MODs: I apologize in advance if this becomes a $#!+storm. It wouldn’t be my first and, if worse comes to worst, I encourage you to lock it down and remove it from history, time, and databases everywhere. This is very clearly extremely speculative, so I’m putting it in IMHO – largely because I pass through here but don’t visit Politics & Elections. I trust you to move or leave it as is deemed best.
So I responded quite extensively in the other thread and, all the while, I kept wondering “We have the ‘2025’ plans and our own dreams and speculations of what we’ll do if the orange-haired narcissist (no, not my mother@, the other one) fails to win the November 2024 elections. But what will Donny Trump do?”
Last time he lost, he had four years to plant and nurture the seeds of ideas like voter fraud and ballot-stealing and all the stuff that paved the way to a just-in-case insurrection. And that insurrection or rebellion or whatever either side wants to call it ended up happening. This time, he’s spending a lot of time in a lot of courtrooms for various reasons. Is he too busy to start planting a new crop? Do we think he’ll whine and pout and jump and shout “Fraud! It was stolen from me AGAIN, I tell you!” …and call for razing the District of Columbia?
And I know it’s going to be extremely tempting to call him names and denigrate his character and belittle his behavior but I want you to suppress those temptations and give me some real analysis if you have any. I can’t imagine he’ll just quietly concede and say, “Oh well…back to real estate deals.” but I honestly have no idea what he’ll try to do A) if the election results are close, or B) If the election results show a vote in favor of ‘Not Trump’ quite clearly and unequivocably.
Let the speculation begin!
And hey! Let’s be civil out there!
–G? @She’s not trying to be a candidate for the US Presidency.
I expect most of them will scatter. His truly is a cult of personality, and such cults typically do not survive their leader for very long. How much damage will they cause when they scatter?
That right here is something where I have an issue with predictions and expectations. Because in November of 2020 I was hearing just that. “He doesn’t want to go because he knows once he’s no longer President soon he’ll be in jail/his creditors will bankrupt him into penury/both.” Hasn’t happened. Am not expecting it to happen, at least not to any degree that provides anyone a sense of cosmic payback. He’ll continue to be rich and a celebrity and will not spend more than one night in lockup, and for good measure he’ll live to be 90.
Wasn’t (hell, might as well say isn’t) that because he cannot conceive of himself losing at anything? I’m picturing the following conversation in November, 2016, sometime after election day:
Trump: I lost Connecticut. How could I lose Connecticut? There’s gotta be some election fraud there.
Flunky: Mr. Trump, you won the presidency overall. There’s no need to worry about Connecticut.
Trump: Maybe not to you, but dammit, I lost Connecticut! Somebody cheated—that’s what made me lose in Connecticut!
Him and his followers will do what they did in 2020. Claim any election that didn’t go their way was fraudulent. What they do with that, I don’t know. Thank god DC has such strict gun control laws because thats the only reason the coup attempt failed. Imagine if the January 6th coup had been armed, how much bloodshed there would have been. Well, the coup attempt would’ve still failed even if they were armed, but it would’ve been a lot more destructive if they had been armed.
The modern GOP base reminds me of the Wilmington insurrection of 1898. Angry white supremacists on the brink of violent insurrection at any time.
Geez!
I just keep thinking DT is an older (I wouldn’t say ‘grown up’) version of Anthony Friedman in 1961’s It’s a Good Life episode of The Twilight Zone.
Sorry…I just discovered the kid’s name was Anthony Fremont.
[And, still, I probably shouldn’t throw this rudeness around in my own thread when I said it shouldn’t be done. But it’s too late for me to delete the post.]
This. This is what he’ll do, and then press replay on 2020-2024 for four more years. There wont be another insurrection tho - the government and police at the Capitol and in DC are prepared this time. Trump will continue to hold the GOP by the short-and-curlys, just like with the border security funding thing just now. He’ll continue to whine and complain while fleecing his rubes, so long as he’s not locked up somewhere, or succumbed to any assortment of old-age health issues that prevent another repeat in 2028.
