For the record, I think that Trump will ultimately forced to do a non-concession concession and leave office. He will fire people and use power plays until his last day in office, but like most people here, I think (hope is more like it) that one-by-one, states will be forced to certify their elections, legislatures will be forced to accept them, congressional republicans will be forced to accept them, and finally, Trump will be forced to confront the reality that his party has run out of reasonable explanations for his continued presidency and that they’re not quite ready to make the leap into an autocracy.
but the danger I’m seeing is that he is planting a seed in the minds of literally tens of millions of voters that this is another version of normal, that elections aren’t really over until the electoral college casts its formal votes in December. That has always been the technical truth but that’s not the understanding we’ve collectively had for at least the past century and longer. If people believe that there’s a legal alternative to elections, then the elections process becomes less meaningful going forward.
As a lot of us have said over the years, Trump isn’t exactly the brightest bulb and he operates on impulse and instinct. But if you were to have another populist in a few years who knows a little something about how power works on the back end, then we might have a real problem. But in the interim, the real problem is that voters could get to a point where they willingly vote for an authoritarian.