,
9 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
So ... what happens when he tweets something like this the day after he loses re-election? (That's a rhetorical question, mostly.)
The question is rhetorical in the sense that I'm not desperate to receive a zillion snarky answers. But it'd be a good question to ask congressional leadership from both parties, and the Dems running for president.
And it'd be a good one for all of us to contemplate ourselves, in terms of our own personal answers.
And for everyone telling me that they'd stop him from clinging to power, I'm not saying you're wrong, but before I'm gonna agree you're right I need to know who "they" are, and what steps they'd take against him.
The orderly transfer of power in the United States has always depended on the active cooperation of the outgoing president. What happens if that cooperation is not forthcoming? The answer—the day-to-day answer for November and December 2020 and January 2021—isn't obvious.
Fun fact: The electoral college doesn't vote until December 19, and its votes aren't officially counted until January 6. For nearly the entire transition period, there is no official winner of even an uncontested presidential election.
Tweets like tonight's crank up the costs of breaking with Trump, but they also underscore the fact that there's no guarantee that waiting him out will be an effective alternate strategy.
The smart money says there's a strong chance that Trump loses the election next year, and loses it by a big enough margin that it'd be impossible to steal cleanly. With most presidents, that would mean he goes away. With Trump, who knows what it means?
I suspect that there's more than one Republican senator who has a Jefferson quote rattling around in his or her brain these days: "We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."
