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Introduction

In mid-October 2020, Proof: the Podcast published two lengthy episodes on the likely scheme Donald Trump would implement post-election to try to steal the presidency.

Almost everything unfolded just as predicted—from weeks of evidence-free litigation to the creation of fake slates of electors, from a push to invalidate sufficient Electoral College votes to throw the 2020 election to the Republican Party-led U.S. House of Representatives to lobbying MAGA-friendly state legislators and elections officials to ignore statewide election results.

Post-election, the Twitter feed associated with the Proof Project forecast that what Donald Trump and his allies were planning could lead to a disaster in January 2021, especially as the Trump-encouraged Stop the Steal “movement” lacked a coherent plan for January 6 besides trespassing illegally on Capitol grounds (as all involved—including Trump—were well aware, the Capitol grounds were closed to the public on the week of January 4, and therefore the Stop the Steal rally planned for the Capitol “steps” on January 6 was ex ante illicit; it’s for this reason Trump was told by the U.S. Secret Service days before the rally that he under no circumstances could travel to the Capitol that day).

In fairness, Proof was by no means the only one to see the coming disaster. After all, it was as early as Summer 2020 that Trump was urging his voters, from a presser at an airfield in North Carolina, to commit the serious federal felony of double-voting—an explicit attempt, as “Proof: the Podcast” made clear the following month, to produce the very widespread “voter fraud” Trump had pre-planned opining about post-election.

Yet as it turned out, for all the voices warning of disaster in early January 2021, almost no one who could actually do anything useful was listening.

Sure, many people listened to “Proof: The Podcast”—in fact, it reached the Top 10 in the Government category in 31 countries, per Apple Podcasts (see here for the full list)—but just as the third national-bestselling Trump biography in the Proof Series had been widely read by Americans (and Brits) when it was released the month prior, but had nevertheless had been ignored by major media and law enforcement, the public statements by Trump critics in the weeks prior to the 2020 U.S. presidential election to the effect that the post-election period could quickly become unprecedentedly dangerous either went unheard by state and federal law enforcement or, if heard at all, went unheeded. While we now know that the FBI and some other key federal agencies were monitoring far-right websites after President Joe Biden decimated Trump in the 2020 vote, we also know that they largely ignored what those who’ve long reported on Trump were jumping up and down about for weeks prior to the election and after it: that Trump himself would surely play the dispositive role in turning online chatter into bloody, infamous, indisputably criminal live-action.

And sadly, it became clear, post-January 6, that no lessons had been learned by anyone.

The FBI and DOJ scooped up low-hanging MAGA fruit—those peons stupid enough to believe Donald Trump would actually be “with them” (as he bombastically claimed he would be) at the Capitol on January 6—something that of course never happened and that, all his subsequent claims notwithstanding, Trump well knew would never happen (again, as fully sourced at the links above and in the 2022 book Proof of Coup, the U.S. Secret Service had told Trump days before January 6 that the Capitol would be unsafe that day; it issued this report to the White House because it knew that all of the rallies planned for the immediate Capitol grounds that day would be per se illegal).

What the FBI and DOJ didn’t do was hold to account anyone in the Trump campaign or Trump administration, though every independent journalist who became a January 6 specialist—a member of the January 6 “beat”—after that horrible day saw instantly that none of what had occurred at the Capitol would have occurred had the men and women the FBI and DOJ were leaving wholly unmolested not engaged in clandestine orchestrations that eyed violence and mayhem from Day 1. (See the entire “January 6” section of this publication for the equivalent of several books on this very subject.)

It was, after all, Donald Trump himself who had recruited Alex Jones, Ali Alexander, and Roger Stone to lead the march on the Capitol on January 6, at a time Trump well knew Stone had orchestrated violence in Florida during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, that Alexander had been using violent rhetoric to presage his January 2021 intentions at rallies in Georgia and elsewhere in late 2020, and that Jones had been framing for his massive audience the post-election period as the run-up to a war between Good and Evil (his Insurrection Eve speech at Freedom Plaza must be heard to be believed).

Trump knew exactly what he was getting when he recruited these ringleaders, just as Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle knew what they were doing when they spoke by phone to Alexander from Trump’s Washington townhouse on Insurrection Eve, and just as the fact that everyone in the Trump campaign knew the Capitol was closed on January 6 means Trump telling 100,000 people to march there anyway was indubitably Incitement of a Riot.

But consistent with the long history of the FBI and DOJ when their prospective federal investigative targets are white, straight, rich, powerful, and Republican—as opposed to nonwhite, LGBTQIA2S+, poor, politically isolated, and/or Democratic—both entities exhibited immediate recalcitrance on the topic of even investigating (let alone questioning or indicting) anyone who could be deemed a politically sensitive January 6 suspect.

The result: random (it must be said) schlubs and schmucks from around the country who had decided to play at war in December 2020 and January 2021 were rounded up as though they had a prayer of accomplishing anything without some very powerful allies in Washington. What these “useful idiots” didn’t know then—what they still don’t seem to realize now—is that historically Republican leadership has always had contempt for the working class and working poor, and has always used the working class and working poor as pawns in their eldritch political games. Neither Trump nor anyone around him is likely to have lost even a minute of sleep over leading hundreds of followers to acts that weren’t just criminal but foreseeably led them right to prison.

Now it is 2024, and all the same patterns are repeating.

As Donald Trump openly promises a “dictator[ship]”, openly promises a post-election “bloodbath”, implicitly admits he won’t accept the election results if he loses, and lionizes the armed insurrectionists of January 6 at a literal awards gala for them held in his home, FBI agents are dutifully scouring online fora to see what the considerably less-educated MAGA faithful there are saying and doing—as though they’ll be saying or doing anything without the explicit and implicit material guidance of Trump, his family, members of his inner circle, and the slightly larger ring of Trump aides, allies, associates, attorneys, advisers, agents, advocates and acolytes that still surround him.

Were the FBI or DOJ (or, for that matter, the CIA or NSA) capable of learning from their mistakes under circumstances in which doing so might admittedly be politically disadvantageous for them—remember, Trump has promised to destroy federal law enforcement and the U.S. intelligence community if reelected precisely so that these defenders of American democracy will be afraid to investigate him properly at a key moment in his war on democracy—it would be listening to the plain language Trump and his milieu are putting out right now and would have an agent assigned to surveil these in-the-open, would-be insurrectionist plotters from now until January 20, 2025.

Instead, it seems as though only regular, helpless Americans must listen to all these scofflaws promising future civil unrest daily and take it seriously.

All of which underscores the need for immediate and public “scenario planning.”

To be clear, Proof is aware that scenario planning, disaster preparedness, emergency management, futurism, and “horizons” discourse is the province of professionals in those areas. My wife happens to be an expert in these arenas, but I am not, so what Proof aims to do here is not to offer a jargon-filled-but-definably-expert approach to the next few months of American history, but rather to approach America’s current situation as seen through the lens of, well… history. As the author of one of the Top 25 History substacks in America; as a Ph.D. whose since-published dissertation was itself a “disciplinary history”; as author of three bestselling nonfiction political histories of Donald Trump’s presidency; and as someone whose obsession with U.S. history is so intense that in his free time (just for fun) he’s working on comprehensive histories of the Atari 2600 game library and the Nintendo Entertainment System game library from the 1980s to the present, I know that the informed forecasting I did on “Proof: The Podcast” came not from reading tea leaves but having an extremely well-educated understanding of the history of the only MAGA ringleader who finally matters: Trump.

If Trump had told his MAGAs to stand down in November 2020, they would have.

If Trump had told his MAGAs to stand down in December 2020, they would have.

When Trump finally told his MAGAs to stand down on January 6, they did—instantly.

Though I was a federal criminal investigator and then state-level criminal defense attorney for almost a decade in total, it doesn’t take investigative or litigation chops to know that when a single man is responsible for thousands of crimes either happening or not happening on his say-so, that is who you focus the vast bulk of your investigative resources upon. Put more simply, America will plunge into some sort of civil war this year or next if Donald Trump wills it, and it won’t do so if he doesn’t. Clear enough?

This being the case, the idea that America isn’t engaged in a complex course of public scenario planning that simply relies on the history of Donald Trump and a thorough review of the facts already on the ground is shocking. We’re sleepwalking to a disaster.

So what you’ll encounter in the massive report that follows isn’t the highly technical in-field consultant-speak that dominates what the business and tech worlds think of when they think of scenario planning, but something that—in this particular context—is more valuable: a history-based forecasting of the near future from a leading Trump biographer who engaged in this same academic practice in October 2020 and got it all horrifyingly right. In the sections that follow you’ll no doubt find, consistent with this media project’s publication history, countless descriptions of the situation we’re likely to find ourselves in this fall and early next year that will go from forecast to reality fast.
The Scenario Planning and Disaster Preparedness Effort the American Public Needs Right Now

Post-election scenario planning in 2024 must begin, oddly enough, with consideration of New Year's Day in 2021.

That’s right: five days prior to January 6, before there was any broad awareness that something historically horrifying was about to happen.

Donald Trump’s friend and adviser Roger Stone had just urgently advised him, at a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, to abandon his annual late-December festivities there and hurry back to D.C. to personally oversee preparations for mass demonstrations the week of January 4. Trump took that advice and ducked out of Mar-a-Lago days earlier than expected, rushing to Washington and the promise of once again being the center of national attention—an unexpected position for a lame-duck president who’d just lost the popular vote in his reelection bid by a staggering seven million votes. Trump relished a return to the limelight not only due to the particular circumstances he was in but by dint of his lifelong and incurable attention-seeking pathology.

One would think that, as Trump ambled to his jet to return to a national capital that would shortly be engulfed in terror and violence, he was feeling pretty good. Why? Because the complex situation January 2021 posed for him was undoubtedly a win-win.

He was not then facing any state or federal criminal cases. There were no 34 felony charges in Manhattan. Indeed, it looked as though the state criminal investigation into his dozens of frauds in New York City in the 2010s had been largely abandoned.

There was no Georgia January 6 case, because January 6 hadn’t happened yet. There was no federal January 6 case, because—again—January 6 had not happened. There was no federal criminal case in Florida over a president stealing classified documents as he left office because Trump hadn’t stolen any documents yet and—though he was very much planning to steal classified documents, and had begun the process of secretly compiling them in preparation for his mass theft—he also was certain that he would get away with it. Sure, the U.S. Supreme Court had gravely disappointed him in November and December 2020 by refusing to help him overturn the 2020 election results but (even if we ignore that he still had hope of getting an emergency SCOTUS petition from Louie Gohmert heard) he was sitting pretty anyway, in the broader view.

He’d faced an impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in January 2020 and survived it—losing only one member of his party in the final vote, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who he believed he could eventually drum out of politics.

The Supreme Court may not yet have backed his play as to the 2020 election, but the fact that it was poised to be the most conservative Court in a century meant he had much he’d be able to take credit for there, and would be able to announce a third candidacy for president almost immediately on the strength of stolen-election claims, any economic or public health struggles president-elect Biden experienced due to the horrific COVID-19-handoff Trump had saddled him with, and the simple fact that he had delivered on his promise to wrench the nation's highest court hard to the right.

On January 1, 2021, Trump’s worst-case scenario was a return to a life of relative luxury.

