Nobody is fully grasping the level of chaos America might be about to unleash on itself and by extension all of us!
It’s not just the election campaign, between two elderly unpopular men, either of whom might suffer any number of health impediments in the months before November. Nor is it the fact that the vice president is so unpopular and the Trump choice for VP likely to be equally unedifying to most Americans.
Not even the fact that AI enhanced horrors of fakery are about to be used by all manner of actors domestic and foreign.
No, what concerns many thinking Americans is what happens after November when, in the old days, the thing would have been done and dusted. Votes cast. Result known. Hands shaken.
Now: real chaos. If Biden wins Trump has already talked about a bloodbath, admittedly in regards to the car industry, but the word was heard and the word has wider meaning. What would happen in the event of a Biden victory would be a set of prosecutions of Donald Trump that might put him in jail. This is not normal. America was not set up to cope with that. It would be – assuming the result was close – a time of high risk for the nation.
But what if Trump wins, which at the moment seems possible if not likely?
Will the Democrats allow it to happen? Can they, given the passions of their supporters? Frankly I doubt it. A perfectly feasible outcome in the presidential election is that Trump wins the presidential poll — via an electoral college that hands it to him in spite of not winning a majority of Americans’ votes — only for the Democrats to overturn the Republicans’ tiny current majority in the House of Representatives.
Then, a group of professors argued recently in a brief for the supreme court, the doors open to the Democrats trying to stop Trump via Congress. Here is what they said:
“If Mr. Trump wins an electoral-vote majority, it is a virtual certainty that some Members of Congress will assert his disqualification under Section 3 [of the fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which disallows people involved in insurrection from running for office]. That prospect alone will fan the flames of public conflict. But even worse for the political stability of the Nation is the prospect that Congress may actually vote in favor of his disqualification after he has apparently won election in the Electoral College.”
The professors add, with admirable understatement, that “neither Mr. Trump nor his supporters, whose votes effectively will have been discarded as void, are likely to take such a declaration lying down”.
The point — and you might say this is an irony — is that Democrats have been trying not to certify presidential candidates for some time.
The granddaddy of all such efforts was during the 2000 election and the Bush v Gore tussle over hanging chads in Florida. The election had been close and came down to that state but anomalies with the voting system – the aforementioned chads – seemed to have stopped the Democrats having all their votes counted in Florida. The Supreme Court did eventually find for Bush and the certification came to Congress as usual. But that January, 2001, saw the first recent hard-line effort to get the result thrown out.
But those were innocent times, prelapsarian times. So much water has flowed under the bridge since then, most of it, many Americans would say, murky and foul. And nothing is murkier than the thought of how all of this might play out in the world of social media. Of course, the Democrat members of Congress might view a Trump victory as something they had to swallow.
But what if it were close? What if some fake image of Joe Biden had been released, damaging him, in the run-up to the campaign? In other words that the campaign itself could be widely understood to be flawed. The whole of progressive America would be aflame: and the notion that Trump was always illegitimate because of January 6, because of what they regard as the insurrection, would be unleashed again.
The pressure on Democrats — individual members of Congress — to “do the right thing”, would be immense. Let the record show: did you vote to certify the insurrectionist or not?
The world needs to think about America this year. And, perhaps, pray for it too ….
Justin Webb
Before joining the Today programme, Justin served as the BBC’s inaugural North America Editor. He also contributes USA-focused articles to the Times, discussing events from Biden’s administration to Obama’s election trail. His speeches cover leadership in the UK and US, with stories from behind the scenes at Today and in the corridors of power.
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