After golf a couple of weeks ago, the patio conversation turned, as it so often does, to the astounding, unprecedented, overt corruption of the Trump administration in the United States. We postulated that this was a very dangerous point in history, for democracy in the United States and by extension for democracies everywhere. After all, the nut-bar in the Oval Office is busy ripping out the guardrails that are supposed to constrain him, and he has repeatedly suggested that he is going to find a way to be President again after this term ends.  At some point I suggested that, although we would never have contemplated something like this a few years back, I would now project that the probability of “blood in the streets” in the US in Nov might be as high as 20%. 

And then we all agreed that yes, ugly things could happen, and then the beer ran out and we went home. After which, I decided to challenge my thinking on the subject. Are things really that bad? Is there a sequence of actions that could lead to blood in the streets? How could this be happening?

Do you remember when rioting broke out in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict in 1992? It was ugly and it was sensational but it wasn’t unthinkable. We’d seen racial violence in the USA before. But violence around democratic elections? A challenge to the peaceful transfer of power? That used to be unthinkable. And then came January 6th 2021. I watched the events of that day with a sense of disbelief. That couldn’t be happening in the USA, one of the world’s great democracies, could it? It was surreal. Absolutely surreal. But now here we are looking ahead at possible outcomes for this fall, and we’re suggesting that something like January 6th is a distinct possibility.

I think there are several factors that are bringing America to the brink of violence. The first is Donald J Trump, aka the Orange Idiot. Let’s face it, there has never been a President like Donald J Trump (47). Even Donald J Trump in his first incarnation (45) wasn’t the bizarre departure from the norm that this guy is. No president has ever monetized the office of President like Trump has done. It is estimated that the Trump family, including the 

Kushners, are richer by $2B to $3B since the inauguration. Most of that has come from cryptocurrency speculation, but they are selling pardons, they are selling insider trading information via Truth API, they are selling Trump coins, getting money from PACs (think lobbyists), and selling USA policy to foreign national interests like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It is puzzling to us here in Canada that Americans are still tolerating all this blatant corruption, because we don’t think we’d ever allow it here. But the Americans’ patience and tolerance may not be infinite. It might run out. And if it does, it may lead to chaos.

The second factor is the degree to which the country is divided. There is a considerable portion of the electorate who are absolutely deaf to facts. Many MAGA loyalists still support Trump, not because they think his corruption is acceptable, but because they simply don’t believe it’s really happening. They have bought into Trump’s “fake news” gospel. Democrat loyalists are statistically a bit better educated and perhaps more discerning, but there is a faction there as well who will never believe that a Republican could have an honest and ethical viewpoint. The problem with that partisan division is that whatever the outcome of the mid-term elections this fall, there are going to be people who honestly believe, to their very core,  that their party has been victimized by the other. And deeply disappointed political firebrands can be dangerous.

The third factor is something like the first one, but instead of the public’s ability to swallow the corruption of the Trump administration, the question mark surrounds the public’s ability to tolerate the breakdown of democracy. The Citizen’s United decision of the Supreme Court in 2010 put big business in the drivers seat for American politics. Election spending in the United States is at incredible levels. The Supreme Court, courtesy of the odious Mitch McConnell has become a partisan body largely subverted to Trump’s will. Gerrymandering has become de rigueur. In the judgement of those who produce the world’s democracy index, America is now rated as a flawed democracy. And so far Americans seem to fail to understand that they are failing as a democracy. They still see themselves as “the bright city on the hill”, the guiding light of democracy in the world. But if and when Trump does something that peels back the blinkers and forces the citizens to face up to the reality of their situation, they might react violently. 

I think all of those things increase the probability of violence in the USA this fall and into next year – could be rioting and broken heads, and in some extreme scenarios, could be close to an outright civil war.

There are several scenarios that come to mind.

