I keep asking that question and I think we all probably know the answer. He will lose his mind and so will his supporters. Think about this:
In fairness, LaCivita was cutely suggesting that the Democrats were the ones who were going to contest the election of Trump rather than the other way around. But I think we know the reality of that statement, don’t we? Joe Biden certainly does:
Speaking to CBS News’s Robert Costa this week, President Joe Biden offered a pessimistic assessment of the aftermath of this year’s presidential election. “If [Donald] Trump loses, I’m not confident at all” that there would be a peaceful transfer of power, Biden said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have to be a stolen election.’”
The “bloodbath” comment to which Biden refers was offered at a Trump rally this year and, in context, appeared to refer to theoretical economic damage from Trump not returning to the White House. But the latter part of Biden’s comment, about how Trump is likely to frame any loss as a function of illegality, is unquestionably on the mark. It’s what he did in 2020, as you’re no doubt aware, and two-thirds of Republicans still tell pollsters that they think Biden’s win that year was somehow illegitimate. More than a third of Republicans say there’s solid evidence Biden didn’t win, which — despite four years of feverish looking — there isn’t.
It’s not clear that there’s any way to ensure that Trump’s supporters accept a loss this time around, either.
[…]
Pew Research Center polling conducted last month found that fewer than half of Republicans believed that the election would be “conducted fairly and accurately.” Recent YouGov polling, conducted for the Economist, determined that 8 in 10 Trump supporters think that he will defeat Harris in the election. Should Harris prevail, is it more likely that those Trump supporters will accept the defeat or that they will assume the election wasn’t fair and accurate?
A separate poll conducted by YouGov for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University determined that about 30 percent of Republicans who felt the 2020 election was stolen anticipate significant political violence after the election. That poll also found that a lot of Americans are concerned about misinformation — none more than those who reject the 2020 results.
“Republicans who believe Trump won in 2020 are more concerned about misinformation than any other group surveyed,” Johns Hopkins’s Hannah Robbins notes, “and believe ‘liberal media’ are responsible.”
Now you’ve got honest election officials who stood up for the truth last time being drummed out of their jobs either through threats and intimidation or primary elections. And in places around the country, Georgia notably just this week, we see changes to the laws which will allow Trump cronies and GOP henchmen to overturn a legitimate election of Harris with bogus charges of voter fraud and then certify Trump as the rightful winner even though he lost.
The odds are low that Trump would be able to seize power in the event of such a loss. But, as we saw in January 2021, that’s not the only possible negative consequence of his supporters thinking without evidence that the election was stolen.
I’m not sure the odds are as low as he suggests. We don’t know what the courts would do in the event of a state certification crisis. After all, the Supremes intervened in 2000 on behalf of Bush. Three of the justices were appointed by Trump and three of them worked for Bush in that earlier case. Do we really believe that they won’t do it again after what we’ve seen recently?
First things first, of course. Win the election. But nobody should be sanguine that the post election period won’t be complete chaos with an unpredictable outcome. This is what Trump has wrought.