Refusing to commit to accept election loss, Trump aims to coerce Americans' votes

Trump and other GOP politicians' refusal to accept election results should be seen as a shocking present-day threat, not a theoretical future one

Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Prescott Valley Event Center in Prescott Valley, Arizona. October 4, 2016. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons

This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.

The refusal of not only Donald Trump, but of increasing numbers of elected Republicans, to commit to accepting a 2024 presidential election loss may just be the biggest story in American politics. It’s certainly as important as the intertwined phenomena of the GOP’s evolution into a party of authoritarianism and its increasing comfort with threats of violence to achieve political ends. Advance rejection of adverse election results is a scandal, a crisis, and a challenge to the pro-democracy American majority, pointing to a breakdown in U.S. politics as the Republican Party embraces open defiance of majority rule and the rule of law.

Trump himself has tried to hedge his refusal by qualifying that he would accept the results “if everything’s honest,” but that “[i]f it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” As we’ve already seen, though, the former president conjures accusations of electoral dishonesty out of thin air, spouting lies about fake votes, illegal votes, immigrant votes, and the like nearly as fast as fact-checkers can debunk them. Let’s not be naive: there is no standard of proof that Trump would accept if he loses in November. To think otherwise is to ignore the evidence of his behavior over the last decade. The rabid elephant in the room, of course, is that Trump not only lied in 2020 about the election being stolen from him, but used that fiction as the basis for both violent and pseudo-legal attempts to undo the election results and so topple American democracy as we know it.

By echoing his 2020 refusal to commit to accepting the upcoming presidential election results should he lose — a refusal that we can see with the benefit of hindsight was the predicate for the first presidential coup attempt in American history — Donald Trump is broadcasting his intention to reject an unfavorable 2024 outcome as well. But he is not doing so out of some self-defeating interest in outing his own insurrectionary intent (although he is in fact making clear this intent). Instead, he’s talking about the need to reject “dishonest” election results in order to sow doubt among his supporters now, to prepare the ground for the same efforts to overturn the results that we saw in 2020. The plan for power in 2024 remains the same as before: Crooked legal maneuvers and incitement of violence.

But a second element that was mostly latent in 2020 is more overt this time around. By intimating that he will not accept the election results if he doesn’t win, and by suggesting he will incite a repeat of the post-election maneuvers and violence of 2020 (for example, in his statement that America will experience a “blood bath” if he loses), Donald Trump is using the threat of future violence to sway Americans’ votes in the present and running up to November — a threat given complete and utter credibility by his staging of a coup attempt in 2020-21. He is telling the American people that he will unleash violence on this country, just as he did before, if they don’t act as he commands them. Too many people are misinterpreting Trump’s threats as lying in the future — they are in fact acts of intimidation meant to operate right now to alter Americans’ opinions and votes.

It is difficult to conceive of a higher crime against American democracy than such threats, short of a second coup attempt by Donald Trump. Threatening the American citizenry to vote for Trump lest they suffer untold horrors is a story that any news organization worth its salt should be pursuing, constantly, key to communicating the darkness of Trump’s refusal to commit to respect the election results. Likewise, the political danger of a president refusing to accept election results, preparing the ground for violence should he lose, and using that threatened violence in the present to sway votes together form a catastrophe in the making that the Democratic Party should highlight, condemn, and confront at every opportunity.

Trump’s attempts to subvert faith in the election preparatory to overturning a November result that goes against him, coupled with his active intimidation of American voters in the present day, should be understood by all reasonable observers to disqualify him from the presidency. This is not a question of specific laws being broken, but of a clear intent to subvert Americans’ trust in democracy, sway the election through intimidation, and lay the groundwork for future violence and sedition by recruiting gullible citizens and dishonest politicians to his insurrectionary cause. He has rendered his candidacy illegitimate.

The menace emanating from Trump is made still worse by the fact that so many of the GOP’s elected officials are either actively or tacitly complicit in his attempts at electoral intimidation and subversion. Those who echo his refusal to accept the election results no matter the outcome, like vice-presidential hopefuls Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator Tim Scott, have made Trump’s cause their own, happy to aid his destructive and violent-minded path to the presidency. But those Republican officials who simply refuse to criticize him are little better, shirking the minimum duty required of elected officials to defend American democracy by affirming its most basic tenet — that when you lose, you accept that the other side has won. By behaving as if Trump’s words and intent are normal, they provide through their silence essential cover to an authoritarian politics that has no place in the United States. In this way, the GOP has been poisoned by the insurrectionary spirit that animates Trump’s campaign for the presidency.

I would hazard that this increasingly widespread, even lockstep, Republican position is a major — perhaps even the central — reason why neither the media nor the Democratic Party have responded to the GOP refusal to recognize presidential election results with the appropriate levels of focus and intensity. With Republican pols closing ranks, the media and Democrats imagine that a basic defense of democracy will now appear too “partisan.” But at the risk of repeating myself: in no way can Trump’s campaign be considered legitimate under the most basic understanding of American democracy.

Unfortunately for the political health and even survival of the country, a failure to truly engage the topic of Trump’s relative legitimacy or lack thereof may very well be having the opposite effect — like those Republicans who stand silent while Trump threatens a “blood bath” if he loses, too many in the media and the Democratic Party are normalizing behavior that isn’t just abnormal, but a direct threat to American democracy and the free society it makes possible.

For both the media and the Democrats, fear of taking a firm stand on Donald Trump’s illegitimacy also seems rooted in a reluctance to avoid what might be perceived as unnecessary or extreme conflict with Donald Trump, with the Republican Party, and by extension with the tens of millions of voters who support them. Yet the GOP has no compunctions about seeking escalation on its own terms, with the goal of delegitimizing both the free press and the Democratic Party.

Regarding the media, a hallmark of Trumpism — one which the GOP has eagerly adopted — has been to deny any legitimacy to mainstream news sources. Instead, Republicans now actively label them as “enemies of the state,” deserving of scorn and, if necessary, physical violence. Nor do Trump or the GOP any longer appear to consider the Democratic Party legitimate, or its voters to even be real Americans. In just the last couple weeks, we’ve been witness to no less a personage than House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that millions of illegal aliens are voting, in line with right-wing propaganda that such voting has been key to Democratic victories. Stop to consider how very shocking this is: the highest-ranking elected Republican is pushing legislation — and signaling to Republican voters — that the Democrats only hold power through fraud and deception, that the party is in fact a criminal enterprise at war with the intent of actual American citizens. Consider as well that this line of attack is of a piece with Donald Trump’s propaganda about stolen elections, so that Johnson is in fact helping Trump make his case that rejection of election results and violence may well be required for a Republican to return to the White House.

Wishing to avoid an escalation of conflict with the GOP, the Democrats’ refusal to make a reality-based argument for the lack of legitimacy of any Republican candidate who encourages or refuses to condemn political violence, and for the necessity of accepting democratic election results, has helped create a tilted playing field that allows the GOP to engage in an anti-democratic form of politics at little or no cost to its prospects. At its most extreme, and most self-sabotagingly for the Democrats and for our democratic system, this helps make it seem reasonable for the nation to go along with the results of an election won by Republicans if the party and its candidates use threats and actual violence to gain victory.

To the contrary: no American is obligated to accept election results that effectively come at the barrel of a gun. In fact, any decent American citizen is obligated to defy and reject such results. Once a political party becomes convinced that winning through threats and violence will secure it power, and that it will suffer no significant political cost through operating in such an authoritarian manner — as the GOP under Trump appears to have convinced itself — then it has every incentive to do just that. Under such circumstances, such a strategy must be exposed, excoriated, and delegitimized by the democratic majority.

I’m no scholar of authoritarianism, but in this situation, it seems a pretty sorry strategy for the pro-democracy party to preemptively signal to the authoritarian party that if the latter can intimidate its way into winning the next election, they will be considered America’s rightful rulers tomorrow and forevermore. It also seems an impoverished approach to worry more about provoking the authoritarian opposition to say bad things about you than about the dire importance of rousing the American majority to understand the threat it faces, to vote accordingly, and, yes, to deny any grant of legitimacy to GOP politicians who gain office on the basis of threats and outright violence. It has to be asked: Does the Democratic Party as a whole have a plan to defeat Republican authoritarianism? Do enough of its leaders grasp what a watershed it is for the Republican Party to have as a central pillar its refusal to accept any presidential election it does not win, and to suggest that any such loss will be redeemed through violence?

As I said before, Republicans are already laying out the case that Democrats are inherently un-American, anti-American, and all around non-American, never to be trusted with power. The Democrats badly need to come to grips with the nature of their existential conflict with the GOP, and to act in ways that energize the American majority to express its rejection, now and in the future, of those attempting to impose authoritarian rule on the country.

I could say that Democrats are doing a “grave disservice” to America’s citizenry, or some such high serious profundity, but it’s more to the point to say that it feels like the Democrats are unable to accurately grasp the risk/gain calculus. They seem to only see downside risk (i.e., they fear they will destructively escalate tensions with the Republican Party) when the truth is that anything the Democrats do, as long as it’s in defense of democracy and political norms, will always be twisted by the GOP into an argument for why the Democratic Party is actually a gang of godless Mexican drug cartels or some such nonsense. The GOP will always push back when Democrats defend democracy, because that is what an authoritarian party does. Democrats can’t avoid escalating the crisis of American democracy when they directly expose and confront GOP perfidy and bloody-mindedness, as ratcheting up pressure on the authoritarian Republican Party is necessary tp stopping its quest for anti-democratic power; this may strike some Democratic politicians as risky, but the alternative of allowing the GOP to continue to wrap itself in the guise of normalcy is simply too dangerous.

At bottom, the Democrats are committing an enormous error by proceeding as if the political stakes and rules have not changed, and that they are simply engaged in regular democratic competition with the Republican Party as in years past, where the rules of the game mean that defeat this year might be reversed by victory in the next election cycle. The Republican Party is very clearly trying to engineer a victory in 2024 that will allow it to cripple the American political system to ensure permanent Republican rule, starting with a president who has signaled, quite openly, that he intends to rule by force and personal fiat.

Again, a big part of the reason we know this is because Trump and the GOP are using strategies incompatible with democracy right now in order to win in November (and also because Trump’s advisors and political allies are laying out second-term plans that are essentially a vision of lawless and unchecked governance, even as the Republican-dominated Supreme Court issues ruling after ruling decimating democratic accountability and basic freedoms). In doing so, they are showing us how they intend to rule. And in behaving as if the Democratic Party and its many millions of voters lack legitimacy, they have left the Democrats no choice in return but to engage in a high-stakes competition on legitimacy grounds, in which the goal is to illuminate and discredit the Republican Party for its war on democracy and embrace of violence to gain political power. Such politics means not simply beating the GOP in the next election, but systematically discrediting and delegitimizing it as a political entity.