Lawrence Douglas - Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020

On the last day of August 2019, a group of prominent scholars gathered in a conference room in the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Befitting the centers mission, the scholars represented Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives. What brought them together was a shared expertise in presidential electoral law. That, and a fear that our process for electing the president might be vulnerable to spectacular failure.

To describe the threat facing our system, some of the experts borrowed metaphors from astrophysics. An asteroid is heading straight toward America. Are we equipped to knock it out of the sky? Others spoke in meteorological terms. A Katrina-like storm is gathering off our shores; how strong is our system of levees?

Their sobering answerprepare for a flood.

For tens of millions of Americans, the 2020 election promises to accomplish what the impeachment proceeding never stood a chance of doingremove Donald Trump from office. For those who questioned the tactical wisdom of impeaching the president, focusing on 2020 was always the better way to go.

Come Tuesday, November 3, at issue will not be whether Trump committed high crimes or misdemeanors but whether he has earned another term as the nations chief executive. Republican lawmakers cannot accuse Democrats of trying to defeat the will of the people if the people vote Trump out of the White House.

Of course, there is no guarantee that Trump will be defeated at the polls. But if he is, he will leave the White House not as a martyr of Congress but as a rejected incumbent. Trump survived the judgment of the Senate; he will have no choice but to submit to the verdict of the voters.

That is the hope, anyway.

Some observers, however, have expressed grave doubts about the coming election, including several of the experts gathered last summer in the D.C. conference room. Their concern was not that Trump might win the election, or that he might steal it through disinformation, foreign interference, and voter suppression, real as those concerns are. Their worry was different. What if the election produced an unclear result, one that could be contested? Or what if Trump lostbut refused to acknowledge or accept his defeat?

To believe that beating Trump at the polls provides not only the proper but also the most secure way of removing him from office is to miss the singular menace that this president represents to a basic principle of democratic governance: the peaceful succession of power. If Trump is thoroughly trounced in November 2020, he will be limited in his maneuvers, master in democratic negation though he may be. But in case of a slender victory by his Democratic challenger or an uncertain result, chaos beckons. Trump will not go quietly. He might not go at all.

Asked to assess the magnitude of the risk that Trump represents to orderly succession, most of the experts I consulted soberly gave it a nine on the proverbial one-to-ten scale. A former senior advisor to President Obama reflected for a moment, then gave a different answer: Do we have an eleven?

Note to reader: As this book heads off to press, Joe Biden has emerged as the clear front-runner in a two-man race with Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. In the pages that follow, I assume that Biden emerges as the Democrats candidate. Please excuse me if history moves faster than book production.

Its not the voting thats democracy; its the counting.

Tom Stoppard, Jumpers