Brace yourself. I hate to say all of this, especially so close to Halloween, but what happens after Election Day may be more terrifying than what came before it. Because Donald Trump will go. But he will not go easy.
The good news: He will lose this election badly, by which I mean poorly. Exceedingly poorly. The bad news: After he does so, he will take his wounded pride and his seething, tiny-fingered resentment to war against this country. Not for this country. But against it. Because for all the haziness surrounding his agenda, his policies, the true colors of his hair and his heart, one thing has become crystal clear: Donald Trump is an enemy of the people.
He will lose the popular vote, and he will lose the electoral vote, but he will act as if none of this matters, because it doesn't—to him.
However clear and convincing his loss to Hillary, he will cast the election as rigged, unfair, and ultimately illegitimate. He's already saying as much, setting the groundwork. (Irony alert: By pre-complaining about this, he's the one doing the “rigging,” laying landlines for a conversation the media will be too weak to resist.)
This “rigged” conspiracy will become his brand—a luxury upgrade from the two-bit fearmongering, resentment-stoking, and race-baiting he's been running on for what seems like a small eternity. And it will serve as the founding principle for the next phase of Trump Demagoguery, Inc.—soon to be a 24-hour cable-news channel, or a 2020 presidential run, or just a vague threat to launch either, like missiles deployed from the deep arsenal of his ego.
How do I know this? Trump's entire story—his bio, the entertainment he provides, the alleged silence of his majority—is built on lies, self-inflation, and dark suggestion (“Something's going on!”), and so we can expect him to react to defeat with the same respect for truth and honor.
Then there's this. Elections used to be settled ground. Once they were over, people plotted for the next one. Democracy! But we don't live in that era anymore. We live in the Alternate-Reality Era: The most sinister political art Trump has mastered (and surely Roger Ailes taught him how, and has extra time now to whisper dark secrets into his orange ear hairs) is the notion of “winning” by doubt—that even if you or your party loses, you can essentially win by constantly churning suspicion, questioning the validity of the winner (or their birth certificate), so that authority is never settled and truth is always dubious.
I'll tell you what I'm worried about. Election hackery. And yes, now it's my turn to get conspiratorial. In an era when we hear about a new cyber-attack every week—a movie studio, a branch of government, the DNC—think about how easy it would be to hack and de-legitimize an election, just a state or two, and throw the whole thing into doubt.
This is how easy: It's already happening. This summer, the FBI alerted states that foreign hackers had attacked the voter rolls of two states, Illinois and Arizona. (This led to the least reassuring headline of the year: ELECTION OFFICIALS CONFIDENT VOTER ROLLS SECURE AFTER HACK ATTEMPT.) The hackers turned out to be Russian—surprise!—and we all know which candidate has a Slavic man crush on Vladimir Putin.
Add to this the recent ballsy attempts at voter suppression. Since Obama got elected, every Republican worth his whiteness has started yapping about “election fraud” and the need for documentation and voter-ID laws, a kind of soft reboot of the odious Jim Crow laws. In Ohio, the Republican secretary of state tried to purge the rolls of tens of thousands of people, including anyone who hadn't voted since 2008. He said he was trying to guard against “voter fraud,” and he was, of course, full of an enormous amount of shit.
Even worse, in Kansas, Republicans pulled a fast one, suddenly decreeing that people registering to vote need to show a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. But then a judge nixed the plan, single-handedly allowing democracy and fairness to live another day. It takes a village, sure, but sometimes it only takes one person.
Whenever you hear people talking about the need for voter IDs, know this: They are trying to stop people from voting. This is the direct opposite of democracy. Perhaps it goes without saying that these campaigns are always attempts to stop minorities from voting. In fact, the first major study on the issue just came out, and it shows those laws can “depress Latino turnout by 9.3 points, black turnout by 8.6 points, and Asian-American turnout by 12.5 points.”
Whatever your politics or party, you should care deeply about this, and demand an end to it, if only because the next time it happens, it might be your group. People have a right to vote, period.
So let's do this thing! Vote. Vote hard. Vote like you mean it, like it's Donald Trump's face you're punching, not a ballot. And stay vigilant.
