What If Trump Loses? What If He Wins?

Some Thoughts On Likely Reactions Following Election Day.

The day before the 2020 election, I drove to Downtown L.A. to meet a young woman for lunch. She was the music director for a national organization called Braver Angels, whose mission is to get Americans talking across the political divide.

I’d come to their attention, through a YouTube channel that had produced some widely seen videos, and had already met with their national ambassador, John Wood Jr. They saw me as a reasonable voice on the center-right, and were sort of feeling me out to see if I might have some role to play in their work.

It was a lovely day, with just a hint of cool Autumn on the breeze. So Alma - the woman I was meeting - had chosen the open-air rooftop restaurant at the vintage Hoxton Hotel. We met in the lobby, rode the elevator together, and were assigned a table. And then we had a very frank and open discussion, over the near constant sounds of construction work.

You see, all up and down the streets below, workers were boarding up windows of local businesses. Because almost everybody thought that there would likely be rioting if the election didn’t go as planned. I took these shots between the hotel and the lot where I parked my car.

Everybody was exhausted by the pandemic lockdowns that were just then being lifted, and by a whole summer of rioting and occupations of downtown areas in places like Portland and Seattle. And we’d had some pretty major looting in Santa Monica and in Hollywood.

Were these merchants afraid of disgruntled Trump fans rioting? If Joe Biden was to be victorious? What do you think?

It’s always been a general rule that demonstrations and riots occur when Democrats are pissed off. The common wisdom has been that, even in cities where a lot of Republicans live, they just aren’t much for group expressions of anger.

Following the George Floyd incident, we saw what we expected to see. Young blue voters in blue cities within blue states run by blue governors … took to protesting alleged racism in police departments headed by blue chiefs appointed by blue mayors. And a lot of that was not ‘mostly peaceful’. Some estimates say $2 billion in damages all told. Some say that’s a conservative estimate.

Months of wanton destruction is not the sort of thing that we’ve ever expected from red voters, no matter what goes wrong.

But four years later, the Republican party is not what it used to be. The cultishness of Trump’s base was becoming apparent as early as 2018, but after his now years-long insistence that he actually WON in 2020, only to have his legitimate victory stolen at the ballot box … God only knows what his tens of millions of hard-core disciples are capable of.

And it wasn’t long ago that Trump predicted ‘a bloodbath’ if he was not elected this November.

EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that I fell for the likely mischaracterization of Donald Trump’s use of the term ‘bloodbath’. It’s more probable that he was using the term to refer to an economic catastrophe, than a violent voter reaction. I should have fact-checked that. It was a dumb mistake. My apologies. Hopefully the column is still of interest. -Dave

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Though he still denies it, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election due to an historic, and somewhat bi-partisan effort to get out the vote against him. Here is the exhaustive TIME Magazine article that tells how Biden won.

“The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.

“Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.

”To the President, something felt amiss. ‘It was all very, very strange,’ Trump said on Dec. 2nd. ‘Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.’

”In a way, Trump was right.” - Molly Ball, TIME Magazine, February 4, 2021

I recommend reading the whole article. It’s sort of a master-class in behind-the-scenes politics. Not all ‘conspiracies’ are illegal, you know.

Now, Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times, gives us insights into how Kamala Harris locked up the nomination last week. He describes a phone-blitz that began ONE MINUTE after Biden quit the race, and didn’t let up for 10 hours.

”Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important Democrats to reach had been prepared in advance, according to two people with knowledge of the situation. The vice president, in sneakers and a sweatshirt, began methodically dialing Democratic power brokers.

“‘I wasn’t going to let this day go by without you hearing from me,’ Ms. Harris had said over and over, as day turned to night, according to five people who received her calls or were briefed on them.

”The blitz demonstrated exactly the kind of vigor and energy that Mr. Biden had lacked in recent weeks. Mr. Biden had reportedly made 20 calls to congressional Democrats in the first 10 or so days after the debate, while his candidacy hung in the balance. Ms. Harris made 100 calls in 10 hours.

”Within 48 hours, Ms. Harris had functionally cleared the Democratic field of every serious rival, clinched the support of more delegates than needed to secure the party nomination, raised more than $100 million and delivered a crisper message against former President Donald J. Trump than Mr. Biden had mustered in months.”

Like her or not, the woman took the hand-off and ran it downfield like a boss. As a guy who spent 40 years as a Democrat, and who has good friends who identify as liberal activists, I have tried for years to convince Republican friends that they really have no conception at all as to what a highly motivated Democratic party can do.

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In 2020, many of my Trumper friends were absolutely confident that their guy would win re-election. And most of them thought he’d do so in a landslide. Many of them still believe that he did. And the former president has done nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

He’s never been involved in a landslide. He beat HRC decisively with 306 electors. And lost to Joe’s decisive 306. This odd symmetry didn’t hold in the popular vote. Trump lost that to Ms. Clinton, and he lost it to Joe Biden by a much wider margin.

But until the whirlwind of events last week, it looked very possible that Donald Trump actually might win his third attempt by a sizable margin. After leading the swing states for months, he was fresh from surviving an assassination attempt, and enjoying the affirmations of a charged up party at the convention.

The Trump campaign was riding high as Biden’s party bickered over what to do about their failing president. The mood on the left was dark. Depressed. Resigned to a contest where their guy would stumble and fall beneath Trump’s steamroller.

But now? Now those same Democrats are dancing in the streets. Merrily casting off all misgivings about Harris and her chances. Chatting happily about Kamala’s quick ascension in the polls. If she’s come this far in a single week, surely she’ll run Trump to ground soon. Right?

