What if Trump refuses to leave the White House?
The United States will enter uncharted territory if the president refuses to leave the White House after a clear electoral defeat.
It's a question that has seemingly sparked growing concern among some Americans in recent weeks amid reports that President Donald Trump was preparing a massive legal response to combat the potential results of the 2020 national elections: What happens if it is refuse to leave the White House?
Of course, this is not the first time the question has become of national importance: every time the president has suggested that he will only accept the results of an election if they are in his favor, the national media has explored the constitutional limits that he would, face by contesting his removal from the Oval Office.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden has assembled his own army of legal minds and constitutional law experts to counter the president's legal challenges on everything from expanding voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic to alleged cases of voter fraud. of which Trump has claimed no evidence was rampant. The Democratic candidate has insisted that federal officials "will escort [Trump] out of the White House very quickly" if he refuses to leave the White House after losing the election in November.
What is perhaps most concerning about the president's apparent threats not to concede in the election is how the country lacks any kind of precedent that addresses such a scenario: The peaceful transition of power is a foundation of American society, and in past examples of contentious elections, resolutions had been made long before any refusal to yield. If he loses to Biden and refuses to step down in the days before the president-elect takes office, the country could enter unpredictable and unexplored territory for the first time in history.
The Independent previously explored the question of what could happen if Trump lost the election and refused to budge because of a story published in June last year. Our report explored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plans to counter the president's upcoming legal battles around the election, speaking with experts who outlined possible scenarios that could happen after the day of the elections.
(The story has been republished in its entirety below. It was originally posted on June 16, 2019.)
About seven hours after his testimony before Congress in March, former Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen issued a dire warning about the future of American democracy if the president does not get his way in the 2020 election. .
While many during Trump's presidency have wondered whether he could be impeached and removed from office during his first term, Cohen had a different concern. As a rude guest with nuclear codes at his disposal, Cohen worried that the famous businessman-turned-president might simply refuse to drop the keys to the White House, even if he is not reelected.
"Given my experience working for Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power," Cohen said.
The comments received as much backlash from the room as a later Saturday Night Live parody of Cohen's testimony in which he called Trump a racist. I mean, basically none.
But it's a sentiment shared by people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told The New York Times last week that she is preparing for that situation.
"We have to get vaccinated against that, we have to be prepared," Pelosi said.
While Cohen's concerns were largely ignored, it was notable that Cohen should raise the question of what happens if the president of the United States refuses to leave office after losing an election. Could something like this happen?
Experts interviewed about the possibility of this article said that there is no actual play manual for the scenario. Like, perhaps, the Trump administration itself, the United States would be in uncharted territory.
On previous occasions in the history of the United States, when the presidency was in some way contested, cooler heads have prevailed for the sake of the peaceful transfer of power.
Richard Nixon awarded John F Kennedy in 1960 amid various accusations of vote rigging for the Democrat, for example. Vice President Al Gore accepted the Supreme Court ruling that George Bush had won the 2000 presidential election despite significant doubts about the integrity of the results in Florida.
Paul Quirk, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, says he hasn't given the issue much thought because it is an outlier, but that the most likely time of dispute would be between Election Day in November and January, when the presidents take office.
“If Trump decided that the election was illegitimate and that he would resist leaving office, he would, I don't know if he would try to arrest his opponent and prevent him from appearing to take control of the office, or if he would just say on January 21, 'I'm not leaving,' ”says Quirk.
“At some point, the question would be: whose orders are law enforcement obeying? Because ultimately, it would become a question of the use of force in one direction or the other. "
The United States constitution does not mention how a president should be removed if he loses an election and refuses to hand over power to his opponent. So it's hard to say if anyone would have the appetite to send the FBI, the Navy Seals, or any law enforcement agency, breaking into the West Wing to arrest a recently defeated Donald Trump.
Joshua Sandman, a political science professor at the University of New Haven, says he doesn't believe Trump will ever refuse to leave office after an election because he would destroy the president's legacy.
Still, he suggests, like other experts cited here, intense political and congressional pressure would force Trump to leave office quickly.
"The first line of defense would be Congress and his party pressuring him to leave, telling him that he must resign or leave," Sandman says. “If he wants to stay in the White House, he will stay in the White House. But again, hypothetically you don't need it. The White House is symbolic. It is not a seat of power, necessarily. "
And he adds: “All these are, it's kind of a science fiction work. Everything is hypothetical. "
Contrary to Michael Cohen's doom-laden warning, and similar claims from the president's former fixer Roger Stone, experts interviewed by The Independent say they doubted a mass uprising would actually occur if Trump lost the 2020 election or his presidency. was completed in Congress after impeachment. As in the 2000 elections, a Supreme Court decision in favor of his opponent would settle the matter.
While the president's base of around 30 percent of the population may be committed to him, that doesn't mean they would necessarily take steps to keep him in office if he lost at the polls. Certainly, there is no expectation that a broad swath of the American population will rise up to protest a Trump presidency should he lose.
Ross Baker, an American policy expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says the most challenging situation would arise if Trump lost reelection by a very narrow margin.
He envisioned a scenario where the popular vote was won by less than 1 percent nationally, and where there was almost a tie in the electoral college. On November 4, 2020, the United States could wake up to tweets from the president calling the previous day's results a fraud and saying there is no way he didn't win by big margins. Meanwhile, Fox News would welcome one expert after another along that presidential line.
If that happened, Baker can imagine a scenario in which the House of Representatives could decide the electoral college based on the delegation from each state, which may or may not align with the popular vote.
But that does not resolve who would win or who would be the legitimate president of the United States.
"It would certainly be a constitutional crisis of the first magnitude," says Baker.
