Joseph R. Biden Jr. has offered an opinion on a subject that has been in the back of minds of many millions of Americans.
Indeed some of us, such as this blogger, have questioned openly whether Donald J. “Psychopath in Chief” Trump would leave office quietly and with dignity were he to lose the November election.
At issue is how Donald Trump would accept the election results if he loses the presidency to Biden. I have wondered aloud about whether Trump would accept the results or whether he would challenge them as “rigged” or “phony.”
Biden, in an interview with late-night comic Trevor Noah, has given additional voice to the notion that Trump might not go quietly.
I am in no position to predict that Trump would resist the results. However, I am willing to declare that nothing would surprise me when it involves Donald Trump. I didn’t hear Biden actually predict a Trump resistance to leaving office; instead I thought I heard Biden suggest that he wouldn’t be surprised, either, if Trump tries some funny business in seeking to cling to power.
Donald Trump has a history of making absurd, unfounded and ignorant claims of voter fraud and corruption. He said in 2016 that millions of voters cast ballots illegally for Hillary Clinton; Trump never produced a shred of truth to it. He has hollered about the threat of voter fraud if Americans are allowed to cast their ballots by mail this year, again with no evidence to back up his specious and dubious assertions.
Now he is facing the distinct possibility — and it’s by no means certain — that he will lose his re-election effort. The man who could defeat him, Joe Biden, is suggesting that Trump’s thirst for power and dominance might not allow him to follow a tradition that began with the election of John Adams in 1796, when the nation’s second president took over from the first president, George Washington.
President Adams established the norm of “peaceful transition of power” that has worked well ever since. Then again, Donald Trump took office in 2017 pledging to be an “unconventional” president. How far he takes his unconventional tenure might become evident if he ends up losing the next presidential election.
