How bad will the violence get if Trump wins?

Politics & Elections
1

There has been a lot of discussion about Trump refusing to concede the election if and when he loses. About his “tough people” (bikers, cops) taking to the streets if the election is “stolen” (his word for any election he loses).

But what if he just…wins?

Picture this scene. Is it implausible?

INAUGURATION DAY (or maybe just the day the election results are certified?).

MASSIVE DAYTIME PROTESTS across the nation. They make the Women’s March, the March on Washington, etc., look puny. Teachers, actors, professional athletes, various other sympathetic (particularly young) people go on strike.

NIGHT FALLS.

The older and more peaceful-type protesters go home for the night. The street roils with anger.

BURNING. Molotov cocktails are flying left and right.

LOOTING galore.

GENERAL MAYHEM. Vehicles overturned and smashed everywhere.

THE NATIONAL GUARD MOVES IN. The angry crowd surges at them despite the tear gas. The Guard starts firing rubber bullets, but they are overwhelmed. Rioters begin to beat everyone they find in a uniform. Live TV is filled with images of bloody Guardsmen and women staggering around battered, bloody, and bruised. They are pelted with bottles and refuse.

Exurban MAGAheads with AR-10s and AR-15s see this on TV and jump in their pickup trucks and roar into the city. They begin shooting at the crowds indiscriminately. MSNBC films the hospitals filling up with casualties, including members of the news media and others who insist they were not engaging in violence or even looting. FOX stays mostly with the footage of the Guardsmen, and their talking heads insist they would have all been beaten to death had the vigilantes not come to the rescue (and they find Guard members who express profuse gratitude for their doing so). Whether or not this is true, who knows? What’s definite is that the vigilante MAGA mob has been indiscriminate in its targets, just as we saw in Kenosha but on a much larger scale.

The next day, Trump has sent in helicopters and federal troops and told them to use live rounds, no rubber bullets this time. They are backed by an even larger wave of MAGA brownshirt “citizen militia” types.

But plenty of BLMers and antifa types come packing weapons as well, ready to martyr themselves.

What happens on Night 2? :grimacing: How can it not make Kent State look like a tiny skirmish by comparison?

2

Good question. The Democrats have yet to concede the 2016 election. So when they lose the 2020 election as well, they are bound to go even further down the rabbit hole. Things could get very ugly indeed.

3

Nice try, but they wouldn’t get as ugly as I envision if the MAGA side showed restraint.

4

It will be much more severe than in 2016, that’s for sure. 2016 mostly featured a lot of protests, some schools canceled class for a day, but was relatively peaceful.

This time around, if Trump wins, the nation has already seen four full years of his incompetence and disastrous governance, so the backlash will be that much more intense, especially if he wins the Electoral College while once again losing the popular vote, or there was widespread disenfranchisement or something. We’ll see a lot of molotov cocktails and rioting and arson, but no civil war.

5

I actually think the rioting could be worse if the victory doesn’t look fraudulent. The young people who so vehemently oppose him would be incredibly pissed at the rest of the country for voting him back into office–and who could blame them?

6

No matter who wins, there are going to be riots. Lots of riots. Have you ever seen a city after its sports team wins the championship? Riot! Whether they’re celebrating or protesting, people are going to riot because everyone is going to be hyper emotional after this election.

7

Everyone who is civilized? What’s going on now with the riots, looting, assaults, and general intimidation all to advance a political agenda is shameful. The world doesn’t revolve around the desires of toddlers in adult bodies.

8

I can’t, it’s just too easy.

9

IKR? @octopus, how did you write the phrase “the desires of toddlers in adult bodies” from an apparently pro-Trump position, without a trace of irony? Unbelievable.

10

I’m not the one burning occupied buildings, looting business, engaged in assaults, or tearing down statues of oppressive reptiles from the Jurassic era. That’s the Biden supporters. So, any fear of violence shouldn’t be reserved for after the election when the unhinged are allowed to run amok now.

11

Here we go again. You’re making it too easy - repeating the last phrase you write is the definitive riposte to every post you make.

12

Does it embarrass you that democrats are engaged in these destructive behaviors? Why is there more condemnation on this site about women making tacos, a kid wearing a hat, or commenting on Betty and Wilma from the Flintstones than there is for the riots happening every night in Democrat cities?

13

Ok, I’ll try harder.

I’m not the one burning the Constitution, looting the economy, engaged in violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations, tearing down principles of democracy and honorable governance that have stood since the era of the Founding Fathers. That’s the Trump administration.

14

And who was it who was caught on video attending a Trump rally, and drove to Kenosha to take random potshots at people?

Who drove in from the suburbs to shoot paintballs and pepper spray at protesters downtown?

