What If Trump Loses and Doesn't Concede?

Imagine the following scenario:

It is the night of November 8, Election Day, and polls have now closed across the country. The networks have projected that Hillary Clinton has won the presidency by a substantial margin, beating Donald Trump in both the popular vote and Electoral College. Democrats are also projected to regain control of the Senate, but fall short of the sixty seats necessary to override Republican filibusters, and the GOP has also narrowly retained control of the House, ensuring some checks on the power of the second President Clinton.

In New York, Clinton triumphantly waits for a concession call from Trump. But the call doesn’t come. She gives him an hour after the last network called the race, but finally goes out to give the long-awaited victory speech to her supporters, speaking in broad terms about the historic nature of her election, and the need to bring the country together after a divisive year.

She finishes the speech, thanks her supporters one more time, and then returns home with her husband, daughter and son-in-law, and the new Vice President-elect. Still, no call from Trump, or any public statement at all. Not even a Tweet.

Finally, around 1am, he takes the stage at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida—the first anyone outside his immediate family or close circle of advisors, including Clinton, has heard from him in hours. The networks cut away from post-election analysis to live feeds of the stage, expecting a formal concession speech.

But Trump, as always, has something different in mind. “The system is rigged, people,” he says. “The system is rigged, and tonight has proven it. First Crooked Hillary avoids an indictment, after all the bad, illegal things she did, and now we’re supposed to believe she won? Come on, folks. We all know Obama would do anything to get his pal Hillary elected, am I right? This whole process has been very unfair.” He goes on for a while longer, but his implication is clear immediately—in his mind the election was rigged, Clinton did not actually win, and he intends to contest the results. Both sides begin gearing up for a protracted legal battle unlike anything in American history.

Obviously this scenario is pure speculation. No one can know for sure who will win in November, though the current polling suggests a blowout Clinton victory. No one can know with absolute certainty how Trump would react to such a resounding loss, since the 2016 primary was his first run for political office.

But the image I’ve just described does have an air of plausibility, after all of Trump’s statements regarding an election rigged against him, criticizing any negative portrayal of him as being unfair, and his difficulty accepting defeat in the states where he did lose, such as Iowa. No one seriously doubts that Clinton, if she is convincingly defeated, would accept the election results. No one seriously believed Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, John McCain, or John Kerry might refuse to concede. Even in 2000, Al Gore failed to concede defeat only because of the ridiculously narrow margin in Florida, giving hope that he might yet be declared the winner. If the outcome was never truly in doubt, the post-election battle would not have stretched beyond that night.

What differentiates this case is the plausibility that, even faced with a resounding defeat, Trump would find a way to claim that he had been cheated out of victory, and either launch an expensive legal battle or simply demand a do-over, just as he argued for after the Iowa caucuses. No presidential candidate in American history has ever failed to respect the results of an election, when that election was decided by anything more than the tiniest of margins. Even Nixon in 1960 decided against challenging the results in several states where there was evidence of voting fraud, on the grounds that the country could not afford to be divided by what would have been a chaotic process.

The mere plausibility of the idea that Trump could attempt such a thing, and the certainty that if he did many of his followers would support him unequivocally, speaks to the odious character of the man who would be President. (It also obviously assumes that he doesn’t have some kind of backroom deal with the Clintons.) Trump would be the first presidential nominee in modern times where it would be perfectly in keeping with his character and observed personality traits to make the scenario described above seem completely possible.

Another reason to deny this man the nomination of the Republican Party. #FreeTheDelegates