'76 Days of Hell' – What Trump Could Do If He Loses the 2024 US Election
Lawfare, ballot harvesting, Mike Johnson's "little secret" and a firehose of falsehood, AV Deggar examines what could follow a Trump defeat
In the United States, the interim period between election day and inauguration day is anachronistically long. Born out of 18th century necessity, the transfer of power was originally scheduled to take four months, to fit the pace of an Enlightenment-era agrarian society that spread out across almost 2.5 million km2 – roughly the area of modern-day Finland, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Sweden combined.
Reduced from four months to around 10 weeks by constitutional amendment in 1933, a “lame duck” session of this length is uncommonly oversized for an electoral system that lacks the horse trading necessary to form coalitions.
This election cycle’s interregnum period is exactly 76 days, more than two months in which the Trump campaign, its surrogates and allies, can provoke an atmosphere of distrust and stoke the sectional fires that they have been lighting across American politics since 2015.
So important is this time to set the preconditions for another iteration of election subversion, that conspiracy theorist and far-right figurehead, Alex Jones, has run two parallel countdown clocks on his live-streamed radio broadcasts: one to November 5th, the other ending on January 20th. Election day is not the whole ballgame for the US hard rightists, it is just the jump-off point for what might come next.
Stop the Steal 2.0
If Trump were to lose in 2024, the apparatus is already in place to reignite the Roger Stone-helmed "Stop the Steal" campaign that emerged after the 2020 election, in which activists attempted to delegitimise the Presidential election result through allegations of widespread vote and voter fraud.
Along with accusations of “ballot harvesting” – the insertion of thousands of fraudulent voting forms into official election drop boxes – members of the US Congress have recently cast doubt over the technology used in the voting process, resurrecting the claims of irregularity that led to a near $800 million defamation settlement in 2023.
High-profile Trump advocates, such as the self-styled “Secretary of Retribution”, have pre-emptively told voters to confront state officials with evidence of election irregularities, and candidate Trump himself has already begun to sow the seeds of suspicion in the electoral process, claiming that voters trying to cast their ballots before election day were being turned away in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.
January 6th Goes on the Road
The spectre of the storming of the US Capitol in 2021, the subsequent high-profile public hearings of the January 6th Committee, and preventative fortifications on Capitol Hill, mean that another assault is unlikely for the upcoming Electoral College vote count in Washington DC.
But this does not preclude the parlous scenario of protest getting out of hand at the seats of state governments or counting stations across the US in the wake of the November 5th vote.
Whether fomented or spontaneous, the potential for unrest could become a major law-and-order issue, with simultaneous flashpoints in states where the vote was closely contested.
Poll workers are already braced for the likelihood of intimidation and harassment at election facilities, and unlike the single, centralised disorder witnessed on January 6th, 2021, countrywide disruptions represent a more unpredictable challenge for local law enforcement agencies.
Such is the seriousness of the threat, some state officials have put National Guard members on stand-by to stave off potential “threats to election infrastructure”.
Pre-emptive and Post-hoc Lawfare
After Trump’s refusal to concede the 2024 election, more than 60 lawsuits were filed to challenge the result, including a plea that reached the highest court in the land.
The 2024 election is set to become the most litigious in American history, with both Republicans and Democrats armed and ready for protracted legal wrangling. Records show that the Trump campaign has raised $90 million for post-election challenges to vote counts, and multiple suits have already been brought to challenge voter registration in swing states.
After the US Supreme Court’s decision to allow the state of Virginia to purge its voter rolls of suspected non-citizens, it is expected that GOP legal teams will advance similar actions to contest state-wide election results on the grounds of ineligible participation.
Trump and MAGA Mike’s “Little Secret”
During a recent rally at Madison Square Gardens, Trump let slip that he and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, had “a little secret, we are going to do really well with the House.” This secret, Trump said, was “having a big impact” and that all would become clear “when the race is over.”
Many commentators have suggested that the little secret is a plot to enthrone Trump in Oval Office irrespective of the election result, through a byzantine combination of congressional procedures.
As noted by Elie Mystal in The Nation, this plan would revolve either around installing Trump via a “contingent election,” whereby the House of Representatives, and not the Electoral College, appoints the President, or to have individual states in which Trump lost refuse to certify their election results, whittling down the total number of viable Electors until the challenger has a majority.
The New Media “Firehose of Falsehood”
Undergirding all of the above scenarios, is the tremendous power of the new media for incitement and disinformation.
Trump launched his own social media platform, Truth Social, in February 2022, after he was banned from Twitter over his actions around the January 6th attacks. Although small by the standards of its peers, Truth Social has some two million active users, pendant on Trump’s every word and awaiting marching orders.
Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated in November 2022, after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform and rebranding it to X. Although the former president did not start posting again to his then 86 million followers until August 2023, it remains a key messaging house for his campaign.
Musk’s purchase of X heralded the re-platforming of many Trump-aligned figures from the hard right – from activists like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Roger Stone, to politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene – who could be pivotal to “firehosing” the information space with the kind of rhetoric that saw them originally de-platformed.
Holding that firehose is Musk himself, the owner of the platform and (ostensibly) its largest account. The billionaire’s far right politics have been plain to see in the two years since his takeover, and he has actively funded and campaigned for Trump both online and in person during this election cycle.
Outside of X but still in the social mediasphere, both Facebook and an instant messaging app, Telegram, have been extensively used to recruit and organise groups of Trump supporters to “monitor” election facilities across the country.
An especially disturbing development in the new media continuum would be the potential return of Q to the cyberwaves, after more than two years of silence.
The QAnon craze is arguably one of the most important factors in codifying the Trump mythology and bring together the cross-belief coalition of actors that make up much of his base. Although the movement has functioned perfectly well as an acquisitive initiative without Q’s direction, the reappearance of its talisman would be the icing on that particular conspiratorial cake.
While a 2024 election defeat might spell the end of Donald Trump’s tilts at the White House – he will be 82 on election day in 2028 – the GOP as it is constituted today has become the party of MAGA. When Trump finally exits the political stage, those who inherit the mantle of leader will do so in his shadow and will be formed in his own image.
Even after his departure from the fray, it is hard to imagine a future in which the period dedicated to the peaceful transfer of power in the United States ever passes undisturbed.