When Donald Trump hinted during the 2016 campaign that he might not abide by an election defeat, most observers dismissed the unprecedented threat as typical bluster by the New York real estate mogul and  TV reality show host.  “I will keep you in suspense,” he smirked at his opponent, Hillary Cliton, during a televised debate. There were chuckles and nervous titters in the studio.

Four years later, no one’s laughing. And Trump himself is fueling the prospect of disputing the election results chaos by his escalating attacks on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, which are expected to reach flood-level records amid the Covid-19 pandemic and largely favor Democratic Party candidates. In just this year alone, Trump has made 91 statements suggesting the election will be “rigged” by mail-in voting, according to the Factbase web website. 

Asked solemnly by a Fox News interviewer on July 19 whether he would concede defeat if he lost his bid for reelection, Trump’s equivocal response—“I have to see. No, I’m not going to say just yes. I’m not going to say no”— rattled a nation that had largely become inured to the president’s long history of baiting opponents with false accusations, blame-shifting deflections and threats. 


Suddenly, America has jitters.


“This president is going to try to steal this election,” declared Joseph Biden, Trump’s presumptive Democratic Party opponent in November, whose campaign team has generally avoided responding to the president’s most incendiary remarks. 


Even top “Vichy Republicans”  (so-named because they have acquiesced to Trump’s affection for Russia’s Vladimir Putin),  felt compelled to reject their leader’s threat to delay the vote. Not even President Abraham Lincoln, they noted, who felt certain he would lose his bid for re-election during the 1860-1865 Civil War, sought to delay the election. 

“Never in the history of the federal elections have we not held an election, and we should go forward,” said  the Republican Party leader in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy. Likewise, Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, said, “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this November 3.”

On the surface, Trump’s threats seemed meaningless, even hallucinatory: The president of the United States has no power to change the election date—only Congress can do that through new legislation. “To call that unlikely would be an understatement,” the New York Times noted. Even if the election results were mired in Trump-manufactured chaos, which many now fear, the U.S. constitution dictates that a new presidential term will begin on January 20. If no sure winner has been declared by then, the presidency will pass to the Speaker of the House—who will almost certainly still be Representative Nancy Pelosi of California or some other Democrat. 

Still, Trump’s palpable fear of defeat—he could well be prosecuted on corruption charges once he leaves office—and his outright disdain for the U.S. system of sharing power with the courts and Congress, has left many people shaken. Underscoring their fears is Trump’s evident admiration for foreign strongmen like China’s Xi Jinping, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. In 2018, he notoriously voiced approval of Xi’s abolition of term limits. "I think it's great," he said. "Maybe we'll give that a shot someday.” 

Trump’s authoritarian drift—his deployment of paramilitary federal police agents against Black Lives Matter protesters, his refusal to submit to congressional oversight, his constant  dismissal of criticism as “fake news,” his denunciation of the media as “the enemy of the people” and defense of armed neo-Nazi and rightwing “militias” who have threatened Democratic officials—has made his critics and former associates deeply worried about the fate of the world’s longest-surviving republic.

One of them is none other than Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who pled guilty two years ago to paying hush money to two of Trump’s former sex partners during the 2016 campaign. In congressional testimony last year, Cohen declared 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.”


Winter is  Coming

Picture this: Late on the night of November 3, mainstream television networks led by CNN report that Trump  is holding a razor-thin victory margin in key swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Colorado. The votes of millions of Americans who voted by mail due to continuing high levels of coronavirus infections, however, have yet to be counted. The TV networks now  broadcast chaotic scenes at post offices around the country, where mail sorters, their numbers dramatically thinned in recent months by Trump’s postal boss, are drowning in ballots. Then, as night fades to daylight, the networks report that Joe Biden has taken the lead from the slow count of mail-in ballots. At noon, Fox News, a close ally of the president, begins reporting on “suspicious” vote counts in Democratic Party strongholds like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Atlanta. Pro-Trump social media and conspiracy-minded commentors, pick up the theme.  Russian, Chinese and Iranian agents, disguising themselves online as Trump “patriots,”  amplify the theme with waves of automated bots.

At 1 pm, Trump goes on TV and claims that the election is being “stolen” by the Democrats and their allies in the “Deep State,” a secret cabal of CIA, FBI and NSA officials who Trump and his conspiracy-minded followers have long imagined to be plotting against him.

By dawn, the election is still too close to call.  Soon, heavily armed right wing “militias” emerge from hiding and descend on state capitols where ballots are being counted. By week’s end, millions of ballots remain uncounted at post offices and ballot counting centers, especially in Democratic majority districts.   Reports trickle in of bomb threats and assassinations of Democratic officials. Trump’s secretary of homeland security blames “antifa,” a loose association of left-wing anarchists, for the violence. Anti-Trump demonstrations break out across the nation. His paramilitary squads start picking them in unmarked vans. 