In the first scenario, Donald Trump proclaims a national emergency around voter fraud, and tries to prevent or pervert the mid-term elections. Citizens take to the streets in protest. Trump describes the protests as insurrection and invokes the Insurrection Act. He orders the National Guard into Democrat cities like Chicago and New York. It only takes a shove, a punch, a thrown egg to provoke a response. Some soldier fires a rubber bullet and it hits a kid in the wrong spot and kills him, and rioting breaks out. What’s the probability of that happening? 

Well the proposed initiating event is Trump’s invocation of a National emergency. On August 11th, in the wee hours of the morning, Trump was being interviewed on Real America’s Voice,  a MAGA-minded right wing radio show by “Wayne Allyn Root, a Las Vegas-based Trump loyalist”. Root urged him to “declare a national emergency if the Senate does not pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act.” 

Trump’s response to that suggestion was “Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”

Invoking an emergency would be old hat for the Orange Idiot. According to former Representative Adam Kinzinger, “30 of his first 150 executive orders in his second term invoked some form of emergency authority.” There are numerous constitutional impediments to Trump invoking emergencies or interfering in the jurisdiction of the state level governments, but that doesn’t mean that Trump won’t try it anyway, especially if he begins to sense that his days in office are numbered. I had a bit of back and forth with my AI partner about this and when I pointed out that Trump’s personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, was now the Attorney General, it (he, she, they? what are the right pronouns for an AI agent?) conceded the point with this statement – “With Attorney General Todd Blanche taking command at the Department of Justice, the interpretation and enforcement of federal statutes—such as Title 10 invoking national emergency powers or civil disturbance provisions—could see novel applications. The willingness of legal advisors to construct expansive theories of executive authority remains a critical variable in how far these stress tests can be pushed.”

Will National Guard units respond to the President’s orders to suppress rioting, and impose what might look like military rule? Over a dozen flag level officers have been replaced with Trump loyalists – “commanders explicitly vetted for alignment with executive directives.” So the military might very well carry out protest suppression orders.

According to an article in The Hill, “If the president were to declare a national emergency and federalize the midterms, Congress could prevent him from doing so via a joint resolution — which would likely require veto-proof two-thirds majorities in both chambers.” It is extremely unlikely, in my opinion,  that a joint resolution would gain that two-thirds majority in either house. So the declaration of a National Emergency is unlikely to be rebuffed by Congress and a serious and significant threat to free and fair elections may very well trigger violent conflict between protestors and National Guard units.

(The SAVE America Act, by the way,  is the legislation that Trump is pushing which would require proof of citizenship to allow someone to vote. The legislation is widely 

held to be a blatant vote suppression tactic.)

A similar scenario is that elections are held and Democrats win control of both houses, but then Trump and senior House and Senate leadership (Mike Johnston and John Thune) use a national emergency declaration to hold off re-convening their respective houses so that the newly elected officials aren’t seated and Trump gets to carry on in the executive branch with no legislative branch guardrails. This stratagem probably has a limited lifespan because of funding issues, but it might provoke the same cycle of protests and conflict.

There is another way for this to go wrong. Suppose that Trump federalizes the Guard and senior officers do, in fact, refuse to execute those orders. Trump cries foul, and moves to have the military leadership arrested for treason. Would the military accept that? Would there be a unified response to that scenario, or would we find certain units loyal to Trump and others refusing to accept his orders? Now there’s a recipe for disaster, since all of those boys own pop-guns. It’s a low probability, edge case scenario…but I’ll throw that on the table as “not impossible” anyway.

The next possibility is that instead of Trump federalizing the National Guard he uses his bully boys in ICE and/or his friends in the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to suppress protests. There is no question about whether those forces would rally to Trump’s call. ICE has been deployed as Trump’s private shit-disturbers for the last 18 months, and those are not nice people. This is not a carefully screened, trained and educated policing force. These guys were hired in a hurry and because normal background checks and hiring hurdles were circumvented, it turns out that a number of them had previously resigned or were terminated from municipal police departments following disciplinary investigations. These include cases involving excessive force allegations, domestic violence incidents, or civil rights violations.

