This was brought up in one of the longer threads, but it was, of course, one small part of a much bigger whole, so I thought I’d separate out the question here. It seems a significant discussion to me, because there can be a lot of daylight between what you’re afraid will happen and what you actually think will happen.
Please try to take the poll question in the spirit in which it was intended; I tried to figure out a wording that would cover any and all nitpicks and eventualities, and it’s like trying to outwit a genie.
ETA, I made a small grammatical tweak to the poll, and it erased the two votes I saw. If you’ve already put your vote in, you might want to try again.
Who will wield executive power in the United States on 1/31/20?
I feel this kind of question hides the nuance though.
Sure biden will be president, 100%. However, amid reports of firings at the CIA and Pentagon, and all these silly legal challenges, I’m still concerned there’s a small chance of an attempt to ignore the election result.
Trump can try to ignore the results, but he will officially be a trespasser in the White House past 12:00 noon on January 20, and a Biden spokesman has said that the government is capable of removing trespassers from the White House.
Besides, I predict he will go to Mar-A-Lago over Christmas holidays and simply not return to the White House. He’ll be too embarrassed to show his face when the inauguration takes place.
I’m not really sure what the point of the distinction is.
My expectation is that Trump will go into overdrive with the corruption as much as he can in the remainder of his term, effectively leveraging the office to benefit parties who will, in turn, benefit and enrich him later on. Then he’ll pardon himself at the last minute. Isn’t that bad enought?
Trump’s crack(ed) legal team will have a few more attempted lawsuits alleging voter fraud swatted down in the courts, selection of electors will go off as scheduled, and that will be that.
I’d frankly love to see Trump forcibly evicted from the White House. It’ll make a fabulous coda to the inevitable movie.
My concern is the possibility of not only Trump ignoring the results.
I can take some solace from the fact that even most Trump allies are treating him like a crazy uncle at this point. Humoring him, and still being respectful, but not explicitly supporting anything he’s saying.
I disagree. If you’re trying to seize power illegally, people are going to try to stop you. And ultimately, it comes down to a question of who can bring more firepower. And while Second Amendment types like to claim they can overthrow the government, they wouldn’t be able to stand up against real military forces.
Firstly, I have said repeatedly that I don’t think that an attempted coup could be successful in the US. When I said 99.9% chance of failing “horribly and immediately”, the remaining 0.1% is just the chance that it still fails but takes some time. Note that I put the chance of Biden being president at 100%.
Once again: I also thinka coup would not be successful.
But secondly, what I was correcting was your point that you need popular support to seize power. Perhaps this was just a bad choice of words? Because seize power itself implies “non-democratic”.
If your point is just that you need sufficient crazy mob support, which is a separate thing to support in an election, then I would argue Trump has it. Easily 20-25% of the country would be happy to see Trump illegally stay on; heck, I think CNN said that 70% of Republican voters apparently believe that the election was fraudulent.
From looking at examples around the world, 20% is plenty of crazy populace support. The more important support is of the military and the treasury anyway. There’s no way Trump is going to get that, and that’s why, in the crazy hypothetical where this all happens, it would fail.
If Trump has 20% of the people on his side then he has 80% of the people on the other side. And in a fight between 20% and 80%, the 20% loses.
If this was 2024 and Trump was coming to the end of his second term but the majority of people wanted him to stay in office, then he might be in a position to say, “Screw that 22nd Amendment. I’m going to stay President.”
If the military, the justice department, the secret service, the courts, the Congress, etc. all recognize Biden as president, then Trump will have no power. And that’s exactly what I expect to happen. I’d worry if Trump had managed to secure personal loyalty from those he would need to back a coup. He hasn’t. In fact, many of them despise him and will be happy to see him gone. And military leaders have made it clear that they won’t get involved in politics.
