"(CNN)President Donald Trump's critics are increasingly focused on the question of which Democrat will challenge him for the presidency in 2020. It's an important question, but another one might be even more important: Regardless of who runs in 2020, if Trump loses, will he leave the Oval Office peacefully?
Let's start with why we need to ask this question: Trump is increasingly proving himself to be a President eager to overstep his authority. Just last week, Trump displayed his willingness to invoke unprecedented presidential power to declare a national emergency utterly without justification. This week has brought a startling report from the New York Times that, for the past two years, Trump has tried to undermine the investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and other parts of the Justice Department in order to, in the words of the Times, "make the president's many legal problems go away." In light of these overreaching assertions of his own authority, it's at least plausible that Trump might attempt to cling to power in ways previously unimaginable by an American president.
Thankfully, there are four steps that key actors across the American system of governance can take to get ahead of this possibility.
Remember, when Trump was merely a private citizen running for President in 2016, he became the first presidential candidate in recent memory to refuse to commit that he'd honor the results of the election if he lost. Now, he occupies the Oval Office. He's the commander in chief of the most powerful military on Earth. If he even hints at contesting the election result in 2020, as he suggested he might in 2016, he'd be doing so not as an outsider but as a leader with the vast resources of the US government potentially at his disposal.
Trump's unrelenting assaults on the media and intelligence community, augmented by his baseless insistence on widespread voter fraud, have laid the groundwork for him to contest the election results in worrisome ways by undermining two institutions Americans would count on to validate those results.
As the 2018 midterms approached, Trump appeared to preview exactly such behavior. He tweeted that he was "very concerned that Russia will be fighting very hard to have an impact on the upcoming Election" and "pushing very hard for the Democrats." Without pointing to even a shred of analysis from the intelligence community, media reports or any other sources, Trump seemed to dangle the notion that, if the elections went too badly for the Republicans, he might allege foreign interference with the vote tally to cast doubt on the validity of the results.
In 2020, with his reelection on the line, the stakes for Trump himself are, of course, wildly bigger.
All told, there's real reason to worry here. So, what can be done now to avoid a potential constitutional crisis and ensure that the 2020 election results -- whatever they might be -- are respected and that any transfer of power occurs peacefully?
While many of us worry that President Trump has fallen woefully short in addressing foreign election interference through social media that can change American voters' minds, there's nonetheless an obvious imperative to respect the actual vote tally unless the intelligence community indicates that malicious actors have directly altered it (which would be unprecedented). Thankfully, there are four key sets of governmental actors across the United States that can commit now to certain steps that would help to isolate President Trump should he refuse to hand over power peacefully.
First is ... " (click the link to read more)
What if Trump refuses to accept defeat in 2020?
You look like a moron if you think anybody thinks Trump is going to serve a day over 8 years.