Lawrence O’Donnell just nailed it

| 10:45 pm EDT July 20, 2020
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Even as one pundit after another has tried to scare people into staying tuned in by floating the possibility that Donald Trump could lose the election and then just simply refuse to leave office and somehow get away with it all, Palmer Report has explained that this is not a real thing. Tonight, Lawrence O’Donnell used his MSNBC show to help further explain why this isn’t a real thing.

“It’s not up to Donald Trump,” O’Donnell explained. If Trump loses the election, Chief Justice John Roberts will swear in Joe Biden on inauguration day, Biden will become President, and if Trump is still in the White House at that point, he’ll be trespassing. Secret Service will remove him accordingly.

None of this is particularly difficult to understand. Yet because the (imaginary) prospect of Trump somehow magically remaining in office after losing is so scary, the worst of pundits just keep using it to try milk ratings out of what is currently a blowout election cycle.

Nancy Pelosi is also shutting down this nonsensical narrative. She explained to the cameras today that “there is a process. It has nothing to do with whether a certain occupant of the White House doesn’t feel like moving, and has to be fumigated out of there.” The Joe Biden campaign has also pointed out that Trump would simply be trespassing, and that he would simply be removed.

We can’t stress this enough: this an imaginary narrative that pundits have manufactured for the sake of ratings. Donald Trump is playing into this fake narrative because he’s hoping to use the empty threat of refusing to leave office in order to perhaps get certain things to go his way during the transition period. But Trump will only have that leverage if the public is gullible enough to believe that he can actually somehow just not leave office. Your job is to not fall for this crap when you hear it from the worst of pundits.