Donald Trump’s Republican candidacy for president of the United States provides a perfect cover for legitimizing the former president and forcing the mainstream media to cover him as a normal political candidate. But Trump is not a normal political candidate. He has refused to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 election. He incited the January 6, 2021 insurrection. He was recently convicted and fined over $400 million for corruptly inflating the value of his properties in New York in order to defraud his creditors.
Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat is more than a symptom of his narcissistic megalomania; it also demonstrates his complete unwillingness, indeed, inability, to understand democracy. Democracy is conditioned upon the practice that the loser accepts their defeat. If the candidate believes there has been error or fraud, they can challenge the results, ultimately in the courts. But once those remedies have been exhausted – and Trump has thoroughly exhausted the legal remedies with over fifty losses in the courts following his 2020 electoral loss – our democratic system requires that the loser accept defeat. For democracy to function, defeated candidates must acknowledge their loss.
But Donald Trump is psychologically incapable of accepting defeat. While his victory in this November’s presidential election would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions for the United States (and the world), his loss will also bring about chaos of another kind. For Trump will not be able to accept it … literally. He will be incapable of believing that he lost a legitimate election and will be convinced (actually convinced, I believe, although the point is debatable) that the election was stolen from him.
There’s no way to be sure, of course, how he will respond to this loss, but I believe that a refusal to concede victory accompanied by a call to his supporters for a violent response (as in the January 6 insurrection) is more than likely. I can well imagine him calling upon his supporters in the military to respond.
As I have written in my last post, I do not believe that he will win this election. But we as a country must also be prepared for his response to his loss.
It will not be pretty.
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