No, he probably wasn’t actually a net billionaire given his staggering debt load, but he was still very rich—and his post-presidency promised a chance to revisit previously abandoned foreign deals and extend clandestinely pursued in-office foreign deals with the imprimatur and gravitas of a former President of the United States unfettered (as he more or less, in his own view, always had been) by The Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution.

And once he announced that he’d be running for POTUS again in 2024, which he imminently planned to do, the prospect of all those foreign deals going forward, and even some promising domestic ones (like a new national media outlet and/or social media platform) would increase substantially. In other words, however much money he did or didn’t have on January 1, 2021, he was going to make piles of money in his post-presidency—not just at home in America but in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Russia, the United Kingdom, and a number of former Soviet republics (e.g., Azerbaijan and Georgia).

Given the foregoing, and given that he’d already privately acknowledged—according to future congressional testimony he couldn’t have known about at the time—that he had indeed lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square, you would’ve expected Trump to be pretty chill on January 1, 2021. He was 19 days away from leaving a job he didn’t actually like very much for a life of shady deal-making around the world, which was and is a past-time he likes very much indeed. The Republican Party was still in his thrall in January 2021 (as it is now), so he could either make another run for president if he thought it would enrich him personally or else settle for handpicking his political successor. All was right with the world for Donald Trump, taking the bird’s-eye view of matters as of January 1, 2021.

Which makes it all the more harrowing that what Trump was in fact doing on January 1, 2021, was furiously planning a violent revolution.

He had set in motion an attempted internal coup at DOJ that would have seen its leadership toppled, a false statement put out by the Department declaring the 2020 vote fraught with fraud—its true result therefore unknowable—and a new Attorney General (Jeffrey Clark) installed who’d do literally anything Trump wanted him to do. Under this coup plot, Trump would have been directly running the entire federal law enforcement apparatus in the United States as he know promises to do should he be re-elected in 2024.

He had set in motion, days earlier, the installation of his personal attorney Sidney Powell as “Special Counsel to the White House”, a made-up role that nevertheless would empower her, as he understood it, to cite obscure DHS regulations regarding foreign election interference to use the National Guard to seize voting machines in battleground states around the country. He was confident that, whatever was actually on those machines, Powell understood her assignment perfectly: she would declare that the machines contained unmistakable markers of tampering and fraud and on that basis declare that the election results in the battleground states were invalid.

The endgame of what has become known as the Waldron Plot was a declaration of martial law throughout the United States. (See here and here and here, and the January 6 section of Proof generally, for more on this. Search for “Waldron Plot.”)

Trump had also spent the weeks after his election loss—a time when major changes at the Pentagon are unheard of because the nation needs maximum stability during a presidential transition period, and of course as of January 1, 2021, Trump was merely a lame-duck president—firing the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and replacing it with his most unscrupulous stooges, ensuring that whatever happened in January 2021 the U.S. military would or wouldn’t be part of it (whether through the National Guard or otherwise) based on what he deemed most profitable to his personal and/or political ambitions.

Moreover, on New Year’s Day 2021 Mr. Trump knew that he almost single-handedly had incited to congregate illegally on Capitol grounds 120 hours hence—he knew, again, that the Capitol was closed to the public, but planned to send a massive mob there anyway—tens or even hundreds of thousands of pissed-off lovers of the Second Amendment, the very same armed-and-dangerous individuals he had once publicly mused could assassinate Hillary Clinton if (like Joe Biden) she were to beat him at the ballot box. Of course the specifics of what was going to happen at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 didn’t really matter, as provided that the Capitol simply got occupied for an extended period on that day (which he knew was the explicit plan of the three men, Stone and Jones and Alexander, he had asked to lead the march on the Capitol that day, as the latter two had already done a dry run at the state Capitol in Georgia), he could call out the Guard, falsely declare that the whole situation had been caused by “antifa” radicals, invoke the Insurrection Act as pro-Trump paramilitaries had been begging him to do since November, direct the National Guard to quell the violence and end the Capitol occupation, and use all the foregoing to declare the 2020 election null and void and schedule a new election sometime in late 2021. And in that election, new rules would be in place about voter ID and in-person voting to ensure his victory.

On of his top advisers, Peter Navarro, had already gone on television to say that then inauguration did not have to go forward on January 20, 2021 if President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence did not want it to. Another longtime (if intermittent) adviser, Michael Flynn, had assured him that there was provable foreign election interference in the 2020 vote and that that opened up new options to him in terms of finding ways to nullify the election results unilaterally (as opposed to through the courts, which had by then refused to do so 60+ times); one Flynn proposal would have seen a new election ordered by Trump. His lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman had assured him that there was still a means—a purely political one that was, Eastman admitted, illegal—to block the January 6 certification and get slates of Trump electors certified as real electors by most of the battleground states that had cost Trump the Electoral College. Having been told the plan was illegal, Trump gleefully endorsed it and falsely represented to a large mob on the White House Ellipse on January 6 (one he knew was armed) that it was legal.

Steve Bannon, another of Trump’s top advisers, was preparing to predict chaos in DC.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Roger Stone was fundraising online for largely unspecified “equipment” for armed paramilitaries planning to illegally congregate at the closed U.S. Capitol on January 6. Trump was reaching out to men like Alexander and Jones who had been intimating that it was time for Trumpist America to go to war—and not a figurative war, either, but a real one. Trump believed that there’d be enough death and/or and destruction in Washington in January 2021 that he would “have no choice” (picture 100-foot-high air-quotes here) but to declare martial law, as certain allies had intimated he probably could have and should have as soon as he lost in November.

These were the actions of a man facing no state or federal criminal cases; 19 days from leaving a job he didn’t particularly like, facing a future of great wealth and privilege doing what he loves most (defrauding consumers, clients, and investors); who knew he had just been blown out in an election with no chance of being overturned. And he chose a warlike footing anyway, because he has always been fascinated by violence, death, and destruction—and because temperamentally he would rather (literally, not figuratively) the world burn than that he ever find himself compelled to admit a loss.
Fast Forward to Now

It is late summer of 2024, and Donald Trump is (maybe) about to be sentenced on 34 felonies in New York, a case that could actually see him incarcerated in a state prison.

He is facing a mountain of state felonies in Georgia with mandatory minimum prison sentences.

He is facing federal felonies in D.C. that could imprison him, on conviction, for the rest of his natural life.

He is facing the likely resuscitation of his federal criminal case in Florida at some point in the future—a case where precedent suggests a conviction would lead to a federal prison sentence measured in years, not months.

He has a Supreme Court that—unlike how he was feeling in 2020—he now believes is fully on his side, having given him the official green light to commit all sorts of crimes if he regains the White House under the guise of an entirely novel construction of presidential immunity that looks to have been crafted more or less explicitly for him.

His followers are angrier and more aggressive than they were back in 2020 by a factor of two or three, as he and his leading influencers having spent years convincing them the 2020 election was stolen, Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, and his own first term was “stolen” from him via fraudulent criminal and congressional investigations.

He and his followers have seen major MAGA figures—Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro—go to prison. They have seen dozens of others, from Rudy Giuliani to Christina Bobb and Sidney Powell to John Eastman, indicted in state and federal jurisdictions around the country. Trump himself was not just impeached in early 2021 but almost convicted, confirming for him (at least in his own mind) that even if he regains the White House a Democratic Congress would quickly seek to end his presidency via impeachment.

In other words, Mr. Trump believes—or at least can convince his followers that he believes—that in addition to his adversaries being willing to kill his supporters (see his lies about the manner and meaning of Ashli Babbitt’s death on January 6), they are also willing to imprison them en masse (Bannon, Navarro, and the January 6 attackers) and prevent a MAGA POTUS from exercising power (see the Second Impeachment).

But more than this, at a time when Trump is himself facing spending the rest of his life in prison on any number of state and federal felonies, the FBI has done him the solid of saying very little about attempts to interfere in the 2024 presidential election by his friends (Russia and China) while playing up to the point of absurdity clearly scattershot interference schemes by his overseas enemies (Iran), i.e. those nations he has falsely positioned as allies of the Democratic Party. In response, he has painted his rivals as active Communists who seek to destroy the United States and declares that this will be the last American presidential election whether he wins or loses. He has watched as the paramilitaries that support him have swelled their membership, the FBI and DOJ have shrunk from holding him accountable for anything under the shadow of a potential second Trump administration during which (he says) he will smite both organizations into incoherence, and entire shadow agencies have been staffed (including globe-trotting shadow ambassadors) to create the appearance and even the administrative pseudoreality of a second Trump administration even before one exists. Trump himself is negotiating with foreign war criminals to have them calibrate their actions overseas to advance his 2024 candidacy in the United States.

Trump has done all these things because he’s facing prison. He’s done all these things because he believes a Democratic Congress would seek to impeach him immediately if he takes office in January 2025. He’s done all these things because, unlike in 2016, he is surrounded now only by the most radical of his enablers—the ones who listen to his often borderline sociopathic ramblings and ask themselves how they can effectuate his ludicrous desires and schemes, not brook them. He’s done all these things because he has seen his advisers and fans jailed in his name and he’s performatively enraged about it, not because he cares about them but because he takes it as a personal slight.

Trump has done all these things because he is more emotionally, psychologically, and mentally unstable now than he was on New Year’s Day in 2021. He has done all these things because he believes—rightly—that his paramilitary forces are more organized now than they were in 2021, and more willing to commit mass violence (especially in light of the Butler Incident, which his most armed-and-dangerous fans falsely claim was a violent attack on the MAGA leader by a left-wing political conspiracy—a vile and baseless premise that even some MAGA politicians have begun to echo publicly).

Trump has done all these things because, as he now freely and publicly admits, he is willing to flee the nation forever should the things he sets in motion become too kinetic for him to control, or should any lawless mob violence he incites successfully be quelled by normative U.S. institutions. And he’s done all these things because his political opponent in 2024 is a Black woman of Indian heritage with a Jewish husband, not an elderly white man who visually resembles much of his own white political base.

Trump has done all of these things because nonpartisan U.S. historians have already labeled him the worst president in American history, and he wants those histories rewritten; because he suspects even a GOP in his thrall won’t let him run for POTUS four times in a row should he lose in November; because he knows his health is failing and he won’t be able to mount another meaningful presidential run four years from now; because his daughter and wife have abandoned him, and he knows now that if there’s to be a Trump dynasty he must ensure it personally by passing off a readymade tyranny to his son Don Jr.; and because his chief election-interfering allies abroad (the butchers Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu) are now facing losing a war and an Israeli prison cell respectively, and therefore will work harder than ever to aid him.

Trump’s situation in 2024 is considerably more desperate—but also considerably more advantageous to him—than was the situation he faced when he incited insurrection and came close to declaring martial law in 2021. He has even, now, paved the way for a dictatorship by normalizing the idea through a “joke” about taking office as a dictator that he made sure ended up becoming the official policy of his campaign. A significant percentage of his base now tells journalists a Trump dictatorship is necessary and just.
The Million-Dollar Question

So the question public scenario planners must now consider is this one: Why would Donald Trump act less dangerously in 2024 than he did in 2020?

Don’t all the known factors in play in 2024 suggest Trump will act more dangerously—even exponentially more dangerously—if he loses his re-election bid this November?

