As I type these words, FiveThirtyEight puts the odds of Donald Trump winning at less than 19 percent — which happens to be more optimistic than other sites. As Nate Silver noted, Trump’s debate performance was unlikely to move the polls in his favor. Since that’s what he desperately needed to happen, it was not a good night for him. Meanwhile, with a month left until Election Day and early voting already underway, more stories will appear about Trump’s contemptible treatment of women in his employ, and more publications that never endorse presidential candidates will endorse Hillary Clinton.
That said, if the events of the last 24 hours were bad news for Trump, they were worse news for America. To understand why, you have to watch this scene from “The Lion in Winter,” a scene that Aaron Sorkin just loves to pieces:
It matters how Trump falls, because in our electoral system it matters how the loser concedes to the winner. By this point in the 2008 election, John McCain kinda sorta knew he was losing, and exactly eight years ago today, started doing things like tamping down the extremist elements of his base at his rallies.
That’s not how Trump has acted over the last 48 hours:
"Nationalist billionaire threatens to jail his opponent" would lead the State Dept to issue a stern warning about dangers to democracy.
— Paul Musgrave (@profmusgrave) October 10, 2016
BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray does a nice job of describing Trump’s current strategy:
On Sunday night, Trump signaled that his objective now is to fight to the end as the champion of the populist nationalist movement he has spearheaded and which propelled him to the Republican nomination. Trump’s revanchist positioning is a sign he’s retreated to pleasing the hard core of his base, despite the fact that they cannot deliver him the White House; a performance like this won’t bring on board the voters Trump must persuade in order to win.
Trump began the night by holding a livestreamed meeting with several of Bill Clinton’s accusers, signaling that he would bring up a subject that many Republicans have urged him not to. He accused Clinton’s campaign of starting birtherism, bringing up Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal twice — a reference unlikely to resonate with many people beyond loyal readers of Breitbart and viewers of Fox News. Trump told Clinton she had “hate in her heart.” He threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and even jail her after the election.
Or, as CNN’s M.J. Lee put it: “Donald Trump issued an unmistakable threat to Hillary Clinton Sunday night: I am willing to cross any line to make the next 30 days of your life hell.” None of this is gonna get Trump the votes that he needs to win. It will fortify his base and accomplish little else.
The question is how Trump and his base will react next month when he loses. Given Trump’s complete disregard for protocol or democratic norms, there seems little reason to doubt that he will claim that the election was rigged against him. And the big question then is how Trump’s hardcore supporters will react to that declaration.
[The speech Trump could give if he loses the election but refuses to concede]
At that moment, the key actors in this pathetic little election drama will be the GOP leaders who have yet to reject Trump. Will Paul Ryan get off his fainting couch say that Clinton is the next president? Will Mitch McConnell? Mike Pence?
After every election, there are nutballs who try to dispute and delegitimize the outcome (Google “Diebold 2004” to see what I mean). This is a major or minor problem depending on how many responsible politicians attach themselves to it. One of the GOP’s biggest disgraces over the past six years was its tolerance for conspiracy theories about President Obama’s citizenship and such. I don’t have high hopes for the post-Trump GOP. But I can hope that when he loses, his political allies will make it clear that Clinton won the election and it wasn’t close.