Donald Trump Is Refusing to Concede the Election. What Happens Now?

But how how far will Trump take his refusal to accept the election results? Vanity Fair reports that some members of his inner circle are fearful that Trump might actually refuse to leave the Oval Office, denying his defeat to the bitter end. “A few members have reportedly grown worried that, eventually, someone will have to sit Trump down and explain that little Donny’s not going to be president anymore—and at this point, it seems unlikely anyone will be able to get through to him short of slapping him across the face and screaming, ‘YOU LOST! IT’S OVER!'”, the magazine wrote in an online piece last week. “Yes, this is an actual thing allies of the president of the United States are actually grappling with.” 

The Biden campaign has voiced little concern at the prospect of Trump clinging to power. “As we said on July 19, the American people will decide this election,” campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. “And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

So, when all is said and done, it appears likely that the Trump presidency will end not in tragedy but in farce.

Rachel Maddow perhaps summed it up best on MSNBC on Saturday, after Joe Biden had been declared the new president-elect and Donald Trump, playing golf at the time, continue to insist he had a actually won the election.

Saying that she had expected that Trump might refuse to concede, no matter the outcome, and that she had initially feared what that unprecedented historic moment would feel like, Maddow said her actual reaction was much different.

“I thought it would be scary or, at least, it would feel like it would sort of shake the foundations of the republic a little bit for the incumbent president, who is still the commander in chief of the military, who still commands the executive branch of the United States government, for him to defy an election result and say, ‘No, no, no, I’m still president,’” Maddow told her MSNBC colleague Lawrence O’Donnell. 

“Now that Trump is in fact doing it,” she added, “it just feels laughable; it feels small and pitiful and irrelevant.”

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