I’m not saying everyone on the anti-Trump side is a bunch of innocent little peaceful angels. Anyone following my posts knows I have major issues with BLM and antifa. But I’m not about to let you get away with pretending there’s no fault on the MAGA side.

ETA: And they are DemocratIC cities. We don’t call your voters “Republic voters”, why can’t you have the common decency to use the correct adjectival form for Democrats?

15

I was a little psyched when some of the sports teams postponed a single game. It is a microscopic step towards a general strike.

But you would need 60 million people to stay home and not work for as long as it took, without any govt support. And they’d have to prep in advance.

So it ain’t gonna happen. But that is gonna be the only way out if Biden loses.

16

A related issue is that there’s good evidence Biden voters use mail-in ballots disproportionately — so it might look like we’re heading for a Trump victory on election night and into the next day (as in-person voting totals are reported), but we’ll find out a day or two later (even, perhaps, a week or two) Biden has actually won.

If this happens, would there be muted but discernible, angry (even sporadically rather violent) protests by Biden voters on election night and the next day…but then even angrier, more generally violent protests by Trump voters a week later, when they realize they’d in fact lost?

It’s human nature to be especially disappointed when you think you’ve won, then realize you haven’t. More to the point, some Trump voters (and likely Trump himself) would angrily question the validity of many of these mail-in ballots, in this scenario.

Anyway, at least this scenario would let both sides in this thread enjoy blaming the other side for acting violently in certain locations.

17

I don’t see the point in imagining what happens if Trump wins legitimately. If it’s apparent that Biden is weak sauce and loses, then Democratic voters will likely accept it just like they accepted Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

Let’s stick with reality.

The reality is that all of the evidence going back to last summer indicates that Biden is a more popular candidate than Trump, and that fact puts Trump and his criminal administration in danger of prosecution after being forced out of office.

This is an existential crisis not only for Trump but for anyone who has engaged in illegal conduct during his administration (let’s start with the Hatch Act during the RNC, for instance). This isn’t about just winning an election; for some, this election is about staying out of jail and having the continued ability to use public office to enrich themselves. There’s every incentive to lie, cheat, and steal in this campaign in order to retain power.

Ah, but there’s this nagging popularity problem. If the Trump team looks at the math of the 2016 vote and compares it to the polling going back to last summer, they know that there’s probably a 75-95% probability that Biden will have enough votes to not only claim the nationwide popular vote but also enough in individual states to claim the electoral prizes, if – and this is a big if – we use the standard procedures of taking the initial vote count and then using those to cast electoral ballots.

The aim, then, is to find ways to cast doubt on the entire process. They’ve been gas lighting the public since January 2017 about pretty much everything, and for the most part, there has been no negative consequence for doing it. So there is every incentive to get Trump’s brainwashed supporters to believe - and have no doubt that they will - that the election is rigged. So there you have it: if Trump loses, nearly half the electorate will have a very hard time accepting that Joe Biden is the President.

But to answer the OP’s question, let’s flip this around. Let’s assume that Trump “wins.” Let’s assume that he “wins” with news reports about potentially unprecedented voter suppression in key states. Or let’s suppose that Trump “wins” as a result of a contested election that somehow makes its way to the House of Reps, which then anoints Trump to a second term (the GOP still has more state delegations than Democrats, so they’d have the advantage despite being a minority party).

I don’t think that would sit too well with Biden’s voters. What they would do is anyone’s guess, but I’d imagine there would be some major protests. But Trump’s voters would probably sit home, drink a beer, and laugh at the cryin’ libs. It’s what happens if they lose or think they will lose that worries me.

18

Trump wouldn’t need to hold a lead on election night to air his grievances though. On election day, there’s a good chance that his internal pollsters will approach him and give him the news that things are not looking good based on exit polling. Trump will then watch the results come in and if it looks like he’s losing, he’s going to take the entire chessboard, pieces and all, and chuck it across the room and claim that he’s been cheated.

“But he’ll be losing and the party will realize that the gig is up. They’ll realize that Trump’s politics aren’t working and go back to being a more moderate party again.”

No, not necessarily. The party has invested heavily in Trump because the tens of millions of GOP voters have made it clear that this is their guy, and that this is their politics.

19

One hitch to that, and it’s obviously only based on my own speculation:

Exit polling depends on physical voters. I think physical voters are going to be extremely low but that a higher proportion of them than usual will be Trump voters.

So I’m not sure how much anybody is going to be able to rely on exit polling until the polls close. Exit polling usually gets done in the morning and you usually have pundit network anchors starting to drop hints by the middle of the afternoon east coast time. I’m not sure we’re gonna see that this time unless it’s a tsunami.

20

For that matter. I don’t see why Trump wouldn’t just call a cabinet meeting about 2 pm, get Gen. Dumbfuck Milley over there on some pretense, and then walk out with them all and declare that “it’s clear already” that he won.