A dystopian fantasy? 

Maybe, but Trump himself is keeping at least some of it alive. With his approval ratings sinking, his “Twitter Richter scale” on voting irregularities has been registering “off the charts”  over the summer, Democratic Party adviser Norm Eisen told The New Yorker Magazine last month. As recently as August 3, Trump pointed to the slow counting of mail-in votes in New York and other state-level races earlier this year, calling them “fraudulent ballots, I guess” and suggesting a “do-over” for those elections—with the obvious implication that he’d want one for himself if the vote dragged on into the winter.  He insisted he had “the right” to issue an order suspending mail-in votes. “We haven’t gotten there yet, we’ll see what happens.”

In fact, individual states have authority over its elections, not the president. 

But it’s just that kind of threat that energizes his supporters, most of whom believe the mythical Deep State is backing the Democrats. In March, Trump suggested that his supporters in the military and police and even bikers would rally to his side if things got “to a certain point.” 

In effect, he’s also created his own loyal paramilitary force at the Department of Homeland Security, whose agents landed in Portland, Oregon in July and swept up some demonstrators in unmarked vans. 

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” he told the right-wing news site Breitbart News.

Mike German, a retired FBI agent who spent months under cover with white power extremists in  the 1990s, is worried about the admiration police have shown for Trump, who has implicitly welcomed the support of neo-Nazis and white supremacists who used to advocate  killing cops.

Seeing police “glad-handing and posing for pictures with” pro-Trump mobs wielding automatic weapons and flying Confederate flags “is stunning,” German tells L’Espresso. The president had already “energized the white power movement significantly,” but when local police took a hands-off response to armed pro-Trump mobs, it “empowered them in dangerous ways, particularly in building alliances with law enforcement.”

“So yes,” German added, “I think you would see some serious violence from white supremacist groups if they felt the country was inching toward a civil war.”

They won’t likely come from the pot-bellied regulars at Trump’s huge Make America Great Again campaign shows, says journalist and author Carl Hoffman, who immersed himself in Trump’s crowds  for his new book,  “Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies.” The number of them who would commit violent acts for Trump “is oversold, just as is the violence of so-called antifa lefties,” he tells L’Espresso.

“Those nuts who show up with their guns are a small number, when all is said and done,” he said by email, “It’s a big leap to go from being a fat guy posturing with your gun to outright war.” Trump’s mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, he added, is also dampening their ardor for Trump. 

In the view of many critics, the American republic faces an existential crisis in the period between the November elections and the January 20 swearing in of the next president. There could be mounting violence in the streets, including in Washington, D.C. that could overwhelm local police and prompt Trump to deploy his loyalist Homeland Security units against protesters.

“This dynamic is pretty typical of authoritarian takeovers,” says Mike German, now at the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. “First the would-be authoritarian inspires thuggish violence against his political enemies with police looking the other way or even joining in. When the public demands an end to the violence the authoritarian demands more policing power to crack down on the thugs, but uses them more aggressively against his enemies.”

President Richard Nixon mused about using troops to stay in power in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. It went nowhere, primarily because the men around him chose loyalty to the Constitution over him. Would Trump’s obsequious staff be the same?  

“During Nixon's final days, when the president was drinking heavily and roaming the West Wing, talking to the oil portraits, Chief of Staff Al Haig agreed to call Defense Secretary James Schlesinger at home if the president tried to issue any sudden military orders,” recalled Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers,” an influential 2017 book on presidential chiefs of staff. “Could Trump pull off some sort of military coup? That's highly doubtful—look at the reaction to the president's Mussolini-like march to Lafayette Park, which brought swift rebukes from Generals James Mattis, Colin Powell, and Mike Mullen.” 


The moment his successor is sworn in, Trump will no longer have any legal powers. Nor will his subservient chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Willam Barr.

“If there is a federal court order regarding the election outcome that declares Biden the winner, and Trump refuses to leave office, the U.S. Marshalls Service would carry out that order,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI chief of Counterintelligence,tells L’Espresso. “They would of course need assistance from the Secret Service.”

Trump’s ouster will not, of course, bring an end to Trumpism. His followers believe that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chairman John Podesta, “rape and drink the blood of babies and that Trump was heaven-sent to build a wall to end that corruption and trafficking in babies,” says Carl Hoffman, who spent 170 hours standing in lines with his fans.  “Given this assault on truth and the fact that millions of people think masks are a hoax and vaccines are dangerous and that the best newspapers in the world are fake news, the long term trends are not good,” he said. “I don't see how that is ultimately counteracted.”