The premise here is that January 6—an armed rebellion—must be treated as the floor for what Trump is likely to do if he loses in November, with the size and scale of that prospective second armed rebellion significantly increased (over the already enlarged state we would expect it to be in for all the reasons cited above) because Trump is no longer in office and therefore can’t use the United States Armed Forces or National Guard for his purposes. Rather, he must rely on militarized far-right militias, lone-wolf domestic extremists, loathsome hate groups, nonviolent civil disobedience by far-right citizen groups, mass non-paramilitary and non-spatial protests (e.g., Republicans deciding en masse to refuse to pay federal taxes), foreign election interference, highly localized heterogeneous pop-up mobs and other asymmetrical means to punish the United States writ large and his political enemies in particular for voting against him at scale for the third presidential election in a row.

Or he could simply flee to Russia (or a de facto Russian protectorate, like Venezuela); or flee to a de facto tyranny like El Salvador; or, less plausibly, flee to a country whose strongman he does Trump Organization business with but which might not have the political will to withstand an American extradition request (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel, or, least plausibly, the fringe European Union member Hungary). No one is saying that Trump fleeing the country is the most likely outcome here, only that (a) he has publicly confessed that he’s willing to do it, (b) it could be the only means for him to avoid imprisonment in the United States, and he knows that, (c) he has the ready financial and logistical means to do it (a private jet, funds stashed in shell corporations and banks around the world, dodgy unscrupulous allies everywhere from the Brazilian neofascist resistance to the ascendant neofascists in Italy, from the minor-warlord-like grifters running several former Soviet republics to—yes, really—Kim Jong-Un of North Korea), and (d) his flight from U.S. shores would solve most of America’s problems with respect to a hypothetical violent far-right post-election insurrection, so even though of us who believe in rule of law and equal administration of justice find ourselves tempted by the idea of Trump never setting foot on American soil (by his own choice) ever again post-November.

But while the idea of Trump fleeing America permanently certainly must reside in the background of this report, it is neither a panacea nor an excuse not to engage in any necessary scenario planning. Hoping for Trump to take the coward’s way out of every predicament—as he has spent his entire professional career, his insta-aborted military career, and decades of failed personal relationships doing—is both self-indulgent and irresponsible when it’s just as likely, or perhaps even more likely, that his delusions of grandeur will cause him to believe that if he can simply execute a plan whose size and scope is five times that of his failed January 6 coup plot (and do it while out of power) all will ultimately turn out well for him.

By the same token, believing the opposite of the above—that Trump will meekly accept a loss; or restrict himself to legal avenues of contesting one; or just repeat the tactics that failed him four years ago; or rely dumbly on other institutions and entities he well knows from past experience won’t do exactly what he demands of them—is also self-indulgent and irresponsible.

The only argument against the need for public scenario planning right now would be that Trump is toothless, which we’ve already seen he isn’t; or that he’ll exemplify the conventional definition of insanity and engage in the same conduct he has before but with the expectation of a different outcome (and while he’s indeed very mentally ill, the winds of his mental illness haven’t historically blown as hard in that direction as one could wish); or that the different contexts of 2024 versus 2021—for instance, him not being in power, paramilitary groups being more apprehensive about their own arrest and incarceration than they were in 2021, state and federal institutions being more prepared for Trump inciting widespread civil instability than they were in 2021, and so on—simply means that Trump is flat-out cooked if he loses the 2024 election.

Those ideations would, it’s true, leave America with little or nothing to worry about now except ensuring that the race’s only credible pro-democracy political campaign wins in November—but it also feels a bit like wishing on a star. It smacks of all those wish-casting pundits with a tacit tranche of “this is the day Donald Trump became a president” videos littering their professional CV, who have by now been humiliated by Trump’s utter incapacity for reflection or self-improvement time and time again.

All this said, we must not doomcast, either. Mass post-election civil unrest is not going to look like trench warfare in suburban neighborhoods, thousands of weaponized consumer-grade non-military drones whizzing through public parks dropping live grenades, or fisticuffs between party members in the halls of Congress and every state capital. To ideate a low-intensity civil conflict in this way is to try to wave away the very possibility of it by straw-manning it into oblivion; the more ridiculous a pundit can make a “second civil war” sound, the more likely she or he can discredit instantly and without any engagement whatsoever everyone alive today who fears that events in America this fall could get very dark indeed.

So let’s analyze the various paths things could take this fall, starting with Election Day, focusing not on the unknowable probability of any such scenarios occurring but rather on their core plausibility and then how they could be responded to if they occur.
Scenario Planning: Election Day

(1) A paramilitary-group operator, working as a lone wolf or with others, attacks the power grid of a major city to disrupt Election Day.

Electoral backup systems are decent but still imperfect, and any power outage would surely cause chaos, voting delays, hours-long lines in high-population-density urban voting precincts, and (perversely) empower the domestic terrorists responsible for it to, on the back end, question the accuracy of any resulting voting-machine tabulations on the grounds that the mass power outage they orchestrated might have perverted them.

Emergency injunctions to keep affected polling places open would be sought and in almost every case agreed to by local judges, but any courts that either refused such requests or simply kept polling places open for too short a duration—the latter a highly probable outcome—could nevertheless disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in majority-minority districts in battleground states, potentially tipping the election to Trump in a way that evades any ready judicial review (especially because voters who leave a voting line in frustration—or simply because they are shift workers who have to report to a job—cannot be counted or estimated by elections officials).

Republicans did something just like this, though less spectacularly and clandestinely, in 2004, when Ohio Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell—a close family friend of Ginni and Clarence Thomas—moved hundreds of voting machines out of majority-minority districts in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) to ensure there would be ten-hour voting lines in the places Democrats are most likely to live in in Ohio. And the plot worked to a tee: many thousands of Black (and young white student) voters abandoned hours-long voting lines in Ohio’s urban centers and college towns, and Republican George W. Bush won the presidency by a swing of a football stadium’s worth of voters in the Buckeye State. Given that Bush clearly lost the statewide vote in the 2000 U.S. presidential election’s tipping-point state, Florida, per post-election analyses, there are many who now feel Bush was officially elected to the presidency twice but as a matter of moral legitimacy never earned the title even once. (For that matter, those who also deem the 2016 U.S. presidential election terminally tainted in ways we still can’t quantify by Russian election interference are like to say that the last clearly valid Republican victory in a U.S. presidential election came in 1988—and after that campaign chief GOP strategist Lee Atwater apologized to the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, as Atwater was on his deathbed, confessing that the Republicans had used “naked cruelty” to win the presidency. We could forgive any U.S. politico for feeling, then, that the last truly untainted GOP win in a presidential election came 40 years ago, when President Ronald Reagan won his 1984 re-election bid in a remarkable, beyond-any-doubt landslide.)

One obvious solution to the above-stated concern about a power grid attack would be increased police and Guard and U.S. intelligence vigilance around major power-grid centers in a small group of American cities prior to the election. Another would be voters across the country making every pre-election preparation possible for lines that—in the event of a manmade, technological, or natural disaster—could be hours long. Yet another would be the DNC having teams of lawyers ready—as it already does—to see precinct-by-precinct polling-time extensions in local courts in every battleground state. Just so, as the massive squishy middle of the American voting-age population well understands that the American Left doesn’t have a paramilitary culture at all, let alone any evident interest in sabotaging this election—the Democratic Party always does better the more people vote, while the Republican Party always does better when fewer people vote—if there’s an attack of any kind that affects voting on Election Day the odds of it being orchestrated by the American Right or by Trump allies abroad (most notably Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, or the out-of-power Brazilian far right) are astronomically high. While preparing for an information war launched by the very people who would be behind such an attack is by no means a foolproof plan, it does help, and to this end media and Democratic pre-election narratives should accurately reflect that MAGAs openly want this election messed with, while Democrats want as many people to vote in November as possible.

(2) AI is used as part of a massive disinformation campaign to keep people at home.

The American Right has long used disinformation in its inevitable Election Day voter suppression efforts, from falsely telling Latinos that their immigration status will be checked by law enforcement at the polls to littering Black communities with fliers saying that voting has been moved to a different day. Sometimes the voter suppression is planned well in advance, like purging voter rolls to eliminate common names in the Latino and Black communities or spreading disinformation about who is or is not eligible to vote in the weeks and months preceding an election. Sometimes these disinformation-fueled voter suppression campaigns have a “live” voter intimidation campaign, from having militias show up at polling places to scare off anyone who doesn’t like being around guns in politically volatile situations to trying to scare off people who are legally dropping off their mail-in ballots at designated drop-off sites.

AI aside, all of the foregoing looks to be worse this year than ever. As Proof previously reported, Michael Flynn and others involved in the infamous Midnight White House Meeting of December 18, 2020 have launched an effort to install many thousands of far-right veterans at poll-worker ops in battleground states; their mandate seems to be to find fraud and then shout it from the hilltops online as voting is still under way.

(3) Mass voter challenges at polling sites.

A well-known maxim in American politics is that provisional ballots might as well be placed directly in wastepaper baskets—as they rarely get counted. It is for this reason that a key Republican voter-suppression ploy for years has been to create scenarios in which valid registered voters who Republican poll-watchers speculate are Democrats are forced to fill out unlikely-to-be-counted provisional ballots instead of real ones.

For instance, the Republicans—not Democrats—love wildly inaccurate pre-election polling-register purges because (a) they focus primarily on demographics in which many people share a last name (for instance, due to the legacy of slavery, far more Black Americans share a last name than do white Americans), and (b) once someone is wrongly struck from the rolls the odds of them being able to fill out a proper ballot on Election Day become slim. By the same token, Republican poll watchers have keen eyes for claiming voters are dressed inappropriately, are standing in the wrong places, look like they might be from “out of town” (code for racist profiling off Brown people), and other “infractions” of the sort one would only care about if you wanted to be sure as few Americans vote for POTUS as possible. In a more organized way, the far-right push for onerous voter-ID requirements despite there being no evidence whatsoever of widespread voter fraud in American elections is nakedly motivated by a desire to see poor people in large cities turned away from the polls en masse (as the poor are slightly less likely to hear about, be able to afford all the requirements of, or fully understand new state regs regarding the few forms of ID accepted at polling places).

But all this is old news. What’s different in 2024?

Well, first of all, it’s clear that MAGA has recruited not just poll-workers but many thousands of polling-place administrators to be party to the sorts of plots described above. Second, immigration now ranks as the top issue for MAGA voters—though virtually none of them are actually affected by it, confirming that the subject is just a proxy for cross-racial/ethnic animus rather than the improvement of American life—which means that not just poll-workers and poll administrators but even workaday MAGA voters will self-deputize at polling places in battleground states to a degree we have never seen before. This could lead to scuffles, threats, injuries, confusion, fear, and most of all what MAGA voters want more than anything else: people staying away from the polls. Even a single instance of polling-place bedlam caused by a bigoted challenge to an American’s right to vote could instantly be broadcast nationwide and leave left-leaning independents or habitual non-voters less enthusiastic about going to the polls to vote. In turn, this motivates MAGAs to try to provoke such a situation.

