Will He Go?

CHAPTER 2

Trump Rejects Defeat

How can we make this prediction with such confidence? In February 2019, Michael Cohen ended his testimony before the House Oversight Committee with this note of alarm: “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”¹ Two months later, in an interview with the New York Times, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed this concern, warning that should Trump lose, “he’s not going to respect the election.”²

We needn’t turn to Trump’s former “fixer” or to the House Speaker for insight into Trump’s intentions. Trump himself has essentially told the nation he will never accept defeat. In the run-up to the 2016 election, he insisted in a tweet that “there is large-scale voter fraud happening” and predicted that the election “could be ‘stolen’” from him. His campaign website entreated supporters to “help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”³ In an August 2016 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump predicted that “the election is going to be rigged,” adding, “I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”⁴

Two months later, in his third and final debate with Hillary Clinton, candidate Trump refused to answer when moderator Chris Wallace asked him whether he would “absolutely accept the result” of an electoral loss. “I’ll look at it at the time,” Trump responded. Reminded by Wallace that the peaceful transition of power is a critical feature of our constitutional order and essential to American political stability, Trump still refused to commit to accepting the results. “I will tell you at the time,” he repeated. “I’ll keep you in suspense.”

The comment left Hillary Clinton visibly stunned. Calling Trump’s response “horrifying,” she went on to elaborate: “That is not the way our democracy works. We’ve been around for 240 years.… We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”⁵

Clinton was hardly alone in her astonishment and dismay. In its post-debate coverage, MSNBC ran a chyron: “Trump Refuses to Say If He Will Accept Election Results.” CNN led with virtually the same message—“Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results”—while the Associated Press declared that “Trump Refuses to Say He Will Accept Election Result,” and accused him of “threatening to upend a basic pillar of American democracy.”⁶

The prominent American historian Douglas Brinkley went further still, describing Trump’s words as “secessionist” and “revolutionary”; they were the views of a presidential candidate, Brinkley commented, “trying to topple the apple cart entirely.”⁷

Most pundits, on both the left and the right, agreed that in challenging the peaceful transition of power, Trump had sealed his fate. Nicolle Wallace, an NBC News analyst and advisor to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said, “He may as well have laid down in his own coffin with a hammer and nail and pounded it in himself.”⁸

Nonetheless, the Obama White House was sufficiently concerned by the possibility that Trump would refuse to accept defeat that senior staff convened in late October 2016 to fashion a response to the political crisis such a refusal would ignite. The plan called for congressional Republicans, former presidents, and former cabinet-level officials, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, to publicly validate Clinton’s victory. They would also emphasize the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community—namely, that the Russians had interfered with the election and had done so to favor Trump, not Clinton. The idea, as Ben Rhodes explained, was to avert any potential crisis in as bipartisan a manner as possible.⁹

⁹

CHAPTER 3

Trump Rejects Victory

While Trump’s election may have spared the nation the trauma of a presidential candidate refusing to accept defeat, it presented us a no less unusual display—a president-elect challenging his victory. In January 2017, the freshly inaugurated president tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” In the following days, Trump repeated and refined this claim, insisting that three to five million illegals threw the popular-vote count to Clinton. By way of proof, the president waved at an outlandish story: that golfing great Bernhard Langer had allegedly been barred from a polling station while others “who did not look as if they should be allowed to vote” were allowed in.¹ Never mind that American voters have no particular “look”—or that Langer, a German citizen, could not himself have legally cast a ballot in 2016; the significant story here was the specter of a freshly inaugurated president challenging the results of an election that he had won.

In the 2018 midterms, Trump again played the fraud card. In Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis enjoyed a slim lead in the gubernatorial race, as did Republican Rick Scott in the Senate race, but state-mandated recounts promised to erode and possibly reverse these leads. Taking to Twitter, Trump attacked the recounts, alleging, again without an iota of proof, that Democrats were committing fraud:

The recounts did not overturn DeSantis’s and Scott’s victories, but rather confirmed them; still, the episode again revealed a Trump fully prepared to attack the integrity of the electoral process in order to get the result he wants.

²

CHAPTER 4

Elections the Authoritarian Way

The prospect of Trump refusing to accept electoral defeat in 2020 raises an obvious question: What would he hope to gain by challenging the system of peaceful succession?

To answer this, let me begin with an obverse question: Why would any incumbent leader ever accept electoral defeat? If the question sounds frivolous—if our clear answer is “Because he lost”—it’s only because the astonishing stability of our constitutional order makes us see the peaceful succession of power as a natural and inevitable feature of political systems. In truth, it is anything but.

Those who have studied nations transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy have shown that it is always easier to stage the first democratic election than the second.¹ The first election is a moment of promise; it typically features a contest between persons offering bright visions of a nation’s future, with no candidate enjoying a claim to leadership prior to the verdict of the people. And whatever their differences, all the candidates typically express support for the nation’s fledgling democracy and pledge to eliminate the vestiges of authoritarianism.

Yet once installed in office, the new leader’s enthusiasm for democratic elections begins to wane. As the next election looms, the leader is now something more than a candidate—he is an incumbent. For the incumbent, the original justification for staging an election no longer applies. The electoral process has already served its purpose—it has installed him in power. With that power comes wealth, prestige, and immense influence, not only for the incumbent himself, but for a large coterie of supporters who share in the administration of power or otherwise benefit from the largesse of the regime. For the incumbent and his supporters, the very process that brought them to power now represents a threat.