So Who Exactly Does Trump Think Will Keep Him In Power If He Loses?!
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This election is truly no longer Donald Trump versus Joe Biden; it’s Donald Trump versus American democracy.
Trump made that crystal clear on Wednesday night when he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. Instead, when asked by White House Correspondent Brian Karem, “Will you commit to making sure there’s a peaceful transferal of power after the election?” Trump shockingly responded, “We’re going to have to have to see what happens.”
When Karem pressed, Trump announced conditions that would need to be met before he would consider voluntarily leaving the White House on January 20 as mandated by the 20th amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Trump demanded that America would first need to “get rid of the ballots.”
Certainly, an odd demand when our nation is a representative democracy and ballots are the way our voices are heard. But what Trump apparently was referring to were mail-in ballots, with Trump telling Karem, “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are disaster.”
Trump keeps repeating the falsehood that mail-in ballots will cause fraud despite various states using mail-in ballots for years and no evidence to back up Trump’s assertion.
We must assume Trump knows that he’s lying the same way we learned Trump knowingly lied about the threat posed by COVID-19, telling Bob Woodward on February 7 that Covid-19 was five times more deadly than the flu but then misleading Americans by frequently comparing Covid to the typical flu.
Trump’s condition for a peaceful transfer of power that mail-in ballots be thrown out is not happening. In reality, 67 percent of Americans support voting by mail during Covid, including Republican officials in key swing states like North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio — especially with Republican voters generally skewing older.
The question then is, if Trump loses — and in the Real Clear Politics average of polls today he’s down by 7.1 percent to Biden — who exactly is Trump counting on to keep him in power? This is something I hope the media at press conferences and especially Chris Wallace, who is moderating the first presidential debate this Tuesday, will press Trump on.
Is Trump counting on the U.S. military to rise up and keep him in power?
While it’s unrealistic to believe the patriotic members of our military would do that, Americans should know Trump’s thought process on how he believes he can hold power over the will of the people. (Trump might want to take a look at a recent poll in The Military Times of active duty troops that found 41 percent support Biden to Trump’s 37 percent–and that was before Trump’s reported smear of U.S. troops who died fighting in World War I as “suckers” and “losers.”)
Maybe Trump thinks by rushing the confirmation of another conservative justice to the Supreme Court, there will be a better chance the Justices will be more loyal to him than the U.S. Constitution. But it was just a few months ago that Trump’s handpicked Justice, Neil Gorsuch, shocked and angered conservatives by siding with the liberal Justices to expand the Civil Rights Act to include protections for the LGBTQ community. If Trump loses the election, the Supreme Court is very unlikely to keep him in power simply because Trump demands it.
That leaves Trump with his supporters rising up to keep him in power.
Keep in mind Trump has already begun priming his base for months for this scenario, telling them at rallies, “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” There could be some very small, subset of his supporters that would engage in violence to keep Trump in power if he called on them to do so. (We can’t forget the MAGA bomber.)
Last month, we saw Trump defend his supports who shot protesters with paintballs in Portland. Will some go the next step and shoot people to keep Trump in power? Is Trump worth their liberty or lives? I doubt more than a tiny number would say yes.
Bottom line is Trump must be pressed by the media on how he thinks he will remain in power if he loses. Patriotic Americans need to know how Trump thinks he can destroy our Republic so that we can prepare to protect it. Generations before us were called to defeat threats to our nation like Nazism. Today, our generation is called to defend our nation from Trump.
Dean Obeidallah, a lawyer, hosts SiriusXM radio’s The Dean Obeidallah show and is a columnist for the Daily Beast and a CNN.com Opinion Contributor.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
