Trump Can't Win Fair & Square, But He'll Certainly Try To Steal The 2020 Election

TOM BRENNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Donald Trump cannot win in 2020.  But that rather cavalier if justified prediction comes with a huge caveat: He cannot win fair-and-square, but certainly will try to steal the election just as he did in 2016. 

Trump had waffled over whether he would accept the 2016 result if he lost all the way through to Election Day.   Since then, he has punctuated his bombast and incessant braggadocio with jokes (ha, ha) about staying in office beyond the two terms the Constitution allows while making dark suggestions that while he would never lose in 2020, woe befall anyone who suggests otherwise.  

Some supporters, including the execrable Jerry Falwell Jr., have suggested Trump should get two years tacked on to his first term as a payback for the Mueller investigation, while Michael Cohen, the president's longtime lawyer and fixer, has warned that "there will never be a peaceful transition of power" should Trump fail in his reelection bid.     

As I explained the other day, he is indeed likely to fail. 

While Trump's "base" is immovable and tribal politics are ascendant in America, there simply are not enough voters beyond that 36 percent or so of the MAGA/KAG hat-wearing electorate sufficiently in his thrall to close the gap between he and the Democratic nominee, while a majority of voters in every poll of consequence say they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances. 

It's pretty much as simple as that.  The math adds up to a loss for Trump, perhaps the resounding loss reflected in his own early internal polling numbers.  

Because of Trump's criminality, the stakes for him in 2020 are especially high.  

If he is defeated and the loss stands, Trump will lose his immunity from criminal prosecution the moment his successor is sworn in.  The Justice Department in a new Democratic administration would be hard-pressed not to bring charges against Trump for obstructing justice, using the evidence in Robert Mueller's final report -- as well as anything of significance the special counsel might add in his just-announced testimony before two House committees next month -- while federal prosecutors in New York have also been reviewing potential campaign finance violations. 

While the law of gravity has not been rescinded, given Trump's extraordinary record of cheating, dishonesty and downright criminality over a long career as a con man, shister and liar, traits that have been hallmarks of his presidency, as well, it is within the realm of possibilities that if he can't steal the 2020 election, the Supreme Court might do it for him. 

Indeed, barring a crushing defeat, Trump probably will challenge the result, setting up a probable appeal to the high court, which has tacked harder to the right with the addition of his nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. 

Constitutional law experts dismiss the fears of a repeat of the Gore-Bush debacle of 2000. They note there are too many forces working against a sitting president simply clinging to power -- including history, law and political pressure. 

Jonathan Turley, among the most highly regarded of the con law experts, says an incumbent who is trying to stay in power would simply become irrelevant once a new and duly elected president is sworn in. 

At that point, the defeated president is nothing more than a guest, "if not an interloper," in the White House, Turley tells Politico.  "The system would make fast work on any president who attempted to deny the results of the election." 

An additional complication is that Trump probably would have to contest the results of the election in more than one state, as opposed to Gore contesting only the Florida result. Election litigation expert Bradley Shrager says this would be "a massive undertaking . . . Given the time frames to launch recounts and election contests, you’d have to be preparing months in advance to be able to do that." 

But then it's unlikely that Turley, Shrager and their peers could have foreseen that the profoundly unqualified reality TV star and faux billionaire would back into the Oval Office in 2016 because of his basket of deplorables, Hillary Clinton's tepid popularity and an archaic and deeply unfair system in which Clinton won the popular vote but was defeated in the Electoral College because of the upstart's razor-thin wins in three key states that were propelled by a Russian cyber disinformation blitz adroitly coordinated with Trump's campaign. 

During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly stoked fears among his supporters that the election would be "rigged" and categorically refused to state during his final debate with Clinton that he'd concede if she won. 

On Election Day, Trump falsely tweeted that there were "voting machine problems across entire country."   And even after being declared the winner, he has continued to state without evidence that "millions" of people voted illegally. 

Shit happened in 2016.  And could happen again.  

CRAIG RUTTLE / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

If Donald Trump has a secret weapon as we slouch toward 2020, it may well be the shoulder-shrugging numbness with which his outrages are greeted. 

Yes, it's bad enough that migrant children are being housed under unspeakable conditions in border "concentration camps."  But when advice columnist and author E. Jean Carroll leveled a credible and vivid allegation of rape at our serially misogynist president last Friday, it sunk like a stone even in the liberal rags and the Sunday talk shows didn't touch it.  Which is all the more outrageous after the recent media frenzy about Joe Biden touching women's shoulders. 

Carroll is the 22nd woman, by one count, to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct, and her account of him forcing himself on her after pulling down her tights in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in Manhattan in the mid-1990s is bolstered by the sheer number of allegations, as well as his boast about assaulting women -- grabbing them, as he said during a 2005 conversation on an "Access Hollywood" bus, "by the pussy."   

Trump's response was familiar. 

"No. 1, she’s not my type.  No. 2, it never happened.  It never happened, O.K.?"  His further denial that he had never met Carroll was undercut by a photo of them together in New York magazine. 

The New York Times, among other major papers, downplayed the story despite it being a slow news weekend.  The story appeared in The Times' digital edition on Friday and was not promoted until late Saturday after readers complained.  The story was not published in the print edition until Sunday.  

"We are hit so often with claims of Trump's misconduct -- and liberals, at least, have such low expectations of him -- that horrifying allegations lose their shock value and slide off," opined the Columbia Journalism Review.  In USA Today, Melinda Henneberger suggests that we're bored with all three -- Trump scandals, rape scandals, and Trump rape scandals.  "Maybe if he had been accused of swiping a sweater from Bergdorf's, that would be new and different?" 

To his credit, Times executive editor Dean Baquet acknowledged that the Gray Lady was "overly cautious." 

If you weren't outraged anew, what's your excuse?