On Sunday, in an interview with Chris Wallace of
Fox News, Donald Trump refused to commit to recognizing the outcome of the 2020
election. “I’m not going to just say yes,” the President said. “And I didn’t
last time, either.” (Back in October, 2016, Trump was proclaiming that the
election he went on to win was “rigged” against him.) He wasn’t telling us
anything new, and yet we still have not learned to think of ourselves as a
country where the President can lose an election and refuse to leave office.
Lawrence Douglas, a legal scholar and a professor
at Amherst College, gave himself the task of methodically thinking through the
unthinkable. The result is a slim book, “Will He Go? Trump and the Looming
Election Meltdown in 2020.” Douglas begins by taking the President at his word.
“While his defeat is far from certain,” he writes, “what is not uncertain is
how Donald Trump would react to electoral defeat, especially a narrow one. He
will reject the result.”
Douglas argues that Trump’s evident intent to hold
on to his office, regardless of the will of the voters, is not the best measure
of the damage he has wrought or the power he has accumulated. He writes, “A
more powerful authoritarian would never let himself get into this situation in
the first place; he would have already so corrupted the process that his chance
of losing would have been effectively eliminated.” By the standards of
entrenched autocracies, Trump’s grip on power is as weak as his grip on
reality. Still, the system of government that he has hijacked is not designed
to protect itself against his kind of attack. “Our Constitution does not secure
the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” Douglas writes.
Worse, the peculiar institution of the Electoral College, which separates the
outcome of the election from the popular vote, practically invites abuse.
When electoral crises have arisen, past political
leaders have stepped up, or stepped aside, to insure the peaceful transfer of
power. Al Gore, to take a painful example, did not have to accept the Supreme
Court’s order stopping a recount in Florida, in December, 2000, as the last
word on that year’s election; Douglas details constitutional avenues Gore could
have pursued to claim victory. Though he had won the popular vote, Gore saw it
as his duty to avoid escalating the electoral crisis. The Presidential
elections of 1800 and 1876 ended in compromises, too, in the spirit of the
Constitution, common cause, and good faith—all things alien to Donald Trump.
It’s not the compromise that functions as precedent here but the conflict:
election results have been unclear in the past, and they can be unclear again.
Douglas conjures three detailed scenarios, which
he calls Catastrophe No. 1, Catastrophe No. 2, and Catastrophe No. 3. In the
first story, Trump gets five million fewer votes than Joe Biden, but appears to
win the Electoral College—that is, until two Republican electors from
Pennsylvania decide to break ranks and vote for Mitt Romney. Douglas, who is
also the author of two novels, imagines the ensuing chaos in vivid detail, down
to Trump’s tweets (“BULLSHIT rains [sic] in PA!!! TREASONOUS ‘electors’ trying
to DEFRAUD the American People”) and “Faithful not Faithless” bumper stickers
for supporters of the rogue electors.
In Douglas’s second scenario, hackers attack the
power grid of Detroit on Election Day. Much of the city is in the dark for much
of the day, and votes are not counted. The outcome of the election in Michigan,
and the country, hangs in the balance. The Democrats demand a revote, as does
the mayor of the city. Trump tweets, “DETROIT doesn’t get a revote because very
LOW IQ mayor doesn’t know how to HOLD AN ELECTION!” A revote is held and
improbably recognized by the Supreme Court, but not by Donald Trump.
In the third scenario, the drama unfolds
slowly—too slowly. On Election Day, Fox News calls the race for Trump, but an
unprecedented number of Americans have voted by mail, and as their votes are
counted, the balance shifts: Americans have chosen Biden. The process of
counting absentee ballots is so cumbersome and labor-intensive, however, that
in some states it necessarily misses the filing deadline. As a result, three
states each file two conflicting vote reports, certified by separate agencies:
one that privileges the deadline and one that reflects the total number of
ballots collected. The first count comes out in favor of Trump, the second in
favor of Biden.
The mortifying beauty of Douglas’s scenarios is
that each is based on historical precedent. Electors have broken ranks before.
Russia has used computer hacking to interfere in American elections, and it has
brought down digital infrastructure in other countries as a gesture of
domination: Ukraine in 2015, Georgia in 2008, and Estonia in 2007. States have
organized revotes, which have taken an extraordinarily long time. And states
have filed conflicting vote reports—in 1876, three states did so, just as
Douglas imagines in his third scenario.
What happens next? We know that Trump will work to
exacerbate any crisis, not resolve it; the Constitution assumes good faith, and
laws intended to regulate voting outcomes are disastrously vague. In each of
Douglas’s three scenarios, Trump would continue to consider himself President,
although Biden may consider himself the victor of the race. According to the
Constitution, if the Presidential race cannot be called, the Speaker of the
House becomes the acting President. Douglas imagines Chief Justice John Roberts
swearing in Nancy Pelosi while Justice Clarence Thomas administers the oath of
office to Trump—or, alternatively, no one being sworn in and Trump and Biden
and/or Pelosi claiming the rights and responsibilities of the Presidency.
Because Americans no longer live in a shared reality, different Americans will
have different Presidents. All the while, Trump’s tweets incite violent
clashes. “And let us not forget,” Douglas writes, “that guns in this country
remain in profuse supply and are largely concentrated in the hands of the
president’s most fervent, distrustful, and easily unsettled supporters.”
“Can the crisis be contained?” Douglas asks. His
answer is not reassuring. Suppose no major catastrophe befalls the election.
(By the time the reader reaches the end of Douglas’s book, this supposition
will seem naïve.) Suppose Biden wins. “The best we can expect from President
Donald Trump after an electoral defeat is self-pitying, peevish submission,”
Douglas writes. If he goes—which will require an overwhelming electoral
defeat—Trump is not only sure to play the victim, blaming the Deep State and
undocumented immigrants for his loss, but also likely to linger and delay his
departure. The ragged end of his Presidency, if it comes, will be full of
conflict and resentment. There will be no orderly handover, no constructive
transition—a disastrous prospect during a pandemic and a deep recession, and
yet another blow to our perceptions of how elections and government operate.
This is the best-case scenario. The worst case, as
Douglas’s three catastrophes illustrate, is a close or contested result of the
vote, which leads to a constitutional implosion and an explosion of violence.
“This would represent a greater disaster for America than an outright victory
by Trump,” Douglas writes. It’s a jarring conclusion, and an entirely
convincing one.
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