Wasn’t Huey Long a sort of populist, Trump-like figure? I really only know him reading about his assassination. But I think he was a sort of bombastic blowhard and I believe had designs on becoming president.
Long was a populist, but not in the manner that Trump is pretending to be. Long was critical of the New Deal because he thought it didn’t go far enough. He advocated for a wealth tax and wealth re-distribution.
Long was definitely controversial, though. There are some analogues to Trump in how he operated. Of course, Long never became President, so a full comparison is impossible.
Is it conceivable that there might be calls for refusing to accept a Trump win? If enough people were really convinced that Trump was going to pull a Hitler-1933 if he was allowed to be inaugurated, or if people believed on one theory or another that Trump was ineligible to take office?
No, the Democrats are doormats. They’d let Trump take power even if they genuinely believed the result would be a fascist dictatorship and their own deaths. They believe too much in “normalcy” and “following the rules” to do anything else.
The Business Plot (aka the Wall Street Putsch or the White House Putsch)
In 1934, retired General Smedley Butler testified before a House of Representatives committee that in the previous year a group of wealthy industrialists had been planning a coup to replace FDR with a military dictator and had offered him the position, which he declined.
Historians now agree that while there was some discussion of such a plot, we cannot determine how close the plotters were to actually executing it.