Some states have passed wildly confusing, and/or draconian, and/or flatly nonsensical laws designed to create chaos at the polls and scare people off—like a new law in the State of Georgia about whether you can give water to people in line. That’s right: the party famous for deliberately provoking hours-long lines in Democratic precincts has now pushed forward with plans to make hours-long lines even more unbearable. It is true that such laws target all precincts, but if only majority-minority precincts have hours-long lines, and only such precincts are being watched like hawks by MAGAs, does it really matter? Such laws may as well only apply to Democratic areas. After all, due to them being overtly immoral and unethical there’s little chance local Democrats will actively seek to enforce or police them in Republican areas (which rarely suffer from long voting lines anyway, in part because rural areas generally see shorter lines).

Every two years, the Republican Party’s voter-challenge program has become more radical, more encompassing, more intrusive, and more confrontational—therefore, more likely to lead to localized violence. And as noted, localized violence would also serve the purposes of MAGA agitators. Trying to keep fellow citizens from voting has somehow become a win-win prospect for the MAGA “movement,” largely because state courts have allowed it (or because they have found themselves powerless to stop at least some overtly mean-spirited, ungenerous, vote-suppressive far-right legislation).

(4) More of the usual.

We’re likely to see more far-right militiamen patrolling big polling sites; more MAGA influencers trolling high-density urban precincts to broadcast to millions of followers false claims of election fraud (claims they know will quickly lead to bomb threats, mob action, the wrongful clearing of active polling places, and the widespread intimidation of urban Democratic voters); more social media posts from GOP politicians claiming that untoward things are happening on the ground, that predictable vote-counting processes (like Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots getting counted second, creating a foreseeable “blue shift” late at night) are in fact suspicious, or falsely declaring victory in locations where a MAGA victory is still unclear or in fact a Democratic victory has already provably occurred. We should expect Trump to declare victory early in the day on Election Day no matter what happens; we should expect far-right media to issue false (and premature) state calls in an effort to suppress the “wrong” sort of voters; we should expect attempts by licensed or even unlicensed far-right “legal advocates” to create such havoc at Democratic-leaning polling places at midday that it could actually cost Democratic candidates large numbers of votes. And of course there will be the usual false stories of mass electronic-voting-machine vote-switching, except this time such claims will be accompanied by AI shallowfakes or deepfakes or dumbfakes that convince a large number of MAGAs already inclined to believe anything nefarious about U.S. presidential elections that “another stolen election” is already underway.
Scenario Planning: Legal Challenges

In 2000, a conservative U.S. Supreme Court—though not nearly as conservative as the current one—halted vote-counting in Florida in a way that handed the presidential election to the Republican candidate most of the Court favored (including one Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, had publicly favored, before witnesses), a ruling that in effect if not in its verbiage privileged highly technical “safe harbor” statutes over the voting rights of all Floridians. In doing so, Bush v. Gore (see the decision) also developed a new understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment that was so obviously janky and jury-rigged that the Court had to humiliate itself publicly by begging trial lawyers the nation over to ignore Bush v. Gore going forward; the case, per the Court, was not to be seen as having any value as precedent whatsoever, which was as good as saying that it was obvious garbage.

In 2024, it’s far less likely, if still not impossible, that the most conservative Court in a century would be facing what its predecessor was in 2000—delays in a recounting process—but as a general matter, (a) delays of any kind whatsoever, including highly partisan state election boards refusing to certify their state votes for weeks on end in favor of a litigation-first strategy, could butt up against safe-harbor provisions, and (b) it can be assumed that if the Rehnquist Court was willing to simply take the road that led to its desired Republican president, the Roberts Court would without shame do exactly the same thing and install Trump as president if given an opportunity to do so.

The danger here, of course, is that Trump knows this. He has, in the past, articulated a plan to count on—whenever possible—the largesse of a Court he disproportionately appointed. And indeed he’s already done so, and almost always successfully. The recent presidential immunity ruling in Trump v. United States, which was every bit as lawless and out-of-whole-cloth as Bush v. Gore was, not only directly ended one of Trump’s four criminal cases (the federal stolen-documents case in Florida) but indirectly pushed one other beyond Election Day in a way that could render it permanently non-justiciable (the federal January 6 case in Washington) and directly caused a delay in the sentencing of a third criminal case (the state fraud case in New York) such that that case, despite it having already resulted in 34 felony convictions, could be left hanging permanently without a sentencing order—though that’s unheard of in our criminal justice system.

The only reason we can’t yet say that Trump’s final criminal case—the state January 6 case in Georgia—was knocked out by the Supreme Court is because it was the poor ethical judgment of two prosecutors in that case, who inexplicably chose to have and hide a romantic relationship in the midst of one of the most important criminal cases in American history, that produced that effect (for now) instead. But even when the Georgia case resumes sometime in 2025, if indeed it resumes at all, it will have to deal with the presidential immunity “standard” that’s now the law of the land post-Trump v. United States. And any of these cases that survives Trump v. United States will be burdened by another part of the ruling that is unprecedented in American history: Supreme Court justices declaring in advance what kind of evidence can be used in just one kind of criminal trial (that is, a trial with just one kind of defendant) while also making it clear that any such trial will essentially see all its evidentiary rulings micromanaged by the Court. It’s a bizarre attack on trial judges that will likely make the prosecution of any U.S. president going forward utterly impossible—even after their term is over.

So whereas Trump in 2020 was focused on challenging the results of an election he lost by a decent margin—losing in court more than sixty times in total, indeed only winning a single case in Pennsylvania about how far away from vote-counters his campaign observers had to stand—in 2024 any challenge of the results that’s based on facially improbable or farcical claims of fraud is likely to be pro forma only. The real goal of the Trump campaign is to delay certification of the vote in battleground states as long as possible, with the aim of creating a safe-harbor-provision snafu that in some way “forces” a Republican-led state legislature to resolve it by fiat—which it would surely do in Trump’s favor, no matter what the vote tallies in play are. Putting aside how ironic it is that a man who spent the last four years opining that all vote tallies should receive their final certification on Election Day now plans to have that process stretch out for weeks on end, the more notable shift in this component of Trump’s stolen-election plot is that there are already signs in several battleground states—most notably Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin—that GOP state legislators would be willing to certify Trump as the winner of their states’ electoral votes even if he’s clearly lost the popular vote in their state. Such an unprecedented violation of a fundamental constitutional right (the right to vote) would of course end up in the hands of a Supreme Court hell-bent on ensuring Trump has a clear path to reelection.

It’s unlikely, however, that 2024 will see a repeat of the GOP’s 2020 scheme to throw in the garbage any American votes that weren’t cast in person on Election Day, as this time around the Republican Party is actually encouraging its voters to cast ballots by mail and during early voting hours. Just so, it’s unlikely that so much of MAGAs’ time will be spent trying to convince state judges that there was voter fraud when—outside a small number of Trump-appointed judges who might be prevailed upon to throw their integrity to the wind—it’s unlikely state judges will be any more likely to bite on such outlandish, fact-free allegations than they were in 2020. Again, the Trumpist goal in 2024 will be chaos and confusion and delay and legislative fiat rather than working within the confines of our legal system. Any cases Mr. Trump brings in 2024 are likely to be little more than delaying tactics and misdirections who success he actually cares little about.

Having said this, we should expect one very important carry-over from 2020: some sort of attempt to create alternate slates of electors in battleground states to try to make what was a legal question in 2020 a political one in 2024. After all, as we saw in the days leading up to January 6, when there was a desperate last-minute effort to deliver to certain unscrupulous Trump supporters in Congress (e.g., Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin) fake slates of electors, there is not only a willingness in the Trump camp to create such slates but also to ship them to Washington so they can be debated on Certification Day. Americans should expect that this time around the creation of such slates will be at once more clandestine but also more organized, meaning that such slates will arrive in D.C. from every battleground state far in advance of January 6 and will be signed by men and women significantly more radical than even the signatories of 2020 were—as of course these Trump supporters will know in advance that they’re likely to face criminal charges for their actions. That’s what happened to most if not all of the 2020 fake Trump electors—but if you think that will stop Trump and his state-based campaign lawyers from swindling Trump fans into risking prison, you really don’t understand how little Mr. Trump and his lawyers care for people or laws.

In short, as increasingly is the case with all Trumpist litigation, the goal with any 2024 election litigation will not so much be to win at the district or appellate level—that’s rather beside the point—but to send every case up to a radical, far-right Supreme Court as quickly as possible, in so doing creating such an avalanche of garbage suits before the High Court that something gets scheduled for oral argument at a time and in a way that five members of the Court could use it to hand the election to Trump.

Perhaps it will be a case whose outcome will directly have that desired result, or perhaps it will be a case that—as with Bush v. Gore, or as with the way Trump v. United States forced a needless nine-month delay in Trump’s January 6 case in Washington—simply indirectly makes an otherwise certain outcome impossible. If Americans have learned one thing about Supreme Court jurisprudence since 2020, it’s that a far-right litigant doesn’t even have to win to “win.” Sometimes the Court merely accepting for oral argument a case that has no business being so deferred to has the knock-on or domino effect of wreaking havoc on legal and political processes that otherwise would have been undisturbed. Sometimes, in other words, delay is the only victory you need.

Trump knows this. Trump’s lawyers know this. And the openly pro-Trump members of the United States Supreme Court—now a majority of the the Court—know it also.

With that said, clearly this is the right spot in this Proof report to make a far broader observation about Trump’s legal team(s): that a surprising number of their members are convicted criminals, under-indictment defendants or under-criminal-investigation suspected criminals. We’ve reached the point at which it’s clear that no attorney of any character or decency or fidelity to rule of law would work on behalf of Donald Trump or any member of his inner circle. Consider the serious criminal charges now faced by John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis (who has since cut a deal with prosecutors), Christina Bobb, Kenneth Chesebro, or Boris Epshteyn. Consider those Trump lawyers who grand juries wanted to indict but who prosecutors declined to, like Cleta Mitchell. Consider those civil servants who secretly acted as Trump’s personal lawyer and got charged for the things they did while so pretending, such as Jeffrey Clark. Consider those former Trump lawyers, like Michael Cohen, who got indicted and prosecuted and incarcerated for the things they provably did for Trump.

Consider all those attorneys who weren’t charged with wrongdoing on Trump’s behalf but who were civilly and/or criminal investigated for potential misconduct related to their pro-Trump work or synchronous with it as a temporal matter, such as Victoria Toensing, Joe diGenova, Don McGahn, the late Roy Cohn, Jay Sekulow, and L. Linn Wood. Some of these men and women have been disbarred, some had their offices raided by the FBI, some (e.g., Cohn) have had their reputations and memories utterly destroyed. Consider, moreover, all the little-known state-level 2020 Trump campaign lawyers who are under active criminal investigation for their activities in the lead-up to the armed rebellion of January 2021, such as Trump campaign lawyer Shawn Flynn, who remains under criminal investigation in two states and by the FBI (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

The upshot is that while even a convicted felon and active insurrectionist like Donald Trump deserves a vigorous legal defense; and while even an attempt to stage a coup in the United States via our justice system deserves its day in court—yes, even when and as it’s in the midst of losing 60+ straight cases filed in pursuit of that administrative scheme; and while even lawyers who remain under active criminal investigation in multiple jurisdictions may under certain circumstances retain the right to practice law (though under no circumstances should they be allowed to practice, directly or indirectly, in any jurisdiction they’re not licensed in, as pro hac vice applications are supposed to have an implicit or explicit morals clause associated with their granting); and even though district and intermediate appellate courts, as well as the Supreme Court, must continue to entertain lawsuits from litigants they know don’t believe in rule of law or American democracy, it must nevertheless be understood that to the extent there is ever any successful advancement of a Trumpist legal effort connected to a U.S. presidential election it’s going to be on the back of unethical lawyers, unethical Trump-appointed judges, deceitful Trumpist affiants and affidavits, and/or (in some rare cases) state and federal judges who simply don’t follow American political news closely enough to realize the wool has been pulled over their eyes by insurrectionists.

