I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think that Biden is and always has been (including in 2020) a weak candidate, and that now is not the time to gamble on a weak candidate, especially after the debate just made him appear that much weaker.
But it just struck me that in the unique and bizarre situation in which we find ourselves - running against a brazen criminal with a stated goal of being a dictator fronting for a group of christofascists who already have a playbook for destroying American democracy - Biden has a built-in advantage as the incumbent.
I don’t mean the advantage that incumbents are generally presumed to have (he notably does not have that), but a much simpler and more immediate one.
It’s disturbingly likely that if/when Trump loses, his christofascist coattail-riders and his legions of angry, hateful and generally heavily-armed chucklefucks are going to literