“A Trump victory will be even harder for the left to absorb” than the one over Hillary Clinton in 2016, said The Atlantic writer.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
Democrats might be sore losers – very sore losers.
That’s the message, or perhaps warning, from The Atlantic contributing writer Shadi Hamid on Sunday. (The progressive periodical was recently in the news itself for using anonymous sources to claim the president had called U.S. dead at the Aisne-Marnes American Cemetery “losers” and “suckers.”)
“I find myself truly worried about only one scenario: that Trump will win reelection and Democrats and others on the left will be unwilling, even unable, to accept the result,” Hamid writes.
“A loss by Joe Biden under these circumstances is the worst case not because Trump will destroy America (he can’t), but because it is the outcome most likely to undermine faith in democracy, resulting in more of the social unrest and street battles that cities including Portland, Oregon, and Seattle have seen in recent months,” Hamid said.
He said “a Trump victory will be even harder for the left to absorb” than his triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016. It would be particularly difficult if, as last time, Trump wins the electoral vote but loses the popular vote, he added.
Oddly, Hamdi argued that to avoid the possibility of violence, Republicans should support Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
“For this reason, strictly law-and-order Republicans who have responded in dismay to scenes of rioting and looting have an interest in Biden winning — even if they could never bring themselves to vote for him,” Hamid wrote.
Hamdi’s isn’t the only voice warning of possible post-election violence.
A recent report, “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election,” released last month by the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) said “the potential for violent conflict is high,” though it tended to put the onus for that prospective violence on Trump supporters, “particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
There’s some question about whether the report itself is a veiled call for violence. Chris Farrell, a former U.S. counterintelligence case officer, writing for the Gatestone Institute, said that the group is made up of academics, Democratic power players and NeverTrumpers.
The report, he says, was written with the purpose of “advocating and promoting street violence.”
“The political power resourced and generated from a document like the TIP report can be used for persuasion (through news and social media), indoctrination (of activists and other ‘true believers’), and introduces the threat of terror and street violence (to the general population) as a ‘normal’ or ‘expected outcome,” he argued.
Foreshadowing a difficult post-election transition, Biden announced in early July he had enlisted hundreds of lawyers in case there was election foul play.
“We put together 600 lawyers and a group of people throughout the country who are going into every single state to try to figure out whether chicanery is likely to take place,” Biden said in a video conference with campaign donors.
Biden had earlier said his chief concern was that Trump would “steal” victory.
Trump, for his part, has argued the contrary, that Democrats would attempt to steal the election, particularly if there was a mail-in ballot.