By way of example, a judge might deem Jason Greaves—at once the attorney for Michael Flynn, Devin Nunes, and Michael Flynn’s January 2021 bodyguards, as well as a regular defender of Trump himself via far-right media—a legitimate practicing lawyer, but what would such a judge think upon seeing bizarre tweets like these?

Suggesting that U.S. VP Kamala Harris wants to put all Republicans in concentration camps.

Spreading disinformation about a Lincoln Project ad that made up actors to look like far-right misogynists by pretending that these are images of Kamala Harris voters in their natural state.

Calling for an impeachment investigation of Kamala Harris over fact-free claims that she was part of a sprawling criminal conspiracy to force President Biden from the presidency via secret threats.

Mocking the victims of sexual assault whose perpetrators were well-known Republicans like Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and Roy Moore.

Implying that “violence” is “acceptable” if a politician wants to create concentration camps—which Greaves has said Kamala Harris wants to do (see above)—or if that politician wants to end American democracy (as the Trump campaign Greaves openly supports says Harris wants to do by falsely calling her a Communist who plans to rule over America as a Communist).

Supporting the idea that the FBI and DOJ either participated in the Trump assassination attempt, wanted it to be successful, or are conflicted about it because elements of the two agencies are prosecuting Trump on an entirely unrelated matter.

Endorsing the idea that any Democrat who worries about the Trump dictatorship he’s openly promised, or who deems his definitionally fascist rhetoric (e.g., “immigrants poison the blood of our nation” or “It is better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep”) to be definitionally fascist wants Trump to be murdered—a notion that sees Republicans telling on themselves for what must now be their own secret thoughts on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And these are just from the last twenty tweets by Jason Greaves. A full review of his public statements would make a federal judge blanche, and probably much worse.

The point here is that judges and lawyers—including this author—are trained to think of those in the legal profession as (at best) generally honorable or (at worst) at least invested in the rule of law. Putting Greaves aside and speaking only in general terms here, the general idea that a practicing lawyer could be an insurrectionist, or a suspected criminal, or a political radical obsessed with notions of political violence and its use, is simply not native to the American justice system. It’s the stuff of mafia movies, potboiler detective novels, and conspiracy theorists’ hothouse imaginations.

Yet in the Trump era, it’s suddenly and shockingly an indisputable reality: some of the men and women advancing Trump’s baseless “legal” claims today will be arrested and prosecuted tomorrow; many will be sued or disbarred, either alternatively or in addition to their criminal prosecutions; their offices will be raided by the FBI, and/or they will be deposed by the FBI, and/or witnesses in civil and criminal investigations will be questioned about their conduct. Most of those in Trump’s pseudo-legal circle—licensed (for now) attorneys who use our justice system to wage political battles and to harass critics of Donald Trump—are unscrupulous, unethical liars who know that they’ll have a place in far-right media or in far-right political operations if and when they get disbarred after years of filing wildly irresponsible lawsuits (lawsuits that were incredibly lucrative for them personally) funded by far-right billionaires in Texas and Florida. For such attorneys, there’s simply no down-side—whereas a real attorney is horrified at the notion of disbarment, and would never engage in any of the conduct that might produce such a result (lying to a judge, filing knowingly frivolous lawsuits, using legal practice as a cover for unethical political or even actually criminal activity), many attorneys in Trump’s sphere view legal practice as a stepping stone to real power.

And real money.

Why do I mention all this? It’s certainly not only because Shawn Flynn and Jason Greaves are somehow, impossibly, the lawyers of record in a federal lawsuit against me by Michael Flynn’s bodyguards that has been filed in New Hampshire though neither Flynn nor Greaves are licensed to practice here, though admittedly my awareness of these two men was indeed prompted by their years of irresponsible lawyering for Flynn, Nunes, the Trump campaign, and others in Donald Trump’s misfit-laden outer circle of legal hangers-on.

The main reason I mention all this here is that U.S. journalists have conventionally presumed that any legal methods a candidate uses to contest an election—by which I simply mean methods that involve court filings—must on some level meet a bare minimum level of legitimacy. Why do we presume this? Because historically, as much as many Americans have detested lawyers, we’ve also assumed, of lawyers, that they are bound by rules of professional conduct they take seriously. They are not people willing to end up under criminal investigation. They do not get involved with vile political plots. They do not repeatedly make misrepresentations to courts about the source and quality of the evidence they’re presenting. They’re not willing to lose their bar cards or professional reputations. They wouldn’t represent any client who asked them to personally engage in unethical conduct. They’re not political radicals whose public statements could enflame violent sentiments and even incite violent conduct.

They’re not scoundrels involved with RICO-violative operations, as Trump’s political operation is now alleged to be in the State of Georgia. They may have political views; they may be willing to take on unpopular or unscrupulous clients; but they believe in the rule of law and they care about remaining attorneys for the long haul.

That no longer appears to be the case with many lawyers in the Trump ecosystem, and this must change dramatically how we think about what Trump and Trump-adjacent lawyers are capable of in the run-up to, and the aftermath of, the U.S. presidential race.

Many of these lawyers are getting fabulously wealthy doing the corrupt dirty work of far-right donors and historically seedy politicians, and many of them don’t see legal practice as their long-term career goal: they want to be multi-million lobbyists, or multi-millionaire media figures, or multi-millionaire political consultants. Some even see a future Trump administration—whatever illegalities may be required to realize it—as their future, specifically in a totally lawless future White House Counsel’s Office or as a deputy at DOJ while it dismantles the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, and any safeguards against Donald Trump becoming the first-ever U.S. dictator. These are ideologues who signed on to work for Trump and his inner circle well knowing that many of those who have done so in the past have since been incarcerated or disbarred or suspended from the practice of law; raided or deposed or interrogated; criminally investigated, civilly investigated, or otherwise publicly disgraced. And they don’t care.

If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, you’ll recall a scene involving a trial to which the defendant refused to appear. Margery Tyrell, one of the trial attendees, warns the would-be trial judge that the defendant refusing to show up is a very, very bad sign.

By the same token, clearly Donald Trump doesn’t intend to suffer the consequences of his crimes. He doesn’t intend to spend a day in jail; he would surely flee the United States forever before he allowed that sort of lawful accountability to fall on him. But by the same token, it’s clearly the case that many Trump and Trump-adjacent lawyers don’t intend to suffer the consequences of their actions: they’re funded by billionaires, and billionaires will pay their expenses in perpetuity; if they are civilly or criminally investigated, someone else will pay their legal bills. If they’re incarcerated, a future President Trump will pardon them. If they are disbarred, they will become heroes to the MAGA cause and make even more money outside the law than they did inside it.

These are the worst sort of “dead-enders”: the sort who, a bit like certain Islamofascist terrorists—albeit in this one sense only; I don’t intend a broader analogy—believe that every outcome their conduct brings is equally fine. For the Islamofascist terrorist, it is either going to be (a) martyrdom, or (b) victory in war that awaits, while for the MAGA lawyer it is riches and universal MAGA admiration in every direction—and they know it. It makes them unhinged and unscrupulous as trial attorneys, an embarrassment to a profession that they actually have very little interest in long-term.

When I was at Harvard Law School in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I studied with a number of lawyers who had represented either the 2000 Gore campaign or 2000 Bush campaign in Florida (candidly, more of the latter than the former). These individuals had lines they wouldn’t cross, which is why it was Roger Stone—not Bush attorneys—who organized a violent riot in Miami-Dade County to try to keep Democratic votes from being counted (a scheme that worked, and that Stone never faced repercussions for, which is precisely why he felt so free to openly encourage pre-January 6 scheming).

Today, the legal profession is totally different than it was back then.

Many lawyers for Trump and his cronies attend special schools—Hillsdale College; Liberty University; the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University—where they are explicitly taught how to be far-right political advocates in a courtroom.

The legal heroes of the conservative moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s went to conventional law schools like Harvard, Yale University, and Stanford University; the new breed of legal activist is significantly more activist than lawyer, and is well aware of the terrible attrition rate the practice of law suffers from (50% of lawyers depart the profession within five years) to the point that they already have a good idea of what they will do once they stop practicing. Does it matter to them if the end of their legal career comes via voluntary retirement, incarceration, suspension or disbarment, or merely the shame of being unfit for service to any client but an active insurrectionist?

That’s unclear.

So when we consider the possible legal battles ahead in 2024, we should call them, in point of fact, “legal” (quote-unquote) battles. They are pseudo-legal—mere proxies for political action that have been engineered by dubiously ethical legal advocates who are trained more in politics than the law. These are lawyers who hate their adversaries; hate the rule of law; hate the judges they practice before; and don’t aim to be deemed respectable in anything but the tiny, eldritch Federalist Society sub-community they swim in. Unlike the lawyers of the past, they’re not paid by clients, but mega-donors; they don’t file motions, but conspiracy theories disguised as media-ready screeds; they don’t litigate so much as “wage war by other means”; and they don’t ultimately care what happens in their cases, because others are paying their expenses and if they face consequences for their own conduct down the line they’ll be immediately “martyred up” (a new version of “failing up”) to more lucrative MAGA employment—such as legal punditry, commercial-product pitching, televangelist, backroom kingmaker, K Street lobbyist, or partisan flack-cum-political consultant.

It is conservatives who popularized the term “lawfare” in recent years, and they did it for the same reason most conservative political rhetoric was devised in the Trump era: as a way of accusing Trump’s political enemies of what he himself is doing. It has even become a Trump-era maxim: every allegation is a confession. The armies of Hillsdale-, Liberty-, and George Mason-trained lawyers who will advance Trump’s “legal” plots this fall will be motivated by money and power and lack any firm foundation in the law or in legal first principles. They see themselves as warriors, not legal professionals.

And that means that they’re capable of almost anything. Which should scare all of us.
Scenario Planning: Civil Unrest

No one seriously believes America will avoid civil unrest in the event of a Trump loss.

The question is, what form will it take? Most of the guesses we see on social media are assuredly wrong. Here are basic concepts we should hold in our heads with respect to a prospective U.S. civil war (one that about half of Americans expect in the near term):

(1) It will be hyper-localized. The whole country isn’t going to suddenly fall into civil unrest. There will be pockets of it, and those pockets will be focused on urban areas in battleground states, state capitals in those states with large and well-organized militia groups, and any place—be it rural, suburban, or urban—in which even one especially deranged (i.e., antisocially mentally ill and untreated) “lone-wolf” radical with a large arsenal resides. It won’t be universal trench warfare, it’ll be scattered brawls, property seizures and occupations and destruction by small mobs, amateur domestic terror attacks (perhaps as much on property or utilities as people), and idiosyncratic flare-ups caused by mental illness or mere misunderstandings. The only thing that will be universal will be violent rhetoric on social media, which will be pushed by Trump super-fans, far-right anarchists, apolitical trolls, MAGA influencers, bots, foreign intel agents, civil-war accelerationists, known hate groups, militiamen, certain fringe politicians and of course Trump himself. So mass civil unrest post-election will feel to us as though it’s everywhere—including in 24/7 media coverage and perhaps, far more troublingly, in its immediate effect(s) on our economy, stocks, and consumer prices—but actual major events are likely to be few in number and geographically scattered.

