As if we don’t have enough to worry about, comes now another reason to forgo a good night’s sleep: What happens if Donald Trump loses the election but refuses to leave the White House?
The punditry class has been quaking over this diabolical conundrum for weeks, largely out of boredom. After all, stories about Trump ignoring a deadly virus, encouraging racial unrest, destroying environmental protections and sexually assaulting women have gotten quite stale. So let’s entertain a new disaster, like whether The Donald can force himself on us for four more years.
The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman filled the current issue’s cover story, “The Election That Could Break America,” with a frighteningly persuasive argument that, in the author’s words: “If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result.”
A few days later, someone else presented a far stronger case in support of Gellman’s dystopian narrative. It came from Trump himself. He is now refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event of an election loss. The president of the United States actually stood before a news conference and insisted that we need to “get rid of the ballots.” He was presumably talking about mail ballots. Polling shows that 37 percent of registered voters plan to vote by mail, and most are Biden supporters. Trump, who votes by mail, contends – without evidence – that Democrats somehow plan to rig the election through mail ballots.
So here we are, a tad more than a month before election day, and the incumbent candidate is demanding to either eliminate or not count mail ballots because of what only he sees as rampant election fraud. It’s not too hard to imagine Trump, with full support from his obsequious attorney general, sending federal marshals into swing states to impound mail ballots before they are counted.
Although the Constitution unambiguously provides that a president’s term “shall end” at noon on January 20, here’s Gellman’s what-if: “. . . two men show up to be sworn in, and one of them comes with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.”
Here’s how Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, responded to that question in The Atlantic piece: “We are not prepared for this at all.” The professor’s observation aptly applies to everything about Donald Trump. We were not prepared for his election. We were not prepared for his presidency. And we are certainly not prepared for what may well be the country’s most fraught and chaotic transfer-of-power-exit.
In crafting our democracy, our founders covered many exigencies. One that they missed was what to do when a president is so deranged and delusional that he has zero understanding of reality. As journalist Bob Woodward, after 18 interviews with Trump, said last week, “I don’t know, to be honest, whether he’s got it straight . . . what is real and what is unreal.”
Donald Trump’s reality is whatever makes him feel good about himself at the time, regardless of clearly observable evidence to the contrary. We learned this about him in the first few minutes of his presidency. It rained during his inaugural speech, but he falsely insisted later that, just as he began to speak, the clouds parted to allow the sun to shine down upon him. If we had selected the president by lottery, if we had randomly handed the keys to the Oval Office to some poor schlub off the street, the odds are enormously high that he or she would have been able to tell the difference between rain and sunshine.
Instead, we ended up with a delusional narcissist, totally untethered from science, the English language, basic facts, and a nation-in-crisis yearning for competent leadership. Our source of angst and despair in this autumn of 2020 is not about the appointment of conservative judges, tax cuts for the rich, or the decimation of environmental protections. Policy in a democracy is all about politics; to the victors go the spoils.
This pain we feel now is much different. It’s about the raw, gnawing fear of what more is to come from this acutely deranged man, who has never met a boundary of decency and decorum that he hasn’t demolished or leaped over. Never has a leader had a wider gap between vision and reality.
This is, after all, the guy who looks past the seven million COVID infections and 203,000 deaths and says, as he did in Ohio this week, that the virus “affects virtually nobody.” He’s the guy who threw paper towels at hurricane-ravaged Puerto Ricans and called the island “the most corrupt place on earth,” and then this week claimed that he was “the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico.” He’s the guy who criticized the Obama administration for not stockpiling any ventilators while 19,000 of them were sitting in storage. He’s the guy trying to force government scientists to skip safety steps in releasing a coronavirus vaccine before the election, while the Trump National Doral Miami resort opens its doors for an early October conference of the nation’s anti-vaccine movement.
To be sure, Donald Trump is not the first person seemingly incapable of grasping reality. The difference between him and his delusional cohorts is that he is in the White House while the others are either hospitalized or under close supervision. A review of the medical literature shows that many delusional patients insist that they are the president of the United States. Unlike Trump, however, they do not have access to the nuclear codes.
The only remedy we have in this nightmare is to vote. Even then, there is no guarantee that a Biden electoral victory will be enough to trigger a peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy for more than two centuries. Still, the bigger the Biden margin, the bigger the likelihood that non-delusional forces in our system will find a way to ship Trump off to Mar a Largo in January.
Since reality doesn’t matter to him, The Donald can bask away in the Florida sun and insist he is still president. Just like his hospitalized counterparts.