Along with facing disaster whichever candidate wins next week, we also face the prospect that one of them will lose. Do not expect the loser and their supporters to accept their fate with grace.
Should Trump lose he will roll out the 2020 Stop The Steal Playbook.(1) He will never accept any result when he loses. Remember, he didn't just say he won in 2020, he claimed he won in a landslide. Even when he wins, Trump makes outrageous claims; in 2016 he said that the result in California, a state he lost by 4 million votes, was rigged and he would have carried the state in an honest election.
He will once again rile up his hardcore supporters. Trump will have no strategy, no long-term plan; he just loves stirring stuff up and seeing that his supporters still love him. What happens next, since he is not the incumbent this time around, is hard to predict, but it will be ugly, and likely punctuated with violence, whatever form it takes. Expect to see attempts to get state legislatures refuse to certify electors, although I think the changes to the electoral college Congressional vote counting process made since 2021 make federal obstruction less likely. I see no sign that Trump will fade from the scene unless he is physically and/or mentally disabled, thus delaying the emergence of whatever will come as the next generation of GOP leaders (if there is still to be a GOP).
On the other side it is not a person who is of concern - it's Democrats. Harris is a nothing and if she loses her political career is ended. Other than recriminations in the immediate wake of the defeat she'll be a soon forgotten figure. However, the Democrats and their institutional supporters in the government, academia, media, the foundations & NGOs, and the corporate world will be mobilized; it'll be 2016 on steroids and an amplification of what had been planned in 2020 if Trump won. The goal will be to disrupt and impede any attempt to restore normality if Trump wins.
In 2016 Democrats worked themselves into hysteria over Trump, somehow convincing themselves that a gullible and easily manipulated figure, with little interest in the details of policy, and with erratic behavior and occasionally outrageous rhetoric, was actually a Nazi who kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bed (yes, I heard this from people), prepared to become a dictator, and unleash his brown shirt legions on America. Somehow Trump forgot to do all that during his administration but in 2025 he'll supposedly get around to it.
After his election in 2016, the Democrats and their allies in the media and in the government conspired to continue and elevate the Russia collusion hoax. And, breaking with more than two centuries of precedent, the Senate Democrats routinely obstructed the approval process for even noncontroversial nominees for federal jobs in order to prevent the administration from functioning. If Trump had won in 2020 the Democratic plan was to bring the mobs out into the street across American cities and do even more than during his first administration to prevent The Donald from exercising his constitutional powers. This year, Democrats and their allies have been whipped up into a hysterical frenzy far surpassing that of 2016 and 2020. I expect that if Trump wins in 2024, we will see protests, violence, obstruction way beyond that of 2016 along with the federal bureaucracy sabotaging the administration of a democratically elected president.
Good times are not coming.
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(1) I live in Maricopa County, Arizona, ground zero for one of the key alleged steals. Trump narrowly won the county in 2016, narrowly losing it in 2020. I read all of the allegations regarding the steal, the documents from the "forensic audit" by the Cyber Ninjas, the county's response, as well as learning a bit about Arizona election laws. The steal claims here were junk; laughably idiotic.
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