(2) It will be equally divided between intentional and reckless. Yes, certain forms of civil unrest could materially affect the 2024 U.S. presidential election—attacks on the power grid on Election Day, bomb threats to polling places in majority-minority precincts, mob actions intended to stop counting in high-density urban precincts, marches or occupations that make the duties of elections officials or state legislators impossible to complete, and so on—but others will simply be crimes of opportunity whose motive is rage and not political advantage. Wherever large groups of Trump supporters gather in the shadow of a Trump election loss, violence will be a real possibility, especially if pro-Harris entities are stupid enough (and they really must not be) to show up also. A mentally ill lone wolf could do dramatic damage in a way that is entirely disconnected from any political or strategic advantage sought by the Trump campaign and its affiliates. At times the recklessness will be in the planning and not the intent; in other words, small cells of Trump super-fans may think they are doing something helpful to their leader’s cause that is actually tactically antithetical to it.

(3) It will not succeed. Donald Trump and his minions cannot overthrow a democratic election that has been certified by Congress when they do not hold the reins of power in the executive branch; it is as simple as that. Can they trash our economy and put us in a prolonged recession? Yes. Can they crash the stock market by their actions? Yes. Can they cause Americans to be broadly fearful and avoid many public places? Yes. Can they cause casualties (whether injuries or worse)? Yes. Can they effectuate isolated spectacular events, like kidnappings or assassinations or mass destruction of property? Yes. Can they engage in widespread civil disobedience of the sort we have never seen before in this country, like a mass refusal to pay taxes or other, more esoteric means of identifying a Harris administration as illegitimate? Yes. Will there be talk of secession in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, parts of Oregon and Washington (the eastern conservative counties), Florida, and parts of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana)? Yes, that is certainly possible, and in a few scattered places a sort of benighted ad hoc referendum on the question might even be sought—though secession is illegal and unconstitutional, and would be blocked by the courts or even the U.S. military if it came to that (which it would almost certainly not). But none of these things would cause a Donald Trump presidency, and that would be immediately clear to most of those who would otherwise seek to participate in activities like these.

(4) It will not happen if Trump flees. As already discussed above, there is a non-zero chance that Trump flees America if he loses in November. Why? Because he would at that point be facing a state sentencing in New York on 34 felonies; a federal criminal trial before a majority-minority jury in D.C. over January 6; a state criminal trial over January 6 before a majority-minority jury in Georgia; a new defamation suit from E. Jean Carroll that would be certain to permanently bankrupt him (we must remember that, after losing to Carroll for the third straight time, he simply continued defaming her in a way that had already by then cost him nearly $100 million total in civil fines he couldn’t actually afford); possible new state criminal charges over the 2020 fake-elector schemes in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin (with the only real question here being whether or when one of the defendants in these ongoing cases turns on him and thereby makes him a plausible target for immediate indictment); possible new FBI investigations and DOJ charges related to the events of January 6; the likely reinstitution of his federal criminal case in Florida for stealing and retaining highly classified documents; the continuation of civil lawsuits against him related to January 6; a possible repeat of the tragic and vile attempt on his life that occurred in Pennsylvania in July 2024 (especially should Trump engage in conduct this fall that causes someone who wrongly thinks violence is how political questions get solved to believe that Trump presents a clear and present paramilitary danger to all Americans); new state and/or federal charges for any crimes he commits while trying to win his re-election bid this year; the inevitably collapse of his political empire—even if that’s a slow, almost imperceptible process—in light of him losing two presidential elections in a row and having never won the popular vote even once across four presidential bids (including here his little-discussed, embarrassing, abortive presidential run in the early 2000s); a new Bribery investigation related to a $10 million payment he allegedly received from Egypt during the 2016 presidential campaign that was only recently acknowledged by and discussed in major media; and new civil investigations into frauds committed by the Trump Organization, which were by no means limited to the few tried to conviction in Manhattan in Spring 2024. And he would be facing all these criminal and civil actions (a) in his 80s, (b) without the benefit of the special immunity that now comes from being a sitting president and (c) likely without the same political base of support—that is to say, the same level of political donations from working- and middle-class suckers willing to pay the legal bills of a self-professed billionaire—that he has previously enjoyed.

In view of the above, we might reasonably ask, “Why would Trump stay in America if he loses in 2024? There are countless foreign countries he could flee to from which he could fight extradition and lead a comfortable life with his corrupt autocratic friends.”

(5) It won’t be well-coordinated. If you have followed the modern militia movement, you’ll know that its story is one of groups regularly fracturing and recombining in new configurations, chapters suddenly going dark or bankrupt or suffering major crises of leadership, sting operations that cause suspicion and paranoia and recriminations that effectuate the collapse of an entire militia in short order. There is never quite enough body armor, and never quite enough weapons, and never quite enough militia membership, for the sort of operations the most radical members of the group would like to pursue—and never enough consensus within the group about which objectives should be pursued in the first place. Militia leaders are more often than you would expect not charismatic, or very bad at managing money, or bad at managing people, or hiding a dark secret having to do with “stolen valor” or past criminal convictions, or simply incapable of strategizing large maneuvers and/or rising above their own vanity and venality. The January 6 prosecutions did to the militia movement—temporarily chilled it—what such prosecutions of January 6 ringleaders should have done with respect to men like Donald Trump; as a result, the MAGA “movement” arrives at the 2024 U.S. presidential election with fat-cat influencers and politicians and advisers eager to once again send their peons to battle in a way the former are now convinced will never lead to any repercussions for them. In short, far-right insurrections are run no different than far-right policy debates are: their ultimate purpose is the benefit of rich white men without any regard whatsoever for the lives or futures of poor white men. And while Proof would be over-optimistic to claim that the poor white men who have been so vilely manipulated by MAGA leadership have finally come to accept this—they have not—they can at least intuit that when the hammer falls in 2025 for what they do in 2024 it will fall on them and their friends (with financial repercussions for their families as well) and not on the autocratic class that deigns to move them about the country like pawns on a chessboard. Yet to the extent the pawns take matters into their own hands and try to move about without any oversight, history tells us that they are not very good at it. It’s the central paradox of all MAGA’s insurrectionist schemes.

(6) Its chief effects will be indirect. As already noted, mass civil unrest won’t change an election outcome; only judges and politicians even arguably have the power to do that, and then only when they are unencumbered by threats of violence (as anything they do under duress can be quickly invalidated once that duress evaporates). But mass civil unrest can cause the collapse of American civil society. How? By making neighbors nervous about their neighbors, tanking the economy, convincing people to avoid large gatherings that have any political dimension whatsoever, turning over our daily news reports to revelations of lone-wolf attacks and doomed state secession votes, gutting America’s standing in the world, markedly enervating unit cohesion in our military, disinclining the next generation of leaders from getting involved in politics at any level, further coarsening our political debate to the point that it shifts even further from policy discussions than it already is (and still closer to the naked incitement of violence than it already has been in recent years), making it even more impossible than it already seems to be to excise the Trump Family from American culture, sparking the thousands and thousands of minor acts of civil disobedience we would expect when a third of a nation believes its leadership illegitimate, suppressing the spirit of America in ways large and small—from depressing new artistic creation to depressing worker productivity, from further scattering American social-media users in the Post-Twitter Diaspora to weakening the likelihood the next President of the United States can accomplish anything for the country.

While in the immediate term what Donald Trump threatens America with is indeed a “bloodbath” of localized violence; and while in the medium term what he threatens us with is a low-intensity civil war whose dimensions are primarily cultural, economic, diplomatic, and political rather than paramilitary; what the long-term presence of the cancer of Trumpism offers to America is a National Doldrums that ensures the 21st century will see the end of America’s significance on the world stage. Sure, we’ll have one of the strongest militaries on Earth for a long time yet, but if we are not also an economic powerhouse that exports popular culture as well as consumer products, we will be little more than a glorified North Korea.

So how can any of the above be stopped? The dirty secret is that it largely cannot be.

Police cannot be everywhere, nor do they have the investigative resources most think.

The National Guard cannot be called out until an emergency has already happened or is on the very brink of happening.

The U.S. Armed Forces cannot be deployed domestically at all, by law.

We have already seen that the investigative processes and values of the DOJ and FBI are terminally screwed up, largely because these are institution-first entities that put their explicit duty to America after their implicit duty to long-term self-preservation.

Our intelligence agencies hate one another, are inexplicably receptive to Trump and his anti-democratic ideals, don’t communicate freely with anyone, are much better at writing reports about what’s happening now that no one will ever see or reports about what’s already happened that very few will ever see than actually trying to save the country from ruin ex ante, and have spent the last nine years now falling on their asses at every turn when it comes to holding Donald Trump accountable for his many crimes.

Most of what the MAGAs can do to threaten American democracy cannot be planned for unless it is large and spectacular and incredibly poorly hidden. Even January 6, which was shouted about from the rooftops for weeks before it happened, did not lead to the U.S. Capitol being properly defended or resourced on the day itself. Why would we ever anticipate that a massive plot—one that is better hidden than that one was—has already been properly prepared for?

So most of the scenario planning regarding mass civil unrest is going to have to focus on what institutions—media, political, governmental, civic—do in the first hour after a major event. This is a matter of comms, public relations, logistics, narrativizing, and the clear-eyed expression of our values, our understanding of current threats known and unknown, and the commitment we’re supposed to all have to free and fair elections.
Scenario Planning: Electoral College

There are certain scenarios America may face that we need not spend too much time on because they are pre-prepared-for—we already know how they would play out. For instance, there are two or three distantly plausible (but we’re really stretching the word plausible to its limit here) Electoral College scenarios that could result in a tie, in which case the next Congress—likely but not certain to be Republican—would vote by state delegation (not member) for President of the United States, with the near-certain result of a Donald Trump presidency, and the Senate, likely but very much not certain to be in Democratic Party hands, would vote by member for Vice President, with the likely result of a Tim Walz vice presidency. But again, the scenarios in which this would occur are vanishingly rare, so the temptation is to not think about it too much.

And yet.

One thing we must remember is that Donald Trump doesn’t care about his VP pick J.D. Vance whatsoever except to the extent that Vance could be used as an instrument for Trump to pardon himself or for Trump to evade impeachment.

To explain: there are scenarios in which Trump could somehow fail to end a given federal prosecution of him after he has won election; be told by White House legal counsel that self-pardons are illegal; and allow himself to be removed as president for a few minutes so Vance can prospectively pardon him (in a Ford-and-Nixon-like way) in order to make that ongoing federal prosecution, or an active investigation, shrivel up and die. Is that a far-fetched scenario? Yes, given that (a) Trump can probably end any federal case against him unilaterally via his inevitably corrupt new DOJ; (b) he can pardon himself for state crimes, but also would be unlikely to be tried on any state crimes while in office; (c) if elected he never plans on leaving office, so he won’t likely engage in planning for a post-presidency; (d) he would be unlikely to risk utilizing the U.S. Constitution in an unprecedented way to even briefly give up power because he’s pathologically paranoid and would fear a betrayal by Vance; (e) blanket pardons are legally untested and arguably still require an admission of guilt that Trump would by no account offer; and (f) given Trump’s temperament, he’s likely to see ascension to the presidency as quickly and immediately ending all cases against him everywhere in America. Simply put, in any scenario in which state law enforcement officials tried to take him into custody he’d probably direct his Secret Service detail to start shooting basically everyone.

