What if Trump does not want to leave the White House, even as a loser?
The American election campaign promises to be one of the most uncertain ever. However, there is a level of political fictional uncertainty (but not too much): this is what would happen if Trump did not accept the verdict of the polls
On 3 November, in the United States, one of the most uncertain elections ever will be staged. The climate in which the presidential elections themselves will take place will be uncertain, first of all, a democratic appointment currently overshadowed by the pandemic from Covid-19, which in the United States shows no signs of improving, with the number of new daily infections now steadily higher. to 50 thousand. The methods of voting are uncertain - with the mail-in ballot suddenly becoming the subject of political contention and accused by Donald Trump of favoring potential fraud - and the result of the race for the White House, which despite the polls in favor of Biden seem anything but closed.
However, there is an additional level of uncertainty, rarely made explicit, which leads us directly to the date of January 20, 2021: the day on which, if defeated, Donald Trump will have to leave his office in the White House. Political personalities close to Trump have long evoked the image of a presidency destined to last well beyond the limit of the second term (sanctioned by the constitution with the XXII amendment) and the president himself has repeatedly joked about the possibility of remaining in office even after 2025.
In an interview released on June 19 to the American website Politico, Trump evaded the question about the possibility of accepting the election result, in case of defeat, simply replying that "Hillary Clinton lost, but she never accepted it" .
For a long time such a hypothesis was confined to the role of a school case, but the time has come to ask oneself an unimportant question: what would happen if the outgoing president decided not to leave the White House?
What the American Constitution says
The electoral transition in the United States is governed by the Constitution, which in Article 2 establishes the duration of the presidential mandate at 4 years, specifying, in the twentieth amendment, that this must necessarily end by noon on the twentieth day of January.
The trial by fire for the American democratic system came in the year 1800, when for the first time it was necessary to implement a transfer of power between two presidents belonging to opposite parties. Until then, the United States had barely had two presidents (George Washington and John Adams) and public opinion at the time feared that the victory of Thomas Jefferson, an openly atheist Democrat-Republican, might not be accepted by all as legitimate.
As we know, everything went well and so for the next 220 years the presidential transitions at the White House went peacefully and in compliance with the law, making any other regulatory action in this sense superfluous.
There are precedents
Refusal to leave an elected office is a rare occurrence in a democracy, but with a remarkable precedent. In 2016, the Democratic Republic of Congo faced a bloody constitutional crisis, when outgoing president Joseph Kabila refused to step aside after three terms and fifteen consecutive years of government, announcing that he wanted to postpone the electoral deadline for two years to complete a census in the country. The protests that followed led to the deaths of 50 protesters, but did not prevent Kabila from remaining in government until 2018, when he renounced a further re-nomination.
In 2017 it was the turn of the Gambia and of the outgoing president Yahya Jammeh, determined to keep power despite the electoral defeat that arrived in December 2016. In this circumstance the presidential transition was ensured through the military threat of the West African Community of States, which he convinced Jammeh to leave power and choose exile.
In November 2018, political chaos hit Sri Lanka, with former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe refusing to leave office (and institutional residence) after President Sirisena's decision to dissolve the executive and suspend the national parliament. In the Sinhalese case, the prime minister’s resistance was justified by the existence of a parliamentary majority loyal to him, which finally allowed him to remain in government until the end of his mandate.
The latest case of turbulent transition dates back to June 2019, when the newly elected coalition executive between the pro-Russian Now Platform pro-Europeans and the pro-Russian Socialist Party was forced to postpone the settlement procedures due to resistance from the outgoing ruling party. . At the basis of the dispute, the rule according to which the new government should have been born within three months of the elections, interpreted differently by the two factions (three months of the calendar, according to the new majority, formed precisely at the end of the term, 90 days according to the outgoing one, which considered the term expired). The stalemate was resolved only on June 14, with the resignation of the defeated prime minister and the swearing-in of the new government team.
Although similar dynamics have never directly involved the presidency, the elected offices of the United States of America are by no means unrelated to problematic transitions. In 1874, for example, the Republican governor of Texas Edmund J. Davis locked himself in the basement of his institutional residence to denounce the alleged fraud that had led to the victory of his opponent, the Democrat Richard Coke, who in the meantime was sworn in to the plan of above, escorted by the sheriff. The situation was unlocked only after several days, when Davis decided to ask for help from the then President Ulysses Grant without obtaining an answer.
Also noteworthy is the case of the three governors crisis, which took place in Georgia in 1946, when the governor-elect died before he was sworn in. The office was then claimed by three contenders: the outgoing governor, the son of the governor-elect, and the vice-governor-elect. While the first two decided to physically occupy the palace of power, changing the office lock in turn, the deputy governor obtained the favorable opinion of the state Supreme Court, resolving a crisis that lasted over three months.
The hypothesis of forced removal
The resistance imagined (so far only ironically) by Donald Trump would therefore represent an absolute first time for the United States, but it would not be a complete leap in the dark.
If Trump - or any president after him - chose not to peacefully leave the White House, that would not block the formal transfer of power to the elected president, a process that would deprive Trump of constitutionally recognized authority over intelligence and federal police. At the same time, the outgoing president would cease to be the commander in chief of the armed forces, losing the right to invoke them in his defense.
The outgoing president would then be little more than a private citizen, criminally liable for what would be a real violation of the most guarded property in the world. A decidedly un-presidential way to end the mandate.
