How Trump might steal election victory from Kamala Harris

Even if Kamala Harris wins the U.S. Presidential Election, it wouldn't be unlikely for Donald Trump to incite enough fear and hatred to steal the victory. George Grundy outlines a possible scenario.

THE POLLS were wrong — again. Kamala Harris won the 2024 Election by a narrow, but by modern American standards relatively comfortable margin.

The turnout was historically high. Women voted in their droves, as did the African-American community and Latinos, the latter stung into action by Trump’s acolyte’s vicious joke describing them as “garbage”. Harris carried most of the swing states; by midnight on election night, the networks declared her the victor.

But that’s where things began to go awry. Donald Trump had spent the final few days prior to the Election claiming that the Democrats would perpetuate massive fraud and within minutes of the networks declaring Harris the winner, he was calling a press conference of his own.

Trump angrily declared himself the true winner and incited his supporters, saying the day’s events represented “the greatest fraud in American history”. If “the fake result” wasn’t reversed, He insisted, “we won’t have a country any more”.

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Just a few hours later, the streets were filled with angry, mostly White, mostly male MAGA supporters, many of them armed. In the cities, police and counter-protesters clashed through the night and by dawn, the death toll was in the hundreds. President Biden appeared on American television the morning after the election, calling for calm and pledging that the election process and result was “the fairest we have ever seen”.

It didn’t work. House and Senate Republicans, under pressure from Trump and facing death threats from their constituents, once again buckled and fell into line with Trump’s claims. As the days following the Election progressed, they were joined by local Republican officials in the closest swing states, who told the media that there had been serious irregularity in the counting of ballots and with the voter machines. Such was their doubt, they said, that in their view the state results could not be certified.

Over the next four weeks, America was rocked with unprecedented civil strife. Trump’s rhetoric, already deafening, darkened even further. Trump told his supporters that they had been the subject of another electoral robbery (after 2020), and a small proportion of the 72 million Americans who had voted for him took to the streets. By early December, the daily protests, counter-protests, gunfire and death had exceeded America’s last national paroxysm, that of 1968.

The world looked on in horror as Biden vainly sought to uphold the rule of law, while Trump harnessed, fanned and encouraged the violence in the streets, to his own ends.

As the fraught days passed, it became clear that some swing-state Republican election officials simply would not declare Harris the winner, despite the clear results. Because of this, the pool of confirmed electoral college votes that would normally give Harris the majority of delegates and the White House was reduced in number. Suddenly Trump’s 255 electoral votes was a higher number than Harris’ official total. And then all hell broke loose.

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Republicans invoked the 12th Amendment, which states that the president is the person who has won the majority of the ‘whole number of electors appointed’. Well, they said, that ‘whole number’ was less than the normal 538 delegates, since some states had refused to certify the results, so Trump’s ‘whole number’ was larger than Harris’.

The deadline for slates of electors to vote and certify election results is 25 December and although the recently passed Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 sped up the myriad of legal challenges to these matters, the dispute made its way through the federal system and quickly wound up at... the Supreme Court. With it’s 6-3 majority. On which a certain Donald J Trump had appointed fully a third of the judges.

The court met in the most fevered political atmosphere imaginable. Riot police beat back protesters and counter-protesters, and the sound of gunfire was audible within the court chambers. But the actual outcome was never in doubt. Six of the court’s Republican-appointed justices had already demonstrated their partisan fealty by ruling that presidents were immune from prosecution. When the 2024 Election made it to their doors, they used the other tactic at their disposal — they did nothing.

This delay allowed Speaker Mike Johnson, who had been a key figure in the 6 January 2021 coup attempt, to declare the process over and on Christmas Day, Johnson stood on the steps of the Capitol and declared that under the rules of the 12th Amendment, Donald J Trump had won the majority of confirmed delegates.

As such, he said, “Donald Trump will be our 47th president”.

And that’s when America’s descent into the abyss truly began.