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It’s not surprising that Donald Trump and his Republicans are feeling pretty good about the state of the race at this moment in time. They just held a convention that, at least in their view, was a smashing success, the former president survived an assassination attempt (and reacted very well in the immediate aftermath), and the polls are showing him ahead of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
This sense of optimism would be fine… if the GOP were a normal party and Trump a normal candidate.
Sadly, they are not, which makes this optimism a real problem and a potential danger for the country.
Here is why: Trump already attempted one coup… and that was after losing the 2020 election by millions of votes and the Electoral College by a healthy margin, which is a result consistent with the polls at the time.
In the process, he successfully brain-washed the GOP into believing that the election was stolen from him, which is something 70 percent of Republicans now believe, to the point that some of his supporters were willing to storm the Capitol on January 6.
So, what do you think is going to happen if somebody with a history of instigating political violence, who believes himself to be touched by God, and who is leading the race three months prior to the election ends up losing?
That’s right, nothing good.
We are already seeing that Trump is laying the groundwork for riling up his loyal followers and trying to overturn the results of any election he loses.
This time, he wants to get “his” Supreme Court involved (to be honest, “his” should not even be in quotation marks because it is clear that the court’s right-wing majority is likely to do Trump’s bidding whenever it matters).
“The only way I can lose is crooked judges,” Trump said at a rally this week. “But we’ll get it overturned, anything that happens.”
Of course, he not only lost the 2020 election but also all of his lawsuits challenging the results.
And here is his son Donald Trump Jr. saying during the convention that the only way his dad loses is by being cheated.
That’s really dangerous rhetoric. We now know that the former president will do anything to “win” an election… and his supporters will believe whatever he says even without evidence.
In addition, it is quite possible that Trump is already peaking, and that the race will change substantially going forward.
Usually, candidates get a small convention bump, and it also stands to reason that the former president benefited in the polls from surviving an attempt on his life.
And, most importantly, last week, he was still facing Biden, who looked like a historically weak opponent.
Trump, of course, is also highly unpopular, so the assertion that he cannot possibly lose this election is ridiculous.
The coming days will show how the race shapes up now that Biden has made way for somebody else, most likely his vice president, Kamala Harris, and how polls change once that matchup is no longer hypothetical.
How that will go is anybody’s guess. Even though she is the vice president, Americans are unfamiliar with Harris, but there are certainly some signs that anybody not named Biden will do better against the former president.
What does seem certain, however, is that Trump is going to continue to prepare his supporters for a coup 2.0.
