I don’t always agree with his takes, but I’ve been enjoying Tim Alberta’s dispatches from the campaign trail. His latest has some interesting speculation about how President Trump and Republican officeholders will respond to a Biden-Harris victory. He begins with a warning, “As the prospect of a Biden walkover has increased, so too has my pessimism about the president accepting the outcome.”
What I found most intriguing was Alberta’s prediction that the foulness of Trump’s reaction will be proportional to the degree to which he is humiliated:
Let’s be clear: There was never going to be a scenario in which Trump loses gracefully. This is a man who despite winning the presidency was so insecure about losing the popular vote that he concocted a fairy tale about 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots. This is a man who hates to be humiliated; whose response to being swept across the battleground map and getting pummeled in the popular vote could be far more vicious than his reaction to losing by respectable margins.
I can absolutely see the reasoning here, and I realize I’ve been harboring the hope that a blowout election that results in a quick call from the media will prevent a lot of nastiness. This may be delusional on my part, but I’m reassured that Alberta thinks it will have a positive byproduct:
But the question is not what the president will do; his vanity compels him to cry foul no matter the outcome. The more important question is how the Republican Party would respond to his loss. This is something GOP leaders are actively thinking about. And from what I can gather, it could very well represent the breaking point of Trump’s relationship with the GOP establishment.
One point that Alberta makes is that whatever remains of the GOP establishment after the election will by definition have just been victorious. They’ll have little motive to raise questions about the validity of the results. If there is some prospect that legal maneuvering could keep Trump in the White House, they might grudgingly go along, but they’ll be keen to move on from the president if it’s clear that he’s a dead duck.
Of course, it’s 2020, so we should expect everything to go sideways because that seems to be this year’s theme. The election results could take a long time to tabulate and it could be days or even weeks before the winner can be declared. I’d really like to avoid that mess and all the attendant stress, but it seems Trump will keep us on a white knuckle ride no matter what happens. As long as he loses, we can at least point to a date in the future when we can pay a lot less attention to him.
You keep saying Trump when what you mean is ‘Republican party’. They are the same.
The Republican Party is now completely going for herd immunity, and you seem to believe, once again, that there are reasonable republicans. THEY ARE ATTENDING SENATE HEARINGS WITHOUT MASKS WHILE POSITIVE.
And the media, including Mr Alberta, will yell as loud as they can that there are doubts with the election that need to be investigated,
and the Republicans controlling the process is how it should be, and why are democrats being so whiny.
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It would seem that anyone who might qualify, by historical standards, as “establishment GOP” will be having to build a separate party, from the ground up, out of whatever dregs are left under their Party banner. The deplorables are likely to walk away and form their own White Nationalist Party, which could potentially be championed and led, in the short term, by Donald Trump, if he can escape prison. It is obvious that this needle threading experiment the last few decades of convincing the rubes to vote “Republican”, no matter what, has about run its course, and any organization that comes into being under the auspices of any remaining establishment GOP will have to be a rump Party for a long, long time. They will be a minority within a minority in the country. Somehow, I doubt they will be happy to wander in the wilderness for very long after enjoying the success that they have in pushing the Overton Window so far to the right. I expect that there will be a significant effort to push Trump down the memory hole as quickly as possible. Once they feel that he has been comfortably buried, and we all know how short the attention span is of our ignorant country (with a helpful assist from the “liberal media”), they will once again have to find a way to make an alliance with the White Nationalist Party. It is the only way they can create a large enough constituency to have any chance at exercising power and continuing to subvert the system in their favor. The GOP, establishment or not, has to have the racists. Without them, they could be looking at decades in minority status, like what occurred for them during much of the middle and latter part of the 20th century. Anyone who calls themselves “establishment GOP” and is unwilling to be allied with the white nationalist ideology of the Klansmen and Nazis better just start calling themselves a Democrat.
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Prediction time: We will know who won by how much within a day or two of the election. Trump will growl, pout, and act like he always does — an idiot child. He will quickly disappear from our collective memory. Check out his past losses: He dumps and runs.
I predict we will know how badly Trump is going to lose about an hour after the polls close. Some news agencies will be tempted to call it. To a fair extent we will know how badly he is going to lose an hour before the polls even open. I think he will shut down pretty quickly afterwards. There are one or two legal issues and various other arrangements he needs to attend to before January rolls round.
The theory presented here is just another sad variation on the dubious theme that Trumpolini’s losing will “free” our poor, downtrodden noble senate Repubs, allowing them (finally!) to act as though they are statesmen who care about the republic once again. But how the deplorable base of the Repub party behaves as Trump does whatever he can to challenge the results of the election will be the real bellweather, because elected Repubs have no interest in selling reality to their braindead base. That’s not in their job description. Nor in the worthless corporate media’s, for that matter.
I fully expect McConnell’s minions in the senate to whole-heartedly embrace whatever post-election lawsuits that Trumpolini and Barr dream up and inevitably start rolling towards Roberts’ Repubs–newly augmented by Justice Amy Coney Handmaiden. This will be the case whether McConnell’s Reign of Terror is ended or affirmed by the election. And if McConnell’s minority faction “majority” isn’t defeated, then any Biden victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The plutocrats understand this, and their Repub judges (nationwide) are doing everything they can both to suppress voting and manufacture arguments not to count the tsunami of absentee ballots that will be coming. The most likely result of the election is still a crack-up of the country and its final delusions of being a “democracy”. The rigged Repub courts are rigging the election in the Repub’s favor with each passing day, with ruling after ruling. The legal situation is very dire indeed.
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