Can Donald Trump Stay Still? – NRK Urix – Foreign News and Documentaries

Imagine the following: The US presidential elections have ended and the votes have been counted, that is, those cast on Election Day. The result is even, but Donald Trump hardly leads. So difficult that the votes by mail, which are not clear, can tilt the result.

On election night, Trump is announced the winner and Joe Biden refuses to congratulate him because not all the votes have been counted. In the next few days, the outcome will change in some major states and Biden will win more than 270 voters and thus the most decisive electoral votes. And the end result shows that it is Joe Biden who will be the next president of the United States.

• What happens then?
• Will Donald Trump accept this and acknowledge electoral defeat?
• And conversely, will Joe Biden refrain from retiring if he loses?
• Can they just refuse?

Rituals

American electoral law is only clear on one thing, when it comes to this. The president-elect must be sworn in and in office 79 days after Election Day.

– The law is clear. After 12 a.m. on January 20, Donald Trump is not president, if he has not been re-elected, but he does not say anything about what happens if he has an unclear electoral result and two that they think have won, says the associate professor of the UIO Sofie Høgestøl.

Everything before this is largely based on tradition and custom.

Because the rituals after the election results have been mostly, just that, rituals.

– We have not had similar cases and we have not tried it before, and we do not know what happens if both parties believe that they have won the elections and neither candidate has withdrawn, says Høgestøl.

– Because this is a mixture of hard law and political custom, he says, and everything can be decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. A court that now lacks a member after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last week.

The system is not secure

One who has been thinking these thoughts for a while is Lawrence Douglas. He has written the book “Will I Go”, where he goes through possible scenarios if Donald Trump does not want to give up power after the November 3 elections.

– I had the idea for the book four years ago, says the law professor at Amherst College.

During a presidential debate between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Trump responded that he would not guarantee that he would accept the election result if he lost. The statement created shockwaves in the American media.

– I thought it was dangerous to say something for a presidential candidate. What if he thinks so? Lawrence Douglas tells NRK.

Now this has become commonplace, and President Trump keeps repeating similar accusations. There are those who make Douglas very concerned about American democracy. It reminds us of how fragile the democratic system is: there are laws and rules about elections and the seizure of power, but it is also made of assumptions and norms.

– Democracy is fragile. We often see countries moving from authoritarian states to democracy hold the first election with enthusiasm and great support. The second democratic election is more difficult. The United States is not that situation, but nevertheless: for a democracy to work, politicians must respect rules, such as accepting electoral defeat.

– Democracies only work when people are informed. You can only make informed decisions when you have access to solid information. Trump’s myriad attacks on the media undermine trust in the institutions that are absolutely necessary for a democracy to function.

– It may seem that the system we have cannot ensure a peaceful takeover. There are rules about dates and so on, but the law doesn’t help us much if there are doubts about the outcome of the elections or if we have a president who refuses to resign. This is the normative part of our system.

And Trump is not known for following the standards.

– It’s not so much about whether Trump will entrench himself in the White House, it’s about the unimaginable chaos between the election and January 20.

Great uncertainty

What if there is a disagreement on whether or not the outcome of Pennsylvania’s major inflection state should be eliminated? Because there is so much uncertainty about whether or not the final decisive mail ballots can be approved. Should the majority of the voter turnout remain at 270, or should Pennsylvania voters be removed, with the majority set at 260?

Nobody knows.

But many have speculated.

And Donald Trump has been ready.

He said it already in the previous electoral campaign.

“I want to acknowledge the election result (pause) if I win,” he said with a broad smile at an election rally in Delaware, just days before Election Day in 2016.

And he has repeated the same message several times since then, but without the smile. Last of the White House.

So the big question is whether it really can. This is where scholars fight, write, and think aloud.

Because it has shown before that it wants to challenge the system, but to a lesser extent it has broken with it. He criticized letter investigator Robert Mueller, but did not fire him. He accused his opponents of treason, but did not imprison them.

Not despot

The American website The Atlantic has looked at different scenarios and ended up in the opinions of different intellectuals.

Among other things, they point out that if Trump is as evil as many of his opponents are supposed to be, he would not have risked losing the election at all. But he groomed the winner of the election as a true despot.

Douglas also does not want to call Trump a classic authoritarian leader, but says “there is no question that he has authoritarian impulses”: He pardons criminals and makes them allies, and appoints loyal employees who are more dedicated to Trump than to the nation. It is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders.

Douglas still believes that Trump will have to resign peacefully if Biden wins by a wide margin.

– If Trump loses big and clear, this may go well. You will continue to complain and scream about electoral fraud, but your chance to create chaos will be far less. So that’s the best hope we have for a healthy democracy this fall.

This is not how democracies should work: that one must win 60-40 to be recognized.

For Douglas, the entire US electoral system, in which state voters cast their vote for presidential candidates based on election results, is dysfunctional. One reason is that it does not reflect the real voices of the American people.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than Trump. Due to the electoral system, she still lost the elections. Douglas doesn’t think there is any doubt that Democrats will get the most votes again.

That the pandemic forces many to vote by mail doesn’t help, says Douglas.

– Even without a pandemic, the choice would be difficult. Now we know it will be chaos.

– Trump has already groomed his supporters for voter fraud. There will be some irregularities, polling stations will close too soon or too late, millions of votes in the mail. Even harmless mistakes will add fuel to Trump’s conspiracy theories. In such a polarized America, this is very scary. Trump has groomed millions of supporters to believe only what he says about the American electoral system. There are millions of heavily armed Americans out there. This is a dangerous situation.