"... the recent GOP jettisoning of basic political norms on multiple fronts suggests they may adopt even more of a scorched earth approach to a Clinton presidency, should she win, than they did to Obama’s."

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If he loses, Trump will continue spreading destruction and mayhem. This chart shows how.
By Greg Sargent, November 4, 2016

With only a few days until Election Day, Donald Trump’s closing argument is now that electing Hillary Clinton president will grind our entire system of government to a halt. “If she were to be elected, it would create an unprecedented Constitutional crisis,” he has been saying lately. “She is likely to be under investigation for many years, probably concluding in a very large scale criminal trial.” Trump now pairs this argument with his frequent claim that the election will be “rigged.”

But it’s important to understand that this isn’t just a closing argument. He’s laying the groundwork for an argument that he may continue to make after the election. That argument is that Hillary Clinton’s presidency is illegitimate, not just because the election was rigged, of course, but also because she is a criminal whose candidacy was always fundamentally illegitimate. In the short term, he’s asking voters to elect him to spare the country the hell we’ll inevitably go through if she wins and our system is thrown into chaos as the truth about her comes out. But if he loses, this argument may long outlast the election.

A new New York Times/CBS News poll shows that a whole lot of his supporters will likely be captivated by this whole narrative. It finds that large chunks of Trump supporters are not too confident their votes will be counted accurately and believe voter fraud happens a lot:



It also finds that more than a quarter of Trump’s supporters say they won’t accept the result, and that barely more than a third of them think it’s very important for their candidate to concede publicly if he loses:

Now, it is encouraging that 63 percent of Trump voters say they’ll accept the results. But that 34 percent who say they probably won’t or that it depends is higher than it should be. And a large majority of Trump supporters say they don’t think it’s that important for Trump to publicly acknowledge that Clinton won, if that happens.

We’ve already seen that Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon is looking to convert the Trump campaign into a vehicle for a political movement that will continue to function as a disruptive force inside the GOP well after the election. It’s a big unknown whether Trump will go along with that plan. But he might. And at the center of this movement will be the idea that Clinton’s presidency is illegitimate.

But this idea of Clinton’s fundamental illegitimacy — expressed with varying degrees of explicitness — could also infect relations between Clinton and Congressional Republicans, and by extension, how our government functions under a Clinton presidency. The through line here goes from Trump’s claim that the election is rigged, through his use of the FBI discovery of new emails (of unknown relevance) to support the claim that she is a criminal who should never have been able to get elected at all, through the vow by Congressional Republicans to keep investigating Clinton, through the scattered chatter among Republicans (already) about impeaching Clinton, and even through to the suggestion that Republicans may not act at all to fill the Supreme Court vacancy even well after the election.

As Brian Beutler explains, the recent GOP jettisoning of basic political norms on multiple fronts suggests they may adopt even more of a scorched earth approach to a Clinton presidency, should she win, than they did to Obama’s. This is the result of a confluence of factors — currently unresolved questions about Clinton’s email set up, due to the FBI’s discovery, and the prospect of a Supreme Court that tilts liberal, which represents a major threat to many conservative priorities. And all this could be made even worse if Trump — unlike Romney — does not concede, and a sizable chunk of Republican voters is persuaded that the outcome was illegitimate. Bannon (perhaps with Trump himself), Trump’s supporters in Congress, and other hardline conservatives in Congress might cynically weaponize that against Republicans who decline to meet this supposedly illegitimate president with the full blown war footing that she requires. And the destruction and mayhem may well continue.
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