Trump Won't Leave
And the solution is worse
For my first post on Substack, I was hoping to write something a little less pessimistic, but here we are.
I sometimes think no one - at the centre and on the left at least - has been paying attention these last four years, during which time the pattern of Trump’s instincts have been clear and consistent. While he is often shocking, he is never surprising. He offends our sense of what ought to be, but everything he says and does is in keeping with who we know he is.
And so you may be, like me, shocked/not surprised at the idea that Trump may in fact never concede, and never leave office. This is unthinkable to most sane people, but not as unthinkable as the concept of him leaving is to the man himself.
I’m more convinced he’ll do anything to stay after seeing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement today that there will be a ‘smooth transition to the second Trump Administration’.
We treat these statements as hyperbole at our peril. They may seem absurd now, only to the extent that warm water seems comfortable to a frog freshly lowered into the pot.
What’s the likely course of events?
The beginning is obvious enough, and already upon us: Trump will challenge the result in the courts.
When he loses there, he will then accuse the judges - and perhaps the judiciary as a whole - of bias, as he has done before.
He’ll then ramp up the argument about the 'deep state', and the conspiracy against him. He’ll sack any member of the cabinet or administration who challenges his narrative.
All the while, the US population will be becoming more polarised over the legitimacy of the election results. Both sides will become more extreme and accusative, deepening the mutual animosity - music to Trump’s ears.
In the context of this, the Republican Party (who will hang onto the Senate) will increasingly side with Trump, like they have - with impish glee - at every turn since he won the election in 2016. As the culture polarises, those Republican senators that aren’t on board will be left with no option (Romney being a possible conscientious objector). Many of the party’s senators are already on record in support of Trump’s delusions about the election, including - as of today - Senator Roy Blunt, who said Trump ‘may not have been defeated’, adding ‘the President wasn’t defeated by huge numbers. In fact, he may not have been defeated at all’.
Why does a relatively obscure Senator like Blunt matter? Because he chairs the Senate Committee on Rules & Administration. Why does this matter? Because the Presidential Inauguration is organised by the Joint Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCIC), which is composed of the Houses Speaker and majority and minority leaders, working together with senators all drawn from the leadership of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. The JCIC is then chaired by a senator from the majority party of the senate (which will likely be the Republicans).
As a result, the inaugural committee will be dominated by Republicans, prominent among them at least one who is already on record doubting Trump has lost, and indeed suggesting he has won. All this is to say that, in the context of all the above, it is possible the committee do one of three things:
1) declare there will be no inauguration ceremony in 2021;
2) allow Trump to hold his own at the White House;
3) actually declare the inauguration in the usual place to be for Trump.
If it comes to this, I suspect they’ll take the first option.
In the first or second case, Trump would anyway hold his own inauguration ceremony at the White House - ‘the people’s house’ - using the building again as a prop, as he has now done several times. The symbolic weight of it all will make it seem quite plausible to half the country, and a fait accompli.
He will still be there on 21st January. At that point, the Republicans - in the Administration, the Senate, and the House, realise they are all committed, and there is no turning back.
A week after the election, and 4 days since Biden was declared the next President, this may sound insane.
But who, exactly, will push back on all this by then?
The Senate? Hardly a chance. It is held by the Republicans, and they have consistently bent for Trump. Why would they stop now, especially given that their Presidential candidate just won more votes than any Republican candidate ever, and had the best showing among ethnic minorities since 1960? They have also held the Senate, against all predictions, and despite all the polls.
Trumpism itself has also been soundly validated as a legitimate movement - and the future of the Republican Party, which has suddenly found itself with an expanded base, beyond poor whites. And they know that the more they hold out, the crazier the left will become, and they know that the more crazy the far left get, the more it will drive support to the GOP.
What about the House? Without the Senate, they have little power to change anything, as the impeachment hearings showed.
And what about the real elephant in the room, the option at the end of all options, the military?
First of all, as a Republican, Trump is popular with the military, and will take steps to make sure the leadership is on his side. It’s also foolish to underestimate the power of reality-distorting narratives on the minds of not just the general public, but soldiers, too.
But second - and more importantly - if the military have to remove Trump, on whose orders, precisely? He is the Commander in Chief. As a friend pointed out to me, if someone other than the President gives the orders, then isn’t that itself a coup, and thus the end of the republic? And if the entire point is that Biden isn’t a legitimate President in the eyes of Congress, then the military can’t do it - from 20 January onwards - in Biden's name either, as that would surely also be tantamount to a coup, and the end of the republic - and certainly be perceived as such by half the population.
In short, Trump’s bold move will have forced a set of bad options: let him have his second term, or force a military coup. No one wants to be responsible for the latter. And by contrast, Trump is fully committed to the former. He knows everyone else will blink before he does - as they always have, and always will.
Additionally, Trump knows that he has the element of surprise - no one right now expects the inquisition. No one expects him to really, genuinely, hold on. And he also knows he personally has more incentive to hang on than any other individual has personal incentive or power to act to push him out. Trump knows that he is and always has been the heaviest political body in the whole political system, and as such (according to my just-invented General Theory of Political Relativity) he is the greatest source of gravity within that system - he isn’t subject to the rules; he makes the rules. Like Prime Minister Johnson in the UK, there is no greater force in US politics - no denser personality - than him. As it is with matter through spacetime, they both warp the fabric of the political culture and society around them, leaving us all in their orbit.
But for now, the likes of Pompeo will brush off the outrage at his comments, and claim that they were a joke, and that people need to ‘lighten up’.
But this is what they always do.
They are trial ballooning the idea that there will be a ‘Second Trump Administration’, normalising people to the possibility, just as they did for the idea that the election would be 'rigged'. The water temperature will increase slowly, but it will rise, and by the time the frog is boiling, it will be too late.
Alarmist as it may sound, all this is to say I can’t help but feel the US is heading for a Second Civil War by way of an inevitable coup, be it by an intransigent incumbent, or by the military. Either way, the Republic may genuinely have only months before it enters - like Rome - its imperial period. Saying so undoubtedly sounds absurd and impossible. But the real risk is inversely proportional to how unlikely people think it is, and thus how complacent they will be.
People are still basking in the election result. But this is not the reality, and they need to wake up.