He’s already sniveled, “We’ll see.” when asked if he would accept an election win for Hillary. He’s been yelling for weeks about the election being rigged before the voting even started.
What if Hillary wins and Trump doesn’t accept it? Do we go through another debacle like the 2000 election?
Does Hillary take the oath anyway, and some gun nut take Donald’s hint to stop her? Do militia types rise up?
Or do things just chug along as Trump has public tantrums that get more and more irritating because the media still gives him a public stage, and he’s not going to give up the spotlight no matter what? And the networks go along because they keep hoping he’ll pull a Bud Dwyer or something equally riveting?
Trump keeps on complaining and whining and crying about how unfaaair the election was.
Media gives him lots and lots of exposure, because everyone loves a dumpster fire, and Trump brings eyeballs to advertisers.
This keeps up for months and months and months. Trump ups the ante whenever media exposure flags.
President Clinton is trashed continually by the usual suspects - Fox News, Brietbart, etc.
A few lone nuts try to stir up violence, but it is quashed pretty quickly. One major militant group is noisily arrested. FoxNews/Brietbart try to spin this as a popular uprising quashed by Clinton’s military jackboots.
Republicans in congress try to outdo their own obstructionism. They will not entertain the thought of ANY presidential appointments of any kind. Priority #1 for the country is to destroy Clinton.
-Republicans in congress will want a special prosecutor who will investigate every haircut and nail clipping of Clinton going back 30 years. Investigation to continue in perpetuity.
Or, Trump keeps behaving like a toddler until people get bored and move on to the next reality show or celebrity divorce. Trump keeps complaining to anyone who will listen, but eventually that becomes a very small group of family and yes-men.
Melania applies for citizenship under Clinton, and once she becomes a citizen, divorces Trump. He gets a couple more days of the spotlight, then it goes away again.
Because Trump actually has a pretty short attention span, he finally moves on. He hasn’t learned anything. He’s just lost interest. He marries some 20-year-old who voted for him.
There was enough down-ballot effect of people voting for Clinton that there plenty of Democrats in congress and the senate that she can get things done.
Old party Republicans, as opposed to the Trump-loons did learn something, and in the next round of senate elections nominate more moderates; they also start telling the people already in office to stop being brats.
When I think of Trump, I think of the comic Philbert Desanex’s 100,000th dream where Desanex gets charisma and is made leader, then suddenly “poof poof poof” you can see the charisma jumping off his body and he becomes a nobody.
November 9, the Secret Service ceases protecting him. All of a sudden, he has no reason to be on television. Republicans, as they always do, stop giving their losing nominee the time of day. Before the cock crows three times on November 9, all the Republicans in Congress will deny knowing him. The Trumpians and Trumpettes have no rallies to attend and they spend the next four years muttering about what might have been. A few of the more mentally-challenged ones may attempt some act of insurrection but will be quickly snuffed out. There may be even a clumsy plot to assassinate Hillary but it will be easily stopped.
He will be laughed at by most, listened to by his most fervent supporters. I see people on Facebook, always Trump supporters, talking about the rigged election. They are bracing themselves for a loss they can feel even though they deny it and claim he is winning. I can tell they know it is going badly.
If Trump loses, you will be truly amazed and how quickly interest in his fades. He isn’t really a Republican, and the public fascination with him is built on the assumption that he is a Yuge Winner who’s going to put Hillary in jail and do all kinds of neat things as President.
On November 9, if he’s not President-Elect, he’ no longer a Yuge Winner, the GOP will be secretly relieved he’s gone and looking forward to the 2018 and 2020 elections, and he’ll have shocked and disappointed the people who thought he was going to change things. His followers will seek out a new Messiah, because the white nationalist Messiah can’t be a person who loses the election. As fast as they lose interest in him, Trump will lose interest in his followers even faster. They are useful to him for donations and votes and nothing else; once that is no longer an issue, they’re irrelevant to him, unless he can convert them into some other kind of customer (such as of a show.)
Will Trump have public tantrums? Possibly, but remember that Trump, for all his horrid bluster, has failed before, and every time he brushes himself off and careens into his next 53 ventures. Trump has engaged in more ventures than you can count; most have succeeded, many have failed. He doesn’t get too hung up on the failures; you don’t see him suing people over the Trump Steaks fiasco. He just keeps rolling. It’s hard to imagine him giving a concession speech, but he won’t stick around making frivolous arguments about it. He’ll move on to something else, probably some kind of media effort.
He will concede graciously, retire to private life, and spend his days in charity work amid the downtrodden, culminating in the Nobel Peace Prize. He will become a sort of elder statesman, periodically providing wise insights into the vagaries of the US political system, and working to better the country and his fellow man.
Or else he will complain a lot, file some lawsuits, and go back to reality TV.
My concern is that about 5-10% of the population will cling to Trump’s claims about rigged elections and the like and that another 10-20% will passively accept some portions of the story. (Kind of like how people felt about birther claims, with some seeing massive Islamic conspiracies and others passively accepting the lie.)
These people won’t achieve much on their own, but they’ll push for all kinds of “reforms” that may sound just good enough to the rest of the population to cause some serious damage. Everything from onerous voter registration/verification schemes to disempowering various government agencies (much like we’ve already seen with federal land management and the IRS). Many of these changes will be at the state or even county/city level where you get concentrations of conspiracy believers.
If there’s one thing that political parties are good at doing, it’s jettisoning losers. Two weeks after the loss, there will hardly be anybody in the GOP who will admit to even having met Trump, let alone supporting him, and his name will be flushed down the memory hole forever.
I’m totally flummoxed trying to predict how the Small-Handed One will equivocate his way around avoiding accepting being beaten by a girl.
So - he’ll just re-puke his “rigged” shit, and then storm off?
And of course with Hillary taking the oath anyway, that’ll be fodder for alt-right dingleberries to start whining about “oh boo-hoo she unconstitutionally made herself president without her opponent’s acceptance.”
Except for a total of 7 days since May he’s been losing in the polls on a daily basis, sometimes by as much as 10 percentage points. I’m not so sure they would be able to get rid of him so easily if he chooses to fight it in the courts. The question is, does he wage that fight with his money or does he ask for help? And who helps him if he calls?
I say that we just tell him that he won. Set him up on a set from west wing, and make it a reality show.
To be honest, I am sure that we all would be fascinated by what a Trump presidency would look like, we just don’t want to live there.
This way, we can have the best of both worlds.
If we get fox in on it, we may manage to convince his more ardent supporters that he won too. We’d let Melania and Ivanka in on it, but tell his sons that their daddy won.
Except there isn’t a constitutional requirement for the loser to concede … it is all in the hands of the electoral college, what actually happens on ‘election day’ [presidentially speaking, we aren’t talking about anything else on the ballot] isn’t anything except the individual voters indicating how they want the electoral dudes to vote.
If history is any guide, he’ll start filing frivolous lawsuits left and right, weaving it into a grotesque business venture like a reality show or a news network. He does have a short attention span, except when attention is focused on him.
I mean, c’mon, even Sarah Palin stayed around in some guise or other when being governor got too tough for her. And she’s just a sophomore media manipulator.
