What if It All Goes Wrong?

Josh Geltzer was quoted in a Slate article about worse-case scenarios leading up to the November 2020 election.

That is, what if, by any reasonable standard, Trump loses the election, once all the votes that should be counted have been counted and once any court challenges that might be brought have been decided, but then he simply claims that he didn’t really lose, or that the votes can’t be trusted, or that the process was fraudulent, and so he won’t go? My friend Joshua Geltzer floated this scenario over a year ago on CNN. I asked him how people responded at the time. “One big reaction to my article was the same one that’s come to define the Trump era: ‘He wouldn’t really do that, would he?’ ” Geltzer said. “But then I’d start ticking off all of the times many of us had said that about Trump before, only to see him do the unthinkable.”