Scott Underwood: What will happen if Trump loses in 2024?

Dec. 18—Donald Trump is a peddler of fear.

He's adroitly tapped into latent anxiety among white residents of middle America who see a changing world threatening to wash away long-established cultural and social norms and values.

Trump has cultivated a fear of immigrants.

And he's expertly engendered distrust of government institutions: the courts, the election system, federal law enforcement and federal agencies. These institutions, he says, have targeted and abused him and, vicariously, all of his supporters.

And, as we all know, he has a lot of those, enough perhaps to win in 2024.

This is where the fear strikes me and many others. We fear Trump would wield a second term in the Oval Office as an instrument to punish his opponents, blunt the Constitution and bring the checks and balances against presidential power to their figurative and collective knees.

A lot has been written about what a second Trump presidency might look like. Less discussed is the chaos that might ensue should Trump lose a rematch with Joe Biden.

You remember Jan. 6, 2021, right?

Photos and video from the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol shocked and appalled most Americans, including many supporters of the defeated president.

Almost three years later, many of those same Trump supporters are singing a different tune, seemingly unconcerned that Trump would pardon the insurrectionists if reelected.

If he loses? Would another insurrection be mounted to stop the certification of Biden's reelection?

Trump's position in both 2016 and 2020 was that he would not accept defeat simply because he knew he could not be defeated without being cheated.

This egocentric, circular logic essentially dictates the same claims of election fraud, should Trump lose in 2024. It also suggests that he would orchestrate a mass uprising to try to regain the White House. Chaos, likely peppered with violence, would ensue.

While Trump would not hold presidential powers at the hour of a 2024 loss, as he did as a lame duck commander in chief in 2020, he and his most ardent and willing supporters would have even more cause to cry foul and lash out at the system.

He would be, as his story goes, an outsider victimized by the deep state, the swamp, the Biden swindle.

Olivier Knox, a national political correspondent with the Washington Post, last week reached farther back into candidate Trump's past to explore what might happen in the event of a Trump loss in 2024.

One thing that's not in doubt is the intensity with which Trump hates being seen as a loser," Knox noted. "In 2016, that led him to ... question the legitimacy of an election that gave him the White House but in which Hillary Clinton carried the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

"Trump falsely claimed 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally, including 1 million in California."

Knox points out that Trump convened a voter-fraud task force, which "disbanded without finding evidence of widespread voter fraud, much less substantiating his claims."

Knox closes his essay with this: "Imagine the intensity of his reaction if he loses to Biden — again — in 2024."

Congress is now littered with Trumpites, meaning the legislative body might be less likely to stand up to Trump's bullying tactics. Oddly, his hold over Congress is greater now than it was when he was president.

While we shudder to think of the chaos that would spring from a Trump loss in 2024, it's certainly a more palatable prospect than the four full years of chaos that would follow a Trump victory.

Editor Scott Underwood's column appears Mondays. Like him on Facebook. Contact him at scott.underwood@heraldbulletin.com or 640-4845.