"What If He Won't Go?"

Under the chilling (print edition) top headline in this morning's Washington Post, "Trump Stirs Fear He Won't Accept An Election Loss," Robert Costa and Elise Viebeck do a deep dive into how existential threat Donald "I Alone Can Fix It" Trump is laying the groundwork for disputing, if not nullifying, the 2020 election.  The full article is worth a read, but here are some excerpts:

“What the president is doing is willfully and wantonly undermining confidence in the most basic democratic process we have,” said William A. Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program. “Words almost fail me — it’s so deeply irresponsible. He’s arousing his core supporters for a truly damaging crisis in the days and weeks after the November election.”

Most legal experts said it is hard to envision that Trump would actually try to remain in office after a clear defeat by former vice president Joe Biden, considering the uproar that would follow such a challenge to U.S. democratic norms. Trump has previously said he offers up inflammatory ideas to provoke the media and his critics.

But his unwillingness to commit to a smooth transition of power has forced academics and political leaders — including, privately, some GOP lawmakers — to contemplate possible scenarios.

Costa and Viebeck outline the scenarios involving creating doubts about mail- in voting, including steps to make absentee voting more difficult (something that could blow up in Republicans' faces), and challenging ballots during a protracted count.  Of course, there is the very real prospect of Trump inciting the most rabid of his cult to violence should he lose, especially a close election.

Democrats are, meanwhile, working on heading much of that off at the pass:

Democrats and voting rights advocates, meanwhile, are mustering their own legal effort to make it easier to cast ballots by mail, filing more than 50 lawsuits in 25 states. They argue changes are needed to make sure that voters are not disenfranchised because of factors outside their control or arbitrary enforcement of the rules.

The best antidote to post- election mayhem is a Democratic tsunami that wipes out Trump and as many of his craven Republican followers as possible:

The way to avoid such a crisis, Democrats say, is for Biden to win in a landslide, by a margin so large that legal challenges contesting ballots in various states would be moot. [snip]

... Biden’s campaign is pushing for a decisive victory in key battleground states, aware that the comfortable lead he has in polls now could shrink, according to his advisers.

The former vice president also said this month that his campaign had recruited 600 lawyers to fight possible “chicanery” and protect voter access. The campaign has also received volunteer sign-ups from 10,000 people and plans to train them to “be in a polling place” on Election Day, he said.

 In other words, we need to keep working hard, ignore distractions, and be prepared for the worst. And vote. Vote.