Over at the Palmer Report, we are assured that the threat of Donald Trump refusing to leave office is an illusion:
We can’t stress this enough: this an imaginary narrative that pundits have manufactured for the sake of ratings. Donald Trump is playing into this fake narrative because he’s hoping to use the empty threat of refusing to leave office in order to perhaps get certain things to go his way during the transition period. But Trump will only have that leverage if the public is gullible enough to believe that he can actually somehow just not leave office. Your job is to not fall for this crap when you hear it from the worst of pundits.
They’re right, as is Lawrence O’Donnell, about whose bursting of this bubble they were reporting.
The thing is, that’s not the threat.
It is entirely possible that Trump will get more electoral votes by stealing the election in plain sight, and there may be nothing that can be done about it, given the current make up of the Supreme Court.
First, the Republican Party itself may launch a massive intimidation campaign. It was under an injunction to refrain from such activities, but that injunction has lapsed.
Second, he could use his Gestapo to occupy the cities of swing states and prevent the people of those cities from voting. The rather subdued media reaction to the occupation of Portland, Oregon presages the reaction nationwide when the storm troopers roll in to strategically chosen American cities.
All of this is reviewed at more length here, in an article I’ve linked to before.
That’s the real threat. Despite the fact that all of this will have been done in plain sight, there is no reason to think that Congress or the courts can (in the case of the Democrats) or will (in the case of the Republicans) do anything about it. See the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, which was stolen by slightly less blatant means, but was still stolen in plain sight.
We may very well find ourselves in a situation where only a military coup can restore our republic. Such coups have been staged in other countries for that purpose, but somehow, the republic never seems to get restored.