The coming national election will be ugly, messy, and possibly violent, not least because a long-standing court order against Republican intimidation at the polls has expired. With Trump's illegal machinations, we're far more likely to have a muddy, multi-day mud fight with lawsuits flying like paper airplanes in a middle-school English class. According to Barton Gellman of The Atlantic, "Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede." So far, when we've talked about Trump refusing to leave office, we've presupposed that there will be a clear-cut winner by January 20. It's a clear part of Trump's strategy to keep that from happening. Absent a Biden landslide, Trump plans to throw election totals in doubt and then use any means he can find to warp the results his way. He has already stated that he will accept the election results only if he wins. We've already seen Trump is working to gum up the gears of the election process in ways that disenfranchise Democratic voters, poor voters, young voters, and voters of color. Those efforts, large and small, add up to an astonishing level of sabotage of the voting system. Did it ever seem that we'd have one party willing to crush America's constitution to keep power? It has never happened before. Thanks to the dead consent decree that required Republican politicians to play nice at the polls, there is no legal bar to Trump's pushing to have the National Guard, county sheriffs, city police, or self-proclaimed patriots with long guns and grudges stand by to intimidate voters and even argue with them as they walk from their cars to vote. Add to that the obvious intention by Republicans to invent reasons to throw out mail-in ballots, supposedly the favorite of Democrats, by getting extra picky about the already persnickety details involved in mail-in voting (Did they use both envelopes? Did they sign in the right place?). That is, the Republican party is literally going out of its way to hack the voting system. Who needs Russians when you have Republican politicians to do the job? That's almost a certainty, because most mail-in ballots will be counted after election day. Trump has stated he thinks that whoever wins on election night wins the election. He won't win that fight, and he knows it. There are strategies beyond that point.
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