system would respond to Trump’s refusal to accept losing is to treat that system as a disembodied machine that was perfected and handed to us by the nation’s founders. Trump will not succeed, the argument goes, because “our institutions” will not allow him to do so.

...What we know is that Trump is willing to fire prosecutors, to mobilize military troops, to abuse the courts, and to claim that everything that has happened to him is corrupt. He simply will not go, and his coup will not begin and end on Inauguration Day.

Indeed, one of the things that Trump and his supporters have been doing for years now is to coopt the word “coup” as a preemptive move, to drain it of all meaning. Indeed, they now use that word to describe any situation in which Trump is opposed via legal means. The Mueller report was supposedly an attempted coup, Trump’s impeachment was similarly an attempted coup, and pretty much everything else is a plot to take away Trump’s “landslide” victory in 2016. “Coup,” in their mind, means “Trump not being President anymore.”

So Trump has already degraded the language by using against his enemies the very word that best describes what he is doing. And no matter how much wishful thinking Kaplan wants to engage in, Trump will spend every day trying to convince people that he is the rightful winner of the election, which will involve efforts never to get to the point where “everyone knows” that Trump lost and must leave when his term ends.

This can only be prevented if the people who work inside our institutions are actually willing to do what their roles demand of them. Trump, for his part, will do what is necessary to convince people that Biden lost.

In other words, no one is saying that Trump will say something like this: “I lost, but I refuse to accept losing. I’m not leaving.” It will be: “I didn’t lose, no matter what the evil press and the deep-state conspiracy says. Massive voter fraud! The courts are corrupt. Second Amendment people need to stop this coup!!” The idea is not to get people to defy the rule of law directly but to get enough of them to be confused about what the law requires that they do not even know who won. “I didn’t lose, I won,” Trump will shout. “The radical socialist Democrats are the ones who hate our beautiful Constitution.”

The Only Way to Stop It Is to Be Honest About It

As I also noted in my column earlier this month, there might not be any point in saying out loud what Trump is going to do, because there might be nothing that we can do in any case. If Trump is going to be abetted by his partisans, and given that he is willing to stop at nothing, maybe there is truly nothing to be done.

If that were true, then we would now be living in what we might as well call a “dead democracy walking.” We might not realize it yet, but our constitutional system might already have been fatally wounded and is simply in the process of bleeding to death. Not dead yet, but irreversibly doomed nonetheless.

As depressing as that is, it might be true. The only way for it not to be true, however, is for people to see clearly what is at stake. For the reasons that I noted above, many people (most definitely including Democratic politicians) have shied away from saying that Trump’s existential threat to the American experiment includes the possibility of an outright refusal to leave office peacefully.

Because I saw no reason to think that politicians, pundits, or reporters would be willing to speak this truth out loud, I concluded that we would be doomed by what amounts to a timing problem. That is, by the time that people were finally confronted with evidence that they could no longer deny, it would be too late to stop the worst from happening.

All of which brings us to my reasons for being at least a tiny bit optimistic about what might yet happen in this country. It turns out that people might be waking up now, which might give us a fighting chance to prepare to stop Trump before it is too late.

For one thing, I have been happy to learn that mine has not been the only voice warning about Trump’s unwillingness to accept losing. I have never been a fan of the pundit Bill Maher (for a variety of reasons), so I did not realize until someone told me recently that Maher has been sounding similar alarms about Trump for some time.

Moreover, at least some of my fellow academics have been working on these issues (much more effectively than I have, if I am to be honest). For example, the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas at Amherst College has now published a book-length inquiry into these questions, the title of which poses the key question: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.

...Here is a particularly helpful (if chilling) sample of his commentary:

[I]f we do fall into an electoral crisis and we start seeing the kinds of challenges to the results that we saw back in year 2000, during Bush v. Gore, then we could really see a meltdown because our contemporary political climate is so polarized. That’s what led me to start asking, what types of federal laws do we have in place? What kind of constitutional procedures do we have in place to right the ship?

And what I found is that they just don’t exist.

Professor Douglas points out that there are ways for the Electoral College to become a point of contention-- not (only) in the sense that it allows a person to become President with a minority of the votes (as in 2000 and 2016) but in the even more disturbing situation where state-level Republicans try to defy their own states’ voters by refusing to certify Joe Biden’s electors.

This could, in turn, throw the race into the U.S. House of Representatives, in which another anti-democratic feature of the Constitution would (even though Democrats are in the majority) allow Republicans to make Trump President again. (Hint: Every state gets one vote, not every member of the House.)

That all sounds pretty bad, and it is. Professor Douglas does, however, offer one concrete reason for hope-- and one that has caused me to rethink how I imagine the end of this year playing out. His Vox interview ends this way:

The only real way to avoid this is to make sure we don’t enter into this scenario, and the best way to do that is to ensure that he loses decisively in November. That’s the best guarantee. That’s the best way that we can secure the future of a healthy constitutional democracy.

...The Douglas hypothesis, however, points out that the nightmare scenario has a lot of moving parts, and larger voting margins make it more difficult for Trump and the Republicans to manipulate enough of those moving parts to pull off a coup. If, say, Florida’s voters choose Biden by 0.4 percentage points, it will be relatively easy for the Sunshine State’s Republicans to convince judges and others (as well as themselves) that the state need not certify Biden electors. But if they are willing to steal the election for Trump even if he loses by, say, 55-45, then we are already doomed. There is reason to believe that we are not there yet.

In the end, then, the decentralized nature of the U.S. system of voting makes it very, very important that Trump and the Republicans have as few avenues as possible to steal the election. That it is necessary to say to Democrats, “You can’t just win, you have to win big,” is a sad commentary on where we are today, but it is true nonetheless.

Perhaps the biggest reason, however, that I am feeling some sense of optimism that we might emerge from 2020 intact-- though surely battered and bruised as a nation-- brings us back to my comments above about the importance of all of us collectively emerging from the state of denial in which we have been living. Democrats need to stop politely refusing to call Trump out on his election-stealing intentions.

And lo and behold, Joe Biden himself has finally said it out loud. Less than two weeks ago, Biden appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and was as blunt as possible: “It’s my greatest concern, my single greatest concern. This president is going to try to steal this election.”

Biden also said this: “I am absolutely convinced [the military] will escort him from the White House with great dispatch” if Trump refuses to leave. Although that is the naïve framing that I described above (everything being in place on January 20, with Trump clutching the door frame of the Oval Office as he is dragged out), it is nonetheless notable that Biden was willing even to talk about something so seemingly extreme.

After all, Joe Biden might be the very embodiment of what has come to be known as “defensive crouch liberalism,” which is the habit of mind by which centrist Democrats lack the courage of whatever convictions that they claim to have, choosing instead not to fight and to preemptively compromise with their opponents (and then to give away even more during negotiations).

Al Gore was a gentleman who stepped aside in 2000 even though he had both facts and law on his side, all in the name of preserving the republic. No matter what one thinks of Gore’s choice, the only way to preserve the republic now is to fight. And with Joe Biden already sounding the alarm in early June, no one else has any reason to pretend not to see what Trump is up to from here on.

Things could still go very badly, as I will argue in the second and final part of this series tomorrow. But seeing Biden and the Democrats at long last stop pretending that this is business as usual should give us some reason to imagine that all hope is not lost. For now, I welcome even that highly contingent good news.