One of the oddest things about our political moment is that President Trump regularly says and does things in the open that are easily criticized, and yet his opponents still manufacture wild conspiracy theories about him. To my mind the dumbest theory currently being floated is the idea that if Trump loses in 2020, he simply will refuse to leave the White House. To those pushing the theory, this is all a very real and super serious prospect that we should all be very worried about and so we need to start preparing.
Asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo for his political predictions, Bill Maher declared, “One of those things … that I’ve been talking about for years now, almost three years, that a lot of people are talking about now, is that if [Trump] loses … he won’t go.”
He said, “We have to worry about that.”
It would be easy to dismiss this if the conspiracy theory were only being advanced by an unfunny comedian, but it actually keeps coming up.
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified that he’s worried there won’t be a “peaceful transition of power” if Trump loses. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned the New York Times that Trump won’t accept defeat unless he’s beaten by a large enough margin. “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” she said.
There’s also been a flood of articles entertaining this possibility.
“What if Trump loses but refuses to leave the White House? We have to start to contemplate the possibility,” read an op-ed in the New York Daily News. The Washington Monthly published a “step-by-step guide” under the title, “How Trump Could Lose the Election and Remain President.”
There was, it should be said, a similar conspiracy theory involving President George W. Bush canceling the 2008 election in the name of the war on terror. This even inspired some fan fiction in the Nation imagining a news article from the future under the headline, “Bush Postpones 2008 Election.”
But the anti-Trump conspiracy has gained more traction, and is being floated by more prominent figures (though in Pelosi’s case, it’s likely more of a cynical calculation given that promoting the conspiracy is helpful to voter turnout efforts).
In reality, there is simply no reason to have a legitimate fear about Trump somehow refusing to go.
Sure, it’s difficult to see a scenario in which he’s a gracious loser. He’d likely take to Twitter to claim widespread fraud, lash out at the fake news media, Robert Mueller, and vent in all sorts of ways. But there’s no reason to believe he’d somehow refuse to leave the White House, or that he’d successfully remain as president were he to do so.
Trump’s presidency has provided plenty of examples of him making bombastic statements about fake news being the “enemy of the people” and threatening or contemplating all sorts of actions. But he doesn’t typically follow through.
For all his media bashing, he is not jailing journalists, or actually revisiting libel laws — something he has routinely floated rhetorically. For all his attacks on the Mueller “witch hunt,” he never took the step of firing the special counsel, even though he could have done so. Yes, he’s taken many executive actions, including ones that I’ve criticized him for. But when he’s been slapped down by courts, while he’s bashed the judges, he hasn’t simply routinely ignored court orders.
Sure, one could argue that he doesn’t deserve praise for simply not jailing journalists. But the point is that refusing to leave the White House after losing the election would follow a pattern of behavior of a president who is willing to jail journalists and routinely ignore court orders, not somebody who likes to pop off on Twitter.
Even if Trump did somehow break with his long-standing tendency of barking and not biting, by refusing to leave, he would not ultimately succeed. He’d be thwarted by courts, and if it came down to it, he’d be escorted out of the White House by the military. Any actions he tried to take as a phantom president would have no legal teeth, and would be easily tossed aside. Unless you believe that the military establishment would effectively support a Trump-led coup, you have nothing to worry about.
The fact that he would have zero odds of successfully executing this coup and could face significant legal consequences if he takes things too far, and that all his advisers would be explaining this to him, is another reason to believe that he would never take things that far.
Trump does not want to spend his remaining years in jail. He wants to spend his remaining years going back to his life as a billionaire, monetizing his massive following, and tweeting about how his successor is a pathetic failure and a stone-cold loser.
