Motivation for Trump to stay beyond January 20:

[no_hypocrisy]

At least four dictators are rulers for life:

Kim Jong-un (North Korea)
Vladimir Putin (Russia)
Xi Jinping (China)
Mohammed bin Salman (Saudi Arabia)

And even though it's technically a democracy, perhaps Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel)


My Point: Trump would be less inclined to leave due to technical term limits while these guys stay in the game. That's not how he's organized his life up until now. He'll try to find a way to fix the election.

[brooklynite]

1. Trashing...

WE'RE DOOMED" conspiracy theories aren't useful.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Beg to respectfully disagree.

My theory is to counter the argument that the "October Surprise" will be that Trump resigns, Pence pardons, and Trump returns to TV.

[sop]

3. "We have norms in our transition, rather than laws."

From an excellent analysis in The Boston Globe, 7/25/20:

"How well is our constitutional legal system designed to deal with an incumbent president who insists that he won an election but for the presence of fraud?...The rather unfortunate answer is our system is not well designed at all to deal with that problem...

"The Constitution really has been a workable document in many respects because we have had people who more or less adhered to a code of conduct....That seems to no longer to be the case. That changes everything...

"Trump will take the same hammer he has used to fracture the norms of executive governance over the past three years and upend the nation’s delicate tradition of orderly political transitions of power by refusing to concede if he loses...He doesn’t have to win the election...He just has to create a plausible narrative that he didn’t lose...

"Trump and his Republican allies (will use) every apparatus of government - the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military - to hold onto power, and Democrats (will take) to the courts and the streets to try to stop it...

“The more demonstrations there (are), the more demands for recounts, the more legal challenges there (are), the more funerals for democracy (are) held, the more Trump (comes) across as the candidate of stability...Possession is nine-tenths of the law...a stark reminder of the power of incumbency."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/nation/bipartisan-group-secretly-gathered-game-out-contested-trump-biden-election-it-wasnt-pretty/

[beachbumbob]

4. none of those countries were ever democracies