As for the various motorcycle gangs riding the MAGA express, they proved their allegiance on January 6th, 2021. And Trump has handed out pardons to everyone in that event, so those boys will be happy to act. So yes, if anything that Trump does prompts protests about election integrity, it would not surprise me at all to see counter protestors wearing right wing gang insignia going out to break “libtard” heads.

Bad stuff can also happen if Trump fails to prevent the elections, and Republicans lose. Let’s suppose that the polls are opened and managed properly by State governments as they should be, and let’s suppose that the returns are overwhelmingly Democrat. Would all of the MAGA millions peacefully accept the results, or would there be Republican-inspired protests complaining that the election was unfair and they lost, boo hoo? Now, instead of Trump federalizing the National Guard, it will be  the blue state Governors who exercise their authority over their National Guard troops. From there on it’s all the same story – the level of polarization in the United States is so high that any kind of protest and counter-protest interaction could set off a powder keg.

If the Republicans lose badly in the mid-terms and Democrats control both houses, how long will it take them to convene impeachment processes? My guess is that they will have impeached and convicted Trump within three months. So by about the first of April 2027, there would be a Constitutional crisis as, for the first time ever, a President gets voted out of office. Would Trump take Nixon’s path and resign rather than have his impeachment confirmed? Probably not, but it doesn’t really matter. The logical consequence either way is that Trump would be forced out of office. If you think that MAGA loyalists are likely to be pissed off in November if and when the Dem’s win, imagine how furious they’ll be if Trump is forced to leave office in April or May. So now we’d be back in that same scenario, where the MAGA loyalists are rioting and National Guard troops are being used to suppress the violence.

I’m nearly done. I think I just have two other scenarios to propose. The first one is that Republicans come to their senses and remove Trump from office using the 25th amendment. My trusty AI source tells me “Removing a sitting President requires the Vice President and a majority of the executive Cabinet department heads to declare in writing to Congress that the President is unable to discharge office powers. If contested by the President, a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate is required to sustain removal. Given Cabinet composition, legal experts view a 25th Amendment removal as highly improbable under standard political conditions.” 

The key to the above paragraph is the final clause “under standard political conditions.” I suggest that these are not standard political conditions. Trumps popularity ratings must be becoming a serious concern for establishment Republicans. He appears to be in a state of mental decIine and he didn’t start high on that graph. He has become an international embarrassment, and he has involved the US in a war they really cannot win. I wouldn’t be astonished at all to find that JD Vance and Marco Rubio are quietly whispering in the ears of their cabinet colleagues to propose that it’s time to get rid of this oaf. If the Trump loyalists decide that he’s done, I imagine that they would not propose a 25th amendment action until they had polled the House and Senate to verify that they would have the necessary two-thirds majority vote. 

So, let’s assume for a moment that this happens. Maybe MAGA world will accept this if Vance and Rubio paint it as a health issue – poor Donald is a hero who has done all he can do, but sadly he is no longer up to the task. But maybe not. I don’t credit the MAGA wing with any great intellectual capacity. Their response will be largely driven by their emotional attachment to the Orange Idiot. Vance and Rubio might have difficulty selling the 25th amendment to Trumps cheering section.

The final scenario is that an assassin’s bullet does more than create a phantom scar on his ear. A lot of Republicans would give a sigh of relief. A lot of Democrats would cheer, and some of them would do it out loud, thoroughly enraging the MAGA loyalists. The blood in the streets in this scenario depends on the name and skin colour of the assassin. All those knuckle dragging neanderthal MAGA people will want to take their anger out on every Moslem or Latino or Somalian – whichever of those groups are implicated. We’d better hope the assassin is white-skinned and blond and Christian because that will blunt a lot of the reprisal violence.

Like I said, January 6th really surprised me. I don’t think I’ll be surprised whatever happens this time around. If you’re living beside a powder kettle, don’t be surprised if it blows up.