Maybe. I do have to say that there is an odd feeling of inevitability in the California air about Kamala’s chances of beating the Teflon Don. But I’m surrounded on all sides here by Democrats. Sure, they are excited and united … but this state was never going to go for Trump anyway.

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When listening to the power-saws and nail-guns on that downtown rooftop 4 years ago, neither I nor my luncheon companion thought it foolhardy to plywood up the plate glass. Trump could squeak out a win, and then cities would again be open territory for mayhem.

And if it went the other way, neither of us anticipated Trumpers going full-berserker.

But it was just eight weeks later, that a bunch of MAGA Bros did riot. I reject the notion that January 6 was an insurrection, or that there was ever the slightest chance that day, of our Democracy crumbling. We’re not that fragile, for God’s sake. But it was a sign that things had changed. Those people were not ‘conservatives’. Not by any pre-Trump definition.

It’s true that most who walked down the mall to the capitol and most at legitimate race protests were indeed peaceful.

But just as the violent and larcenous have always attached themselves to legitimate left-wing protests, Jan 6 showed that the ‘new’ Republican base too has its share of thuggish hangers-on.

But more troubling than that is that the greater mass of Trump loyalists do believe that they were robbed four years ago, and that every rough thing the country’s been through since is attributable entirely to progressive malfeasance.

Last go-round, Hard-Trumpers bought into a dizzying number of explanations for Biden’s victory. And most believe more than one of these theories. Even when these theories conflict with each other.

The only theory they won’t consider is that Democrats simply outplayed them on the field of win-or-die politics.

Will Harris’s lighting-fast ascension look to them like anything other than a new and clever ‘election irregularity’? A sleight-of-hand, bait-and-switch? No. In MAGA Land, many believe that Barack Obama has been pulling Biden’s strings all along.

If Harris does catch Trump, and pass him, in the coming weeks, DJT will tell his minions that it’s all ‘fake polling’.

So what about his predicting ‘a bloodbath’? To be clear, at rallies the man runs his mouth like a drunk, and to him, exaggeration is the mother tongue. But it’s not a question of what HE thinks about what he’s blurted out. It’s what catches on with his fans.

We need to remember that the new populists felt genuinely aggrieved, long before Trump shined a spotlight on them, and gained their undying love. At best, they’ve felt ignored by the party that used to be focused on the working class. At worst they’ve felt like the butt of every liberal elitist joke. There was smoldering hurt and anger there already. Trump just gave it slogans and jaunty red caps.

The people who’ve bet their futures on this guy, have long felt that America’s systems were increasingly rigged against them.

Last time he ran, he primed his peeps well in advance, to believe that a loss was proof of a fixed election. And he’s stuck with that narrative. In late May of this year the NYT did an analysis of Trump’s 2024 campaign speeches looking for references to election rigging or interference.

So unless this is all made up by The Times, I’d say that Trump is still employing his ‘heads I win, tails you cheated’ strategy.

Look, most of my friends are Democrats. And in recent years, voting with that team means that you have to hold your tongue a lot or risk getting in trouble. In Los Angeles, the hard-working liberals whose stores were ransacked under a pretense of social justice, just quietly rebuilt. Rioting had long ago been re-branded as ‘up-rising’, in a self-conscious attempt to withhold judgement whenever it was people of color who broke the windows and grabbed the goodies.

When there is a direct presenting issue of police brutality, that makes some sort of sense. But the widespread unrest that was expected if Trump won in 2020, had little or nothing to do with ‘oppression’. And the rioters were expected to be of all colors.

Tearing up the shopping district because your guy didn’t win, is as unAmerican as storming the capitol. If there was a Nike store and a Foot Locker in the rotunda we’d have seen the joint broken into a dozen times before.

It’s not okay on either side. Particularly for the purpose of a partisan tantrum. Obama was fond of saying that elections have consequences. They do. I don’t particularly like either candidate, but one will win. And I promise not to fly into a rage, or spend a week in the fetal position.

For better or worse, the man or woman who wins, will be my president. There … I said it.

If it doesn’t go their way, I hope that my Democrat friends will remember that the 5,000,000 Republicans living in California haven’t had a vote go their way since Prop 8. And that was overturned by the courts faster than you could push a handful of wedding-cake into your same-sex spouse’s face.

I don’t know what portion of California’s GOP voters are Trump fanatics, but if they ever voted for him, they did so as an empty gesture. Ours is a state where representation is anything but equal. And we’ve got the lack of perspective in our governing bodies to prove it.

Still EVERYBODY knows what will happen here if Donald Trump wins. Even though he could never ever ever win the vote here, there will still be massive demonstrations.

It remains to be seen what will happen if Kamala Harris wins. As I’ve said, we are in uncharted waters with the worshipful populists who now pool where there used to be cautious, slow-to-anger conservatives.

I don’t think that they’ll get violent. But I shudder to imagine what a few thousand heavily armed guys with 4x4 trucks and good mechanical skills, could do to the power grid if they ever really wanted to make a point.

That’s all for now. Let me know what you think in the comments. Share this with somebody. Help me grow. And remember that a $5 monthly donation will be appreciated more by me, than it will be missed by you.

I’m just sayin’.

And for no particular reason, let’s end with a shot from our concert Saturday night. It was a splendid affair. Everybody was well fed, and not one drop of political blood was spilled. Let me know if you want to be on our mailing list for future shows. Thanks to Vicki Toler for the photo.

Yours, Dave