If Trump refuses to concede, refuses to leave, then what?

Gregg said:

The "I'm not Donald Trump" strategy didn't work for Hillary (or any of Trump's GOP primary opponents) and it won't work for Joe Biden. He has to get out there in the public eye and show he's up to the job. On nine days in September he's cut his campaign day short well before noon - and, no, he hasn't been prepping for the first debate.
While Trump does have high negative's he also has much more enthusiasm behind him the Biden.

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The Russian propaganda machine is certainly gearing up to promote Trump and denigrate Biden.

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/21/21401149/russia-2020-election-meddling-trump-biden

Brightdreamer said:

Fiscal conservatives appear to be functionally extinct in the halls of power, near as I can determine.

And I don't think we can count on individual integrity if the order from the top brass is "open fire."

Barring mass, Belarus-level showings in the street, I don't see how we stop this plain-sight power grab when it gets that far.

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And there is no evidence any such mass showing in the street supporting Trump and ignoring the election results will happen. There might be massive street showing across the country if Trump pretends he won.

There are no top brass that will order "open fire" but maybe I misinterpreted that line in your post.

The bottom line is Trump might fantasize he's going to win the election. He might fantasize he only lost because liberals cheated, the same way he tried to claim Clinton's win of the popular vote was due to a million illegal immigrants voting and the way he imagined 'God' stopped the rain at his inauguration which was in his imagination attended by more people in the history of US inaugurations ever. Based on observation now and over the last four years: that losing the election fantasy fluctuates in his brain between bouts of imagining he's simply going to win.

Trump is not staying on after he loses the election. He might make a senseless attempt to challenge the election results in court. Stuffing the SCOTUS is no doubt part of that fantasy. He probably imagines certain court members will pay him back for their appointments.

The problem with that nonsense is one doesn't challenge state election outcomes in federal court. He'd have to challenge those outcomes in state courts. And to challenge the results in multiple states isn't going to be valid. Trump knows he's losing and he fantasizes how he'll win anyway.

We need to stop letting Trump control the news narrative by saying one outrageous thing after another. And we need to stop him from convincing people the election is going to be rigged.

Take this latest kerfuffle over nine military mail-in votes being discarded. Apparently they were discarded because they didn't have an outer envelope, something the Trump administration themselves demanded mail-in ballots have.

MaeZe said:

And we need to stop him from convincing people the election is going to be rigged.

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Unfortunately, I think that ship has already sailed.

mccardey said:

Unfortunately, I think that ship has already sailed.

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Well yeah for his base, but that's not who I meant. I meant we need to keep non-sycophants from listening to Trump's messaging. At this point that means writing letters or emails to a variety of news sources that are allowing Trump to run the news narrative. They do say "no evidence of voter fraud" every time they report on Trump saying there is fraud. They need to continue that with a comment on there being no path for Trump to stay in office if he loses the election.

In other news, Chris Wray, head of the FBI, is out there saying there is no evidence of voter fraud.

Does Trump have enough time to replace Wray with a Trump lackey in the next few weeks? If so you can count on Wray's replacement in 3...2...1.

If it were just one man fantasizing, it wouldn't be a problem.

But he's backed by a Senate that has, in a very real sense, told him he can do anything - literally anything - and they won't remove him.

He's backed by hand-picked appointees in the DOJ, the FBI, and every branch of government... all repeatedly proven loyal to him, to the needs and wants and blusterings of one man, not their ostensible "duties" to the nation.

And he's soon to be backed by a packed court bench on the SCOTUS (because, barring alien invasion and/or meteor impact, it's pretty much a done deal.)

Meanwhile, the media continues to roll over for belly scratches and clicks, even those who claim to be once-in-a-while, maybe critical of the regime, and allow the WH occupant to consume all the oxygen in the room.

I do wish the media would focus less on Trump's outrageous lies and tweets and more on Biden's platform. I'm not saying ignore them completely. They must be debunked, but spending hours being all outraged about each and every one isn't productive. It doesn't convince anyone of anything they didn't already believe, and Trump's "making the liberals mad" is one major reason the Right adores him.

I think we have to accept that we don't know what will happen on election night and beyond. My dearest hope is that Biden is actually ahead on election night and simply pulls further ahead as more ballots come in. That way, any challenge of the results will be seen as feeble and ridiculous and with no legal standing at all. Or if a challenge is taken seriously by the Senate and the courts, the majority of the electorate will see it as evidence of how deep the corruption runs.

If Biden is behind on election night but pulls ahead as the mail-in ballots are counted, it could be dicier. But if enough Americans can be persuaded to engage in mass strikes in particular, essentially shutting the country down until justice is served, then the coup could also be averted. The issue, as always, is convincing enough Americans to do this, given the fact that some Americans still tend to either have a lot of faith in our systems and institutions to survive without much effort on their part, and some others are so mired in hopelessness and cynicism they'll figure it's too late to do anything, or that they will still be scared of losing their jobs and so on. The fact is, if Trump steals this election, keeping one's job and livelihood for a while longer won't matter, because everything is going to be on its head and we will no longer be a country where it is safe to be a liberal.

And if Trump wins, seemingly (at least, but there's always the possibility of foreign hackers) fair and square, then we're screwed in a different way. Then, resistance will have to be a long game.

Brightdreamer said:

If it were just one man fantasizing, it wouldn't be a problem.

But he's backed by a Senate that has, in a very real sense, told him he can do anything - literally anything - and they won't remove him.

He's backed by hand-picked appointees in the DOJ, the FBI, and every branch of government... all repeatedly proven loyal to him, to the needs and wants and blusterings of one man, not their ostensible "duties" to the nation.

And he's soon to be backed by a packed court bench on the SCOTUS (because, barring alien invasion and/or meteor impact, it's pretty much a done deal.)

Meanwhile, the media continues to roll over for belly scratches and clicks, even those who claim to be once-in-a-while, maybe critical of the regime, and allow the WH occupant to consume all the oxygen in the room.

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I think it might be the other way around. The mess that is the current GOP is how we all got Trump. And now the fools don't realize what they created.

I'd be pre-mourning my country and everything I know and love and couldn't fit in a suitcase when I left. His previous Middle East meddlings have triggered another intifada, and he is one dumb announcement away from getting Israel nuked by disgruntled enemy nations of which we have plenty. Not to mention Netanyahu has been encouraging him every step of the way, and he just got re-elected...
I'll also be thankful for living in a village nobody cares about, because it's unlikely to get bombed in case Germany gets dragged into something this man starts. And he will. He will start something, I just know it.

MaeZe said:

I think it might be the other way around. The mess that is the current GOP is how we all got Trump. And now the fools don't realize what they created.

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I suspect some of them do. I don't think this was their plan decades ago, but now that so many of them are "true believers" in a White America and a return to traditional power structures, which they conflate with meritocracy, I think they're happy to prop up a dictators swept in on a tide of backlash populism they helped create, election by election. American corporations don't think they need a robust middle class anymore. The 2% can sell their products to the emerging middle class in other parts of the world, and anyway, the middle class proved too capricious and unpredictable to contain after the Reagan revolution, when the GOP honestly thought we were headed towards being a one-party system.