By the same token, yes, Vance being a creepy misogynist no Democrat in Washington considers much better than Donald Trump would take the shine off the prospect of impeaching Trump, but (a) as history has shown, there’s almost nothing Trump could ever do anyway that would result in Senate Republicans voting to convict him at an impeachment trial, and he knows this; (b) there’s a very real chance J.D. Vance would be involved in any impeachable offenses anyway, and therefore would simultaneously be facing impeachment; (c) though he pretends otherwise, Trump is well aware that—unlike his allies in Congress—Democrats won’t try to impeach him until he engages in impeachable conduct, which decision is at all times in his own hands and not those of Democrats; (d) if impeached, he could still use Vance to try to get himself an ex ante pardon mid-trial; (e) Trump v. United States makes it near-impossible for any President of the United States to be impeached, indeed this is one of the most infamous and destructive results of what is at base one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of our country (almost on par with Dred Scott); and (f) in the dictatorship that Trump is planning there will be no impeachments, anyway—as the Congress and the Supreme Court will be ignored by the executive branch whenever Trump feels like it.

Why do I mention that Trump has no reason to care about Vance? Because it means that Trump has no particular reason to fear a scenario in which he is POTUS and Tim Walz is VPOTUS. Such a bizarre occurrence would probably do nothing whatsoever to change Trump’s plans for America, with Walz no more than a sad and/or laughable inconvenience to a neofascist second Trump administration. And what flows from this fact is the following: Trump would be perfectly happy to try to create an Electoral College tie where there shouldn’t be one. In other words, of all the outcomes we can feel confident Trump is willing to use lawless means to push toward, an Electoral College tie is actually one of them because—provided Republicans have not lost the House so badly that they fail to control the majority of state delegations, a scenario that’s almost mathematically impossible—it suits his personal ambitions just fine.

More broadly, Trump’s goal, should he find himself losing in the popular vote (almost a certainty) and the Electoral College vote (as I write this a “push”, as both candidates are said to have a 49% chance of winning) will not be to do what he did in 2020—call election officials and harangue them into “finding” more votes for him, a gambit that was never going to be successful—but to create such chaos in the Electoral College that (i) the largest possible number of states won by Harris fail to certify a winner prior to their safe-harbor date; (ii) the largest number of states won by Harris send dueling slates of electors to D.C. in January 2025; (iii) statutory and constitutional deadlines become logistically impossible to meet, leaving politicians and elections officials and federal administrators across the country scrambling to face scenarios they’ve never encountered before and thus have a good chance of getting wrong in ways accidentally advantageous to MAGA troublemakers; and (iv) the Supreme Court ultimately feels compelled to step in, doing so, as it always has over the last four years, in a way intended to strengthen, embolden, and aid the most lawless predilections of America’s most lawless politician ever.

What the Harris campaign will say in response—and what many optimists would say—is that if the vice president defeats him by enough in the popular vote and Electoral College, any gambit he tries in an effort to regain hold of the national post-election narrative will be fruitless. But this is a profound misunderstanding of Donald Trump, MAGA, far-right nihilism, and the “dark metamodern” neofascist and Christofascist ideologies that animate MAGA.

In short, the more Trump loses by, the louder his howls of election fraud will be, and the more desperate his followers will be to resolve their anger at America through something other than lawful conduct. Indeed, one of Mr. Trump’s most oft-repeated refrains in trying to “prove” a stolen election in 2020 (NB: none of his efforts even approached the concept of “proof” as it is understood by adults, let alone professionals) was that it was “impossible” for Joe Biden to have received 81 million votes in 2020.

Why was it “impossible,” you ask? Because that’s so many votes! And no one likes Biden!

Yes—that’s as sophisticated as the MAGA analysis of the 2020 election vote tallies got.

Trump headmastered an ad hoc election-theft schoolhouse in which Joe Biden holding campaign rallies that utilized social distancing—and therefore had artificially low turnouts—meant that almost no one anywhere was planning to vote for him. He made up bizarre maxims no one has ever heard before, like the notion that if a candidate wins in South Carolina and Alabama he cannot possibly lose in Georgia. He professed—and that is really the right word for it, as he styled himself almost a professor of post-election data analyses—that the number of mail-in ballots sent out to citizens had to equate to the number of mail-in ballots cast, that voter rolls are synonymous with vote tallies, that universally foreseeable bulk shifts in tallies caused by the late counting of historically more-Democratic mail-in votes can only be explained by technologically impossible foreign tampering with electronic voting machines; that final pre-election approval ratings create a strict mathematical cap for a candidate’s vote tally and that (get this one) as long as a candidate who wins a given national election gets more votes the next time out it’s mathematically certain that he won that second election, too.

No, none of this makes any sense. It wouldn’t make sense to a seventh-grader with a solid “D” in Math. It’s abject gibberish, delusional poppycock, and idle pap. Worthless.

But it plays well in a cult of personality that’s been carefully habituated by its leader to mistrust and even detest anything that smacks of education, learning, expertise or data science.

In other words, there’s no reasoning with these people—and any post-election scenario planning actually has to explicitly take that inalterable fact into account.

So if Harris beats Trump 55% to 45% in the popular vote, it won’t cause MAGAs to suddenly see the light and accept that their candidate—who’s never won a popular vote, or even come close to it—yet again got decimated at the polls. And if Harris beats Trump in the Electoral College by the same amount Trump called a landslide when he was on one side of it and a squeaker when he was on the other (306 to 232), it won’t matter if the closest Trump comes in a dispositive battleground state was 5,000 votes or 500,000 votes: that distinction will only modify the scope of the Iran- or Venezuela-led international criminal conspiracy Trump’s fans allege post-election.

In other words, while nothing in this report should in any way dissuade anyone from voting in November—everyone must vote in November—it also will not do to say that if everyone votes in November, none of the scenarios outlined here will come to pass.

That’s simply not so. We are, in a nightmarish way, screwed coming and going—if Trump launches a dictatorship following a successful re-election bid or if Trump launches years of civil unrest in the shadow of a clearly unsuccessful re-election bid.

The scenarios outlined above aren’t dependent on the Electoral College. They’re not dependent on the popular vote. They’ve nothing to do with logic, civics, or patriotism.

The only fact that matters in this election—as to the subject of post-election chaos—is that Donald Trump is a mentally ill man facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in a cage. Everything else (again, simply on the subject of post-election chaos) is mere trivia, including the willingness of his followers to follow him down the very same insurrectionist rabbit-hole he ushered them into four years ago before speeding back to the White House for a dinner of hammered steak and loose-capped ketchup.

His followers will do nothing if he bids them do nothing; they will do something if he bids them do something. If he flees the country, they will be confused and leaderless and probably do nothing. If he declares himself the victor but simply announces his candidacy for the presidency in 2028 rather than taking any action to overthrow the U.S. government—an unlikely outcome—some small segment of his support will peel off into abject madness and disarray but there’ll likely be no widespread civil unrest.

If he chooses to tell his people lies intended to incite them to criminal action, some percentage of them will believe him and move rapidly toward such action(s). And as before, the general feeling of the FBI and DOJ will be that as long as the transfer of power occurs, and as long as any street-level criminals are arrested, and as long as Trump doesn’t do something so stupid and indelible that he can’t back out from it—like declaring himself president and calling for the American military to assist him in gaining access to the White House—all is more or less fine and nothing really requiring the immediate arrest of a popular political figure has actually happened.

That thinking would be fine and good—well, not really, but those not obsessed with the rule of law could at least pretend it to be so—if the only vision of widespread civil unrest or a hot civil war that exists in the literature on tyranny or the annals of history of academic conferences on civil conflict is one in which two armies fight until one surrenders. That’s not going to happen here in America, for a host of reasons that start, but do not finish, with the way our military is run; but what very much could happen is a period of such legal, legislative, logistical, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, social, and paramilitary instability in the United States that the average person will sense that our nation is in freefall and past—past—the point of collapse.

And the knock-on effects of such a universal awakening are absolutely harrowing.
The Best-Case Scenario

Scenario planning isn’t merely disaster preparedness. It can imagine bright futures.

If Trump flees the United States, he becomes a propaganda chit and/or diplomatic victory for whichever tinpot dictatorship he lands in, but he also becomes a cringing, pathetic figure near-universally derided as a coward and traitor who abandoned his supporters.

If Trump is able to cut some sort of pre-election deal with prosecutors that allows him to escape further prosecutions at the preposterously low cost of not trying to start a civil war, it will eviscerate American rule of law but also, as noted above, prevent such a war.

If Trump wins and makes the unexpected decision to not cancel all future elections and/or make himself a tyrant above Congress and the Supreme Court, he could still be thwarted by a new Democratic Congress and/or a Supreme Court horrified by what it has wrought. A jittery and/or restive American populace could vote him out in 2028.

If pigs start to fly, Trump loses in a way that’s deemed indisputable even by MAGAs, and everyone in his base just accepts Kamala Harris as their new president.

If Trump wins—or loses—there is still a chance his D.C. January 6 case could go to trial prior to Inauguration Day in a way (and this is the least likely part) that escapes Supreme Court review, with the result that he is federally incarcerated by January 20, 2025, is not broken out of prison by his supporters, and cannot effectively be POTUS.

If Trump wins, he could perversely decide that the best way to effectuate the forever presidency he desires is to try to please everyone and be a moderate. America would lose its democracy but glide comfortably into oblivion over a period of 10 or 20 years.

Does any of this sound plausible? Or acceptable? Of course not. So: scenario planning.
Conclusion

Doubtless there will be Trump supporters who will say this fall, who indeed are saying in their encrypted chats right now—show me someone who will only communicate via encrypted chats and I will show you someone whose private views aren’t consistent with their public postures (one of many reasons I won’t use encrypted messaging and say privately only things I would say publicly)—that all the Trump coup plot for 2024 requires is more of what already was present on January 6, 2021. More of everything.

More guns (there were guns present on January 6, but most of the 100+ types of arms in use that day weren’t guns, as Proof catalogued over years of January 6 court filings).

A wider net for mass occupations in D.C. (had the U.S. Capitol attackers done as the Proud Boy plan, “1776 Returns”, which circulated at the time, insisted they should, and focused on first taking and occupying lightly defended outlying Capitol-grounds buildings, it would’ve caused the same Capitol evacuation in a fraction of the time).

The taking of hostages, even hostages of no value whatsoever (as it would elevate the national emergency to new levels and likely make continued operation of Congress on Capitol grounds impossible).

Simultaneous, al-Qaeda-style attacks on state capitals—as Trump clearly thought was the plan, based on the text of the speech he gave at the White House Ellipse—to make possible or even inevitable an Insurrection Act declaration that would open the door to all sorts of new breeds of chaos.

