Okay, I realize there’s about a 0.001% chance of it actually happening, but let’s say Trump and his cronies actually get enough ballots thrown out in enough states to turn the outcome of the election. Or that enough faithless electors cast their votes for Trump Instead of Biden, and on January 20 Trump takes the oath of office for the second time.
How will the nation react? Clearly there would be massive protests; some would turn violent. My guess is there would be attempts to storm the Capitol or even the White House. Would it be logistically possible to overcome security measures with enough people?
Elsewhere, would some states refuse to recognize Trump’s authority? How might that look and what would be the repercussions?
Or does anybody think the already tired resistance would become beaten and demoralized and ultimately be resigned to another four years - a best-case scenario for the administration?
Obviously this thread is pure speculation, and I sincerely hope we never find out the actual answer.
I think the predictions of civil war and revolt are overblown. People are couch potatoes by nature. I think we’d see massive protests against Trump for a few weeks, rioting, arson, etc. but it would eventually die down, especially with the pandemic discouraging crowd gatherings.
Certainly. The question is whether enough people would be willing to take up arms against various police and military security forces. I hope we don’t find out.
IMHO, the ratio of people who type up a storm behind their keyboards and call for civil war, or say they’ll start one, to the number of people who’ll actually in fact go out and take up arms, is something like ten thousand to one.
For me, by far the most likely scenario that leads to Trump still being president is some kind of Hayes-Tilden compromise to avoid something bloody. For example, say some states go along with the coup and/or something makes its way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court signals that it will be willing to do something that would invalidate the right ballots in just the right way to swing the election. The result is a sham, of course, and there’s massive upheaval, but Trump has enough of a claim to the White House that it isn’t a foregone conclusion that the Secret Service, the military, etc. will just basically point and laugh at him when he locks the door and stops answering texts in January.
If it gets to that point, then I think the most likely outcome is a negotiated presidency: you do such and such with coronavirus response, you appoint some of these people to Cabinet positions, and I (Joe Biden) will tell the significant numbers of people who aren’t buying it to, y’know, stand back and stand by.
I don’t think the reverse scenario would be enough impetus for that kind of compromise at this point – Trump won’t pose enough of a credible threat, even if the Q crowd and the Proud Boys dramatically ramp up the violence, that a compromise would be even close to less damaging to the country – so it would take some kind of “victory” of some sort to throw the next few years into serious doubt. Given the choice between digging trenches and slugging it out during a pandemic vs. capitulating on the major points to get some concessions on more minor ones, maybe Democrats would say OK, we’re not up for a civil war over this.
If that happened, yeah, I think your average person would post about it on the internet, not raid the armory.
We’re so far out beyond the norm that almost any prediction about what officialdom at any level will do is pointless. We’d do as well to ask Discobot for his predictions. And we ail know how irredeemably stupid he is.
In general I agree with the idea that the public is going to protest some, but not sustainably. A few dozen / hundred people get killed, a few (dozen?) buildings get stormed or occupied or burned, and that’s about it. Across the scale of our country it’ll be pinpricks individually and a pinprick collectively.
The real problem is that we have about 70M Trump haters spread all over the country. If they could all converge on Washington the weight alone would sink the city built on landfill into the Potomac. But they can’t. COVID or no it’s hard to fill DC day after day with the sheer number of angry bodies it takes to force the rest of officialdom to grow a pair and throw the bum out.
We could sure get there. But much like the Eastern European Color revolutions showed, it takes a couple decades of jerks kneeling on your neck before the public at large is resigned & cynical enough to risk it all in a bid to overthrow the tyrant.
Sure, that’s likely true. And yet, civil wars do actually occur. If 1 in 10,000 Americans were willing to actually take up arms against official state forces that’d be a pretty bloody conflict.
The problem with this scenario is that Trump has zero credibility with respect to any negotiation. No one believes he’d stick to anything. It seems remotely plausible that the previous American Civil War could have been prevented with such a move because the people involved in it were statesmen, rather than con-men.
Trump’s problem is he’s going to have a real hard time presenting any seizure of power as legitimate. Biden won the popular vote, the Electoral College, and has widely been identified as the winner. Trump’s going to need something along the lines of a Supreme Court decision made while he’s standing behind the justices with a loaded gun. Nobody is going to feel that what he did was legal.
Of course, some people won’t have a problem with that. They’ll say that Trump seizing power illegally just proves what how manly he is. But the majority of the public will feel Trump isn’t the real President.
What happens next depends on who emerges to lead opposition to Trump. If Biden and everyone else just gives up and goes along with events, public opposition won’t turn into effective resistance. But I figure somebody would emerge as a leader who would be telling people “You don’t think Trump should be President? Here’s what you should be doing.” My best guess as a strategy would be ongoing demonstrations and a series of general strikes; the equivalent of what King or Gandhi did. Make the country ungovernable until the Republicans give up and agree to turn on Trump and impeach him.
Yep. Can’t discount the occasional sufficiently motivated lone wingnut. If those lone wingnuts started banding together, then we’d have a problem. As we were dangerously close to seeing WRT those plots to kidnap governors.
My fault for reading too fast if they’re referring to people standing up to Trump and his minions rather than people standing up for Trump and his minions.
Yeah, I mean that’s the thing. If Trump seizes power, we either rise up to put him out of it or there goes our country.
It’s not like 4 years ago when some bullshit propaganda and the structural advantages of a rural party in the electoral college were enough to squeak him into victory, or like 2000 when the margin of victory was a few hundred votes and it came down to the Supreme court. It this election is somehow invalidated, that’s it for democracy.
I think a lot would depend on how American corporations react, which in turn would depend on how international leaders react. This is a global economy, after all.
Calls for a mass strike or boycott typically fizzle out like calls for civil war because - only a tiny percent of people who call for them, actually participate in them.
Goodbye to Social Security.
Goodbye to ObamaCare.
The virus pandemic will explode beyond anything we are seeing already.
The economy will tank and unemployment will skyrocket.
Couch Potato America will whine but do nothing, until they find crimes escalates in their neighborhood, people are dying en-mass from the virus, the societal supply chains crack and shortages of daily necessities drive them to … shift their asses on the couch a bit.
We will self-destruct and no one will do anything about it.
The irony is that if Trump seized power the US would essentially turn into Venezuela, the very thing Trump supporters have been claiming would happen under Biden. Massive corruption and unrest everywhere, an economy in tatters, rampant lawlessness dealt with by violent reprisals from government thugs, international condemnation and sanctions…the country would be seriously fucked. Because once it’s demonstrated that the mechanisms of democracy and justice are no longer in place, there’s nothing to stop it from happening.
Except when the cause is big enough. Then they don’t.
Movements in this country to extend the votes to women and to enforce the constitutional rights of black people succeeded. So did the movement to prohibit alcohol.
Personally, I feel a movement directed against removing from office a person who has illegally seized power over the country would have wider support than any of the above.