Hello.
I agree with the general tenor of the thread that there are two potential sources of worry for the OP.
Can Trump overturn the election and hold onto power? (Or, more accurately, can his minions do this on his behalf, because Trump himself is too stupid and lazy to actually do anything, and expects his wishes to be delivered on demand.)
On this question, there is no real risk that Trump will succeed. He is a figurehead of and for morons. He’s unable to recruit or pay for top-quality assistance, legal or otherwise, and his team will crash and burn. Indeed, I believe he knows he will crash and burn, and after he goes to Mar-a-Lago for the Christmas holiday, he will simply refuse to return to the White House, in effect abandoning any pretense of governance in favor of continuing to grind his axes. He’s a bully and a coward, so he doesn’t want to risk the humiliating confrontation of being escorted from the White House, so he avoids that by his absence. The inauguration will go ahead, but Trump will essentially ignore it, claiming to be President in Exile or something, continuing to stoke division and trying to drum up interest in his next media venture (at least until state prosecutors come knocking and he relocates his circus to Dubai).
But there is a natural follow-up question, as suggested by many posters: Should we be concerned about what all of this says about the state of American democracy? And on that point, I believe the answer is clearly yes.
The majority of Trump’s GOP apparent allies don’t have any illusion that Trump will succeed. They know he’s lost, and will not be President after the 20th of January. They are staying silent for two reasons: First, they know that Trump’s cult of ignorant, screaming douchebags will persist, and any perceived disloyalty to the Naked Emperor will lead to their political detriment. But they are not simply remaining silent; they are watching closely, because Trump, in his wild thrashing, is also teaching them where the guardrails for democracy are strong, and where they’re weak, or nonexistent. Trump himself will fail — but his failure will be extremely instructive.
Further, in my view, the election of Trump in 2016 was itself a shrieking alarm bell for the health of the American experiment. It showed that the Fox noise machine had successfully carved off a huge segment of the electorate and constructed around them a self-perpetuating fiction of fear, anger, and racial grievance. It showed that the Right’s 40-year campaign to establish for themselves a state of permanent minority rule through gerrymandering, suppression, and other dirty tricks was paying off. It showed that the soma of social media was biasing our minds toward the direct and the immediate, shrinking our perception of history from centuries and decades down to the weeks and days of news cycles.
I do not believe the American experiment has ended. But I do believe its end is now inevitable, and that this was clear after the 2016 election.
This is not idle salon chatter, either, the disconnected speculation of a dilettante observer. I am dead serious about it. Which is why I, personally, put my money where my mouth is, as they say, and relocated my family to Europe. The United States still has the wealth and strength of a superpower, but it is hollow, and it will not sustain. The future of the forward march of civilization is elsewhere. I gambled on Europe, and while nothing is certain, it seems to have been a reasonable bet. After almost four years, my children are fluent in multiple languages, and my wife and I are making progress on the checklist for alternate citizenship. Once we’ve secured our new passports, one or both of us will renounce our American identities.
Does it hurt to turn our back on the U.S.? Yeah. But in many ways, the country was already turning its back on us.
So to the OP: There are different scales and nuances on which to gauge foolishness. It’s not a binary yes-or-no. In some respects, this may be comforting, because in a few weeks Trump will be out of the White House, and things will be somewhat better. But in other respects, there is no comfort to be found, because the forces that gave rise to Trump will continue their inexorable assault on democracy.