Working in small cells more or less undetectable by federal law enforcement rather than via sprawling group chats easily infiltrated by clandestine government agents.

Eschewing “dry runs”—as in 2020, both Stop the Steal and certain of its affiliates ran sophisticated dry runs in November and December before the event illegally planned for Capitol grounds in January, rather than merely orchestrating scattered, persistent, nationwide, low-intensity actions unpredictable in their size and scope and duration and location and intentions.

Starting everything—particularly any fake-elector schemes—much earlier, and with more on-the-ground logistical support from Trump lawyers, Trump campaign staffers, and local pols, including greater coordination between political and paramilitary and even rogue law-enforcement assets.

The problem with all of the above is that while these alterations to the sometimes scattershot planning that preceded January 6 would indeed be wise for anyone aiming at an insurrection, Trump no longer holds the reins of our government; federal law enforcement is now prepared for all of the above-cited developments; 1,500 would-be Trump soldiers are now incarcerated over the events of January 6 or under ongoing criminal investigations and/or indictments, with many more who might have been willing to throw away their futures for a venal billionaire who doesn’t care about them now chilled from making the worst choice of their lives by dint of having seen how such decisions worked out for others; any independent voters who saw the horrors of January 6 will by no means support a repeat of it; Trump’s inevitable claims of a stolen election should he lose in 2024 will automatically seem less plausible merely for being an echo of the things he said—we now know falsely—four years ago and ever since; the quality of Trump’s advisory corps has decreased markedly since 2020, even as its fanaticism has increased, meaning that he has more lawyers and associates and aides willing to do crazy, lawless things for him but they’re categorically less intelligent and competent than their already disgraced 2020 predecessors; there’s a real chance that 2024 isn’t nearly as close an election as 2020 was, which could defuse most of Trump’s arguments about small vote changes in certain locales being arguably (if only distantly “arguably”) dispositive; what mainline Republicans in Congress remain are even less supportive of a guerilla-warfare action in D.C. than they were in 2020, having been nearly equal victims of mob violence on January 6 alongside Democratic colleagues (remember that the vote to convict Trump following his second impeachment trial was the most bipartisan in U.S. history by far, even if it fell short of banning him from future office); the fact that Trump is on bail in several cases significantly curtails the conduct he can engage in without having his bail revoked; and he himself no longer has nearly the physical vigor or emotional stability he had back in 2020 and early 2021—which isn’t to say he was particularly healthy by either of those standards back then.

We might even note that the very existence of Project 2025—and its staffing with so many Trump administration alumni (140 at last count)—could have the unforeseen effect of disinclining certain Trump super-fans from engaging in clandestine, illicit conduct post-election. When you’ve spent years with the high hopes of being back in power in a legitimate way, such that you’ve worked basically a full-time job since 2020 planning how to work on Trump’s behalf inside government starting in January 2025, it becomes harder to suddenly switch mental gears in the shadow of an election loss and pivot toward hopeless, graceless, directionless paramilitary nonsense instead.

So we should assume that what Team Trump is doing is asking itself what assets it has now that it did not have before. And they appear to be these:

A more compliant Supreme Court, even if its political balance remains unchanged;

a much larger army of poll-watchers ready to falsely call fraud at election sites;

more state elections officials willing to act lawlessly to aid Trump, and as part of this much more of a run-up for such rogue actors to plan for acting lawlessly;

a presidential-nominee opponent who is considerably scarier to Trump’s racist and misogynistic base, as she’s a Black woman rather than (as Biden) a white man;

a militia movement that may in fact be larger and healthier than it was in 2020;

a sprawling Project 2025 team that would be ready and willing to stand up a fake provisional government in early 2025 if circumstances somehow—though this is deeply unlikely—pave the way for such an anti-democratic administrative mirage;

a candidate who’s considerably more desperate than he was in January 2021, such that he can be counted on to be even more open in his inciting of violence and mayhem than he was four years ago;

the aid and assistance of the billionaire white supremacist, Elon Musk, who now owns and operates the largest and most influential politics-oriented social media network in the English-speaking world;

a sitting president—as Joe Biden will be President of the United States during any 2024 Trump coup attempt—who’s neither particularly popular nationally nor seen as being particularly good at inspiring confidence in Americans in the midst of historic instability (an assessment of the man that’s unfair and unwarranted but nevertheless widespread); and

the sheer willfulness, viciousness, and lack of scruples that comes from a cult having failed once before in a similar effort and believing—as many Trump fans now do—that this is the last chance for America to erect a neofascist, Christian nationalist dictatorship that hates women and minorities on American soil.

Candidly, this isn’t much for an insurrectionist set to have in its arsenal. There’s a bit of value in many of the items above, but not much, and all of them pale in comparison to—say—the control of the Pentagon that Trump had (and sought to make horrifying use of, as established in the 2022 book Proof of Coup) back in January of 2021. For this reason and others, it is wisest to ask ourselves how Trump and his fans could at once (a) make use of what few assets they have that are listed above, while simultaneously (b) pursuing courses of conduct that don’t mirror 2021 and therefore can’t be predicted.

For instance, how could the support of the richest white supremacist in the world be weaponized by Trump, under circumstances in which Trump effectively controls (via Musk) the largest disinformation instrument on Earth? How could a larger but more risk-averse paramilitary force be deployed, such that it is not all concentrated in one place—Washington, D.C.—awaiting arrest and processing by many better-trained and better-equipped law enforcement personnel, but is instead set against soft targets the nation over? Given that Trump is now staffed by the most unscrupulous band of sorta- lawyers any U.S. political candidate has ever seen, what sort of motions could they file before obscure, district-level Trump-friendly or Trump-appointed judges in Texas or Florida that could (and may yet) get them disbarred for making misrepresentations to our justice system but which they’re willing to file anyway because they don’t actually care about still being lawyers three years from now? How could the existence of a Trump-“blessed” Project 2025 and its many shadow agencies and shadow cabinet secretaries be leveraged to at least create the appearance of an alternative option for American governance in a 2000-like scenario in which both candidates are claiming victory? If Trumpist extremists are more willing to use firearms to kill in 2024 than they were in 2020, what sort of targeted kidnappings and assassinations will they plan that don’t require direct action against any organized, armed governmental force?

Historically speaking, around the world, going back centuries, the answer to many of the questions above has been a simple one: terrorism. Paramilitary cabals out of power and seeking it destroy logistically sensitive soft targets kidnap or kill lightly protected but politically valuable individuals, orchestrate mass-disinformation campaigns that lead to a general panic and a collapsed economy, and use the trappings of legitimacy (for instance, as is present in licensed attorneys who have not yet been suspended or disbarred for misconduct, even in circumstances in which perhaps they should have been) to paper over illicit conduct with public claims of “doing things the right way.”

And just as terrorism is often funded from outside the country it is slowly destroying—think of how Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism plots executed all across the world—Donald Trump has carefully cultivated the sponsorship, friendship, and fidelity of madman, butchers, and dangerous autocrats on almost every continent, from Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (Egypt) and Khalifa Haftar (Libya) in Africa to Kim Jong-un (North Korea) and Xi Jinping (China) in Asia, from Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Türkiye) in Eurasia to Viktor Orbán (Hungary) and Giorgia Meloni (Italy) in Europe, from Nicolás Maduro (Venezuela) and Nayib Bukele (El Salvador) in South America to leaders across the Middle East, including Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Mohammed bin Salman (Saudi Arabia), Mohammed bin Zayed (the United Arab Emirates), and Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa (Bahrain). Trump still has the loyalty, too, of dangerous out-of-power malcontents and scoundrels like Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) and Nigel Farage (United Kingdom), as well as autocrats who likely want to stay on the right side of American democracy but are candidly capable of nearly anything if they think they won’t get caught helping Trump destroy it, from his ally Narendra Modi in India to key figures in several weak but wildly corrupt former Soviet republics (most notably Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) and a few more Muslim nations (e.g., Qatar).

In short, wherever rich, powerful, dangerous, unethical, historically murderous men control large swaths of territory and/or population, Trump has allies who would be willing to covertly assist him in any strategy that weakens the United States and/or turns it into just another failed state overseen by a vicious warlord-cum-tyrant. We underestimate the potential for a very small amount of foreign election interference to have a very large effect on America’s elections at our peril. For instance, how would American voters react if Trump narrowly won the presidency by a vanishingly small number of votes but it was shortly thereafter revealed he’d secretly been undermining U.S. foreign policy around the world via criminal violations of the Logan Act, and if concurrent with this discovery new polling discovered that it was events outside the United States orchestrated by Trump via this criminal conspiracy that were dispositive for the small number of voters that ended up deciding the race for Trump? How would the Biden administration or DOJ respond, in short, to some significant evidence that Trump committed something very nearly qualifying as Seditious Conspiracy in order to get back into the White House, knowing that the clock would begin running on prosecuting him for such offenses (as post-Trump v. United States, just getting through the front door of the White House effectively erases all past crimes, including those that were committed in service of getting one to that doorway) almost immediately?

What happens if we learn, in February 2025, that a Russian or Saudi or Israeli hack of a database in Wisconsin or Arizona is what delivered the votes for Trump that made him President of the United States again?

Less melodramatically, what if some state-sponsored pro-Trump attack on America’s elections infrastructure doesn’t clearly switch votes over to Trump but causes so much Election Day chaos that litigation results that culminate in the U.S. Supreme Court effectively installing Trump as president just as the Rehnquist Court did Bush? How would American voters react if it was clear that Trump’s foreign allies attacking our country initiated a domino effect that ended with a Trump presidency (one that would never have come to pass otherwise)? Or what if a foreign attack simply causes such widespread doubt about what the “real vote tallies” were that every American decides to shape their. own opinion of who won and by how much—with no single argument being either conclusively provable or conclusively false? How would we move forward as a country amidst that sort of mass negative capability?

We have assumed—and should assume—that Democrats would never sanction any insurrectionist activity, but we can certainly imagine far-right insurrectionist activity that would produce an obviously illegitimate Trump presidency.

Just so, we can imagine how any of the forms of foreign interference that have been ideated above could be weaponized in the reverse: not to effectuate a Trump victory, but to cast such a pall over a Harris victory that a much larger percentage of Trump supporters than would otherwise be the case decide that anything is now permissible in seeking to dislodge Harris from the White House.

The point here is that Trump is likely to try to exploit his assets—which are few, but known—and avoid past mistakes. He is likely not to repeat failed stratagems in just the way they already failed him, but also equally likely to repeat any gambit he and his team reasonably feel has been strengthened with time (for instance, via the recent installation of new legislators or elections officials or poll-watchers in certain states).

As was the case in 2020, there is likely to be virtually no consideration by Trump or his GOP allies for how many of his followers could be killed, injured, arrested, and/or imprisoned as a result of the actions he compels them toward, no more so than his legal advocates seem to care a whit for their future suspensions, disbarments, arrests, or imprisonments. MAGA is a movement undergirded not by any policy vision or any abiding first principles but the Big Important Feelings of amoral and immoral persons who are at base nihilistic, self-interested, disingenuously “religious”, and capable of great evil in service of ambitions they know, deep down, are venal and undemocratic.

In short, as bad as January 6 was, there’s just no reason to expect this fall to be better.

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
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Task: Summarize the above article. Then analyze the above article.