The Trump Show and The Coming Chaos

A Trump win on November 5th promises chaos. He has told us as much. Listen to him. Believe him.

“I will be your retribution,” he has promised his followers if he wins the election. He will go after “the enemies within,” who are simply his Democratic opponents, those American elected officials who have opposed him.

Equally menacing is the probability that chaos will also follow should he lose the election because Trump will never concede that Kamala Harris could beat him on November 5^th. Donald Trump is incapable of admitting defeat. He has always been incapable of admitting defeat. Listen to him earlier this month at a rally in Michigan, where he maintained that he won the 2020 election. "We won, we won, we did win. It was a rigged election; it was a rigged election.” While his inability to acknowledge defeat may simply be a Trumpian pathology, it represents a serious threat to political order in America. Donald Trump will savage his political opponents if he wins, and, of course, he will savage them as well if he loses.

Hold on to your hat. Severe turbulence ahead.

Donald Trump creates his own reality, and to him and his most ardent followers anything or anyone contradicting his clumsily curated election fiction is simply a purveyor of “fake news.”

For the record, I think Trump will likely win this election fair and square. At least, that’s what the current polling data suggests to me nine days before the election. I’m not happy about that, but that’s the reality I see in the poll numbers at this point in time. Trump and Harris are neck and neck in the polls, and his voters may be more determined to show up on election day. I also believe that Harris needs to be polling ahead of Trump by more than a couple of points to beat him. She isn’t doing that, so I think the advantage goes to Trump.

Nonetheless, the election is sure to be a cliffhanger, and Trump will never accept a close election that results in a Harris win. He will pull the house down before he accepts a narrow Harris victory. And because the election will be close, chaos will be central to Trump’s post-election strategy.

Remember, Trump still hasn’t conceded the 2020 election and won’t concede should he lose this election either. Trump conceding an election defeat, regardless of the extent of such a defeat, just isn’t going to happen. Despite his bravado, Trump is too fragile a man, and has too sensitive an ego to admit defeat. Senator Joe McCarthy’s henchman and Trump pal, the late Roy Cohn, taught Trump well. Never acknowledging defeat was central to Cohn’s political philosophy, and Roy Cohn had no more an attentive student than Donald Trump.

Following the 2020 election, Trump, without a shred of evidence of any meaningful election fraud, refused to acknowledge that Biden had beaten him, and Trump still outrageously maintains that he won the 2020 election. Trump lied four years ago, knowing full well that there was no significant fraud or error in tabulating the 2020 election results. He maligned election workers and pressured electors in several swing states where the election had been close to reverse the results. He even pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go rogue and send the vote-counting process back to several states to redo the results of a fair and free election.

The extent to which Donald Trump tried to trash the 2020 election is, without doubt, one of the great political scandals in the history of the republic, and the extent to which many Republican members of Congress were willing to go along with Trump’s scheme is also one of the great scandals in American history. It is an outrageous affront that has essentially gone unacknowledged, and for which Trump has paid no political price.

By largely tolerating what happened in 2020, many Republicans have effectively excused unprecedented rogue behavior at the top of their Party and, indeed, at the heart of the nation. As a former lifelong Republican, I do not believe the country can afford to tolerate such political behavior again. Four years ago, it was merely Trump’s ego and love of power that motivated him to try to trash America’s election integrity. Now, his motivation to hold on to power is even stronger. He is a convicted felon who is awaiting sentencing next month. He can make that reality disappear by holding on to the presidency, pardoning himself, and rewarding those who stand by him. The concern is that he intends to do that by any and every means possible.

Fortunately, the 2022 law reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 should substantially reduce the latitude for election mischief by clarifying that only governors and not state legislatures can send a certified list of electors to Congress to be counted. The new law should significantly reduce the danger of competing electors being sent to Congress, with one group consisting of faux electors that a highly partisan state legislature submits to compete with duly elected and certified electors submitted by the governor. Vice President Harris, who as President of the Senate will preside over the counting of the electors’ votes and will, of course, adhere to the new law which makes clear which electors’ votes will be counted in the event of dueling groups of elector votes being submitted; one by the governor and another by state legislators who may be more inclined to mischief.

Of course, the latitude for political parties to interfere in the administration of elections still exists. Whether or not the Republican Party will encourage Trump, if not enable him, to try to stay in power should he lose the election on November 5th remains to be seen. If he loses the election, his past behavior and the threat of chaos loom ominously. Given his criminal convictions, the threat of Trumpian chaos will more than likely metastasize into certainty.  

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Recent podcasts have featured my commentary on Liz Cheney’s book, “Oath and Honor,” as well as my commentaries regarding:

U.S. Representative Jim Jordan,

Brian Kemp and Those Republicans of Georgia,

The Trump Indictments,

The Fox Corp Settlement,

The CNN Trump Town Hall,

The Hunter Biden plea deal,

The New American Cult of Personality,

and my interviews with William Bratton, Retired Chief of Police in New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston;

Rikki Klieman, Attorney, Network News Analyst, and best-selling author;

John Thoresen, Executive Director, Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center;

Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and founder of the Institute for Political Innovation;

Jazz artist Ann Hampton Callaway;

Outlander author Diana Gabaldon;

AI Data Scientist Lawrence Kite;

Ryan Clancy, Chief Strategist of No Labels;

Senator Barbara Boxer;

Senator Joe Lieberman;

and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan.

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