Joe Biden’s departure from the 2024 presidential race produced almost instant clarity and relief—a tangle of doubts and fears brushed aside in a day. There was no scramble to seize his place, no mean-spirited list of reasons why Kamala Harris wouldn’t do, no shrug from a spiritless party. Against the president, for not quite a month, Donald Trump had the grin of a man who smelled blood. Now it’s a new day and a new race.
Trump may win but I think it likely he won’t. This is not a conclusion reached in the scientific spirit, through weighing a filing cabinet of facts about poll numbers, the economy, the rise of non-voters, and so on. It’s my gut feeling that on the whole people don’t like Trump, and the more they see of him, the less they like him. Thinking this frees me to focus on trouble down the road—what will be first out of Trump’s mouth the morning after defeat? He refuses to commit in advance to accept the results. The last time, even before the votes were counted, he ginned up a campaign to “stop the steal” by stealing the election himself. Will election denial be his strategy this time, too? Will he invite and urge the violence he sometimes hints or even predicts? How will his diehard core of voters respond?
The unknowable here is Trump himself, a man of unbounded self-belief, certain he will prevail, a gambler specializing in Russian roulette. He has been making faces for years—sometimes grins of self-satisfaction, more often fierce frowns, clenched teeth, dagger looks of anger. No Trump face or word says we can work this out. We have heard stories of White House meltdowns, loyal aides cast out, ketchup bottles flung at the walls. My own guess, based mainly on the testimony of Trump’s niece and nephew, is that it all has to do with his father—a pattern of treatment which Trump from childhood saw as contemptuous rejection. He copes with it by courting rejection. When Biden beat him in 2020, Trump’s response was unexpectedly clear and firm. He denied he had lost and the bewildered Republican Party soon discovered they had to say the same thing. Could he do it again?
The common fate of denial is to run into a wall, which can be a shattering experience. “Decompensation” is a psychiatric term for the collapse of a personality suddenly confronted with failure. All the coping mechanisms, rationalizations, and flat denials abruptly give way before fact. When Adlai Stevenson lost the presidential election to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 he said, “It hurts too much to laugh, but I’m too old to cry.” He was rueful but honest, willing to wince in public, blamed nobody, accepted what could not be denied—all evidence of a realism Trump does not share.
When Trump doesn’t win, he ups the ante. If he can’t bring himself to say congratulations, Kamala, you won it fair and square, we must expect that he will double down—refuse to see a second loss as the end of the road—and court yet deeper, more final rejection. The pattern suggests he may simply charge that the elites have stolen it again, tighten his death grip on the Republican Party, drive the weak-kneed into the wilderness, dare the government to withdraw his security protection, make unimaginable threats. January 6 was unimaginable the last time; we still have three months to imagine what Trump might try next. We have watched the man for eight years. It’s clear how he feels about losers. This should not be a hard call.
But then I remember the research I did years ago to understand how the CIA with its smart staffers, zillions of dollars, and state-of-the-art snooping gizmos failed to predict the events we remember as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Yom Kippur War (1973). In both cases the intelligence analysts came up with firm judgments of what to expect—the Russians would never deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba; Egypt and Syria were not planning a large-scale surprise attack on Israeli forces in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.
But the analysts were wrong both times, for roughly the same reasons. The information flow was dense and complicated, just as you would expect, but the failures to read it correctly can be described simply: intelligence analysts cannot predict anything they think makes no sense, has never happened before, and which they don’t want to happen. Nine times out of ten the analysts are right. But Trump tried to overthrow an election once and might again. Should we accept this as a real possibility and prepare for it? Or trust that an older, twice-whipped Trump will congratulate Harris and send his followers home?
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It is not only Trump who must confront the question. The Republican Party as a whole is faced with their own version of the agonizing choice—accepting the fact they might have backed the loser, or joining Trump in denial. In varying degree, using language more or less clear, serious Republicans backed Trump’s denial that he had lost to Biden—despite the fact that they were all professional politicians and understood how votes are counted and how elections can be stolen. By the time Trump’s wild denials had been rejected in dozens of courts and accepted in none, they knew that the election was not stolen and that Trump was lying. They joined Trump in denial not only in the initial moment of defeat, when it was hard to think clearly—but over and over again for the next four years, each time they faced the question and were forced to reply.
This is not a small matter. The leaders of the Republican Party did not lie only to the opposition—the liberal press and Democrats. They lied to fellow Republicans who show up for speeches and rallies, to the online donors who gave them ten or twenty dollars, and even—very likely—to their parents, to their brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, even to their spouses and children. To go on repeating that lie for the remainder of a lifetime is a fearsome prospect, but how could they hope for respect and support after confessing to a lie of such magnitude?
It’s my guess that the person who best understands this dilemma right now is Donald Trump. He insisted that his followers all accept and repeat the lie about 2020. Denial was the oath of allegiance they took, the tool that allowed Trump to control the party, and the heart of the strategy that won him a third nomination. It cannot be bizarre to worry that Trump might not just refuse to admit a second loss as he did the first, but take things further this time.
