Here’s what happens if Donald Trump loses the election but refuses to leave office

| 9:09 am EDT March 16, 2020
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Several times per day, I receive panicked questions about what will happen if Donald Trump loses the election and then refuses to leave office. Most of the time, these questions are accompanied by a link to an article that insists we should be absolutely panicked about the prospect of Trump just magically remaining in office forever.

So what’ll actually happen if Donald Trump loses and then decides to stay in office anyway? Nothing. That’s not a real thing. It just isn’t, and Trump knows it isn’t. The next President would be inaugurated and sworn in with or without his participation, at which point Trump would no longer be President. He’d be trespassing in the White House, and law enforcement agencies would immediately drag him out by his heels. He’d be immediately taken to prison, instead of getting to wait until he’s inevitably indicted.

Further, Trump knows this, which is why he wouldn’t even attempt such a self defeating thing. There is literally zero chance that he will just decide to stay in office and somehow have it magically work out for him. This is the stuff of fairy tales and magic wands. So why does Trump keep joking about trying it? Simple: he knows that each time he does, the most dishonest of political analysts and pundits will write opportunistic scare pieces.

These articles about Trump magically remaining in office? They’re written by craven opportunists (on both sides of the political aisle) who are trying to scare the living crap out of you because they know you’ll click on the article and give them a huge amount of very profitable page views. If you want proof of this, consider that these nonsensical doomsday fantasy articles about Trump remaining in office are so pervasive, they’ve prompted people to clog up my inbox with panicked fear over it.

If Donald Trump loses the election, will he vaguely threaten to remain in office? Of course he will. He routinely makes loud threats that he knows are impossible, because he’s hoping to scare you into being gullible enough to believe that he could actually do it. He’s hoping that your fear of him magically remaining in office will allow him to negotiate reduced criminal charges on his way out the door. And he’s counting on the media to help him play up this imaginary scenario, because page views.

The lousy pundits who push this nonsense tend to get rather territorial about their cash cow. When Pete Buttigieg was ludicrously asked during a town hall about the prospect of Trump magically remaining in office, Pete blew it off for the joke that it was. The lousy pundits slammed Pete for this, because his answer risked getting in their of one of their most profitable doomsday narratives.

Stop falling for it. These are the same lousy pundits who have spent the past three years milking you for page views and ratings by routinely insisting that Donald Trump was about to pardon all of his co-conspirators, when in reality Trump has yet to pardon a single one of his co-conspirators.

We have so many very real things to worry about right now. We have a pandemic going on. We have to put in the work to make sure Joe Biden beats Donald Trump. And yes, we do have to worry about the corrupt things that Trump might try to sneak in during the transition period, before he slinks out of office. But the transition rarely even gets talked about, because the pundits are too busy feeding us this hallucinatory hype about Trump somehow remaining in office after the transition period. Not only are these articles to be ignored, the people who write these articles are to be ignored.