The OP asks what happens if Trump fails to win the November 2024 elections. And the answer is that he’ll do exactly what he tried to do last time he lost in November – use the Congressional count of electoral votes to steal the election.
Here’s the important thing to remember: when Congress meets to count the electoral votes on January 6, 2025, it will be the newly elected Congress that will conduct the count. Even if Biden wins, there is a strong possibility that Republicans will pick up a Senate majority given that they only need two seats and three currently Democratic seats are in deep red states. There’s also a good chance they can hold the House given newly gerrymandered maps in North Carolina.
During the count, Congress may invalidate a state’s electoral votes if a majority in both chambers agrees to do so. Republicans will come under enormous pressure to invalidate some Biden electors under some pretense. If they can sustain objections to sufficient Biden electors such that neither candidate has an electoral college majority, then it will go to a contingent election in the House. Which Trump will be well positioned to win.
If Trump loses the 2024 presidential election, he won’t be in any position to meaningfully hold the GOP by the short and curlies. Not only are the odds good that he’s going to be convicted and imprisoned, but given his age, he’s never going to be a candidate for the office again. As far as I can see, there’s nobody to replace Trump as MAGA’s cult leader and I just can’t see him replacing anyone. I’m sure Trump will try to do as much damage as possible on the way out, but I suspect when he loses even many of his followers will see him as a loser.
Well, it’s happening very slowly. He’s already due to pay out $88m to EJC, he’s likely to take another big hit from the Trump Org case, and there are assorted other civil cases (including Rudy’s) that will drain his coffers (or at least his donors’ coffers). I suspect you’re right about him escaping prison (or at least anything worse than house arrest) for the criminal charges, but we’ll see.
This is so important to remember. If the Democrats don’t win or retain at least one chamber, the election is not at all over until Jan. 6th even with a Biden blowout in November. Thanks to the cult, there’s yet another guardrail removed that we didn’t even know we needed before.
If he were the sort of person you could trust to keep a backroom deal, one could imagine going to him and guaranteeing there would be no effort to lay a finger on him if he just went away. But of course he is not, AND he wants to be seen as fighting and winning and getting one up on everyone else.
Spending a year or more in the pen would really break the spell. He’d be finished. And the sheer number of apparently upcoming trials makes one think that he’ll lose big at least once.
But there are a bunch of ways for him to dodge prison. The Georgia case looks to be in trouble. Bragg might just get a misdemeanor conviction. Maybe SCOTUS will help Trump out on appeals. Maybe he’ll get probation after a mixed verdict or two, and sell that as a win. Maybe the Secret Service will balk at prison. And politicians have a higher-than-average acquittal rate.
So I see a slight probability Trump never serves a real prison sentence, and sells that as victory.
And if Biden remains in good health, it will seem, in 2027, that Trump isn’t too old for another bid either.
So — 50-50 that he runs again. It would be harder for him to win the nomination than it was this time, but do it he probably would. And after eight years of a Democratic presidency, the out of office party usually wins.
There are a bunch of probable, but quite iffy, contingencies, every one of which has to go Trump’s way, for him to be elected in 2028 after losing this year. So he probably is done if he loses this year. But don’t count him out if he loses this cycle.
It is big. The most important change is that it now requires one-fifth of each chamber to object to electors in order for the objection to be considered (previously it only took one Representative and one Senator). Republicans will have no problem clearing this hurdle.
The act also limits the grounds for an objection to either that the electors of a state were not lawfully certified or an elector’s vote was “not regularly given.” But what “not regularly given” means is not defined, and much like “high crimes and misdemeanors” it’s ultimately whatever a majority of Congress decides meets the threshold.
As for Kamala Harris presiding over the count, the act also states that her role is strictly ministerial – she will have no authority to rule on the legitimacy of objections to electors.
That said, given the likely small majority Republicans will have even if they take the Senate and hold the House, it’s probable that an objection to Biden electors will not be successful. There are still a few dinosaurs that might not go along (fewer though – Romney will be gone). But if Republicans have a good night down ballot, all bets are off.