I’m here to wreck your Sunday. You’re probably sitting quietly, having your morning tea or coffee, maybe listening to music, maybe doing the Sunday crossword, maybe looking out the window and evaluating the weather and planning how to spend this last lazy day before having to go back to work tomorrow.

Dude, I’m about to fuck up your day. I’m going to ask you to consider the following sequence of events:

• Comrade Donald Trump is impeached by the House, voting along party lines.
• The Senate refuses to convict, voting along party lines.
• Trump is defeated in the 2020 election.
• Trump refuses to concede the election. He claims the election results were rigged by the ‘deep state’. He claims the results were skewed by voter fraud and that millions of illegal immigrants voted. He claims he really won the popular vote AND the electoral vote, and news reports otherwise are fake news. He states he is the real winner of the election, and what’s taking place is a coup attempt. He holds a series of rallies between election day and the day of the new president’s inauguration encourages his supporters to resist. He tells news reporters that he’s worried his supporters will resort to violence unless the coup is stopped.
• Trump rejects and prevents an inauguration event. He refuses to leave the White House or acknowledge the legitimacy of the new president.

What happens next?

I’m not an alarmist by nature. I tend to be a skeptical optimist. I keep my expectations low, but my hopes are moderately high. I don’t expect things will work out well, but I always hope they will. About a month ago I wrote about the probability that Comrade Trump would make the transition of power as ugly and messy as possible. But the notion that he would refuse to give up that power was, for me at that point, unthinkable.

But behaviors that were unthinkable two years ago are now commonplace in the Trump administration. A presidential candidate accepting the help of a hostile foreign nation to skew an election in his favor? Unthinkable. A president openly using the office of the presidency to line his pockets? Unthinkable. A president attacking traditional allies and openly supporting totalitarian regimes? Actively and persistently undermining the law enforcement and intelligence communities? Ordering his staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas? Calling the news media the ‘enemy of the people’? Lying blatantly and openly about everything from golf scores to domestic policies to military situations? All of that used to be completely and entirely unthinkable. Not anymore.

Refusing a peaceful transition of power? Refusing even to give up that power? It ought to be unthinkable. But Comrade Trump and his fellow Republicans have already been laying the foundations for the unthinkable for a couple of years with their repeated lies about voter fraud and the ‘deep state traitors’ inside the government and ‘fake news’ agencies staffed by reporters who hate Trump.

It’s not only ‘thinkable’ that Trump might refuse to accept defeat, it’s somewhere between ‘very possible’ and ‘an absolute certainty’. We HAVE to think about Trump refusing to give up his power and consider the implications of the unthinkable. We have to ask ourselves what the military would do in such a situation. What would the Secret Service do? What would Congress and the Supreme Court do?

What would WE do? Think about that, because it’s a very real possibility. What would YOU do?

Okay, you can go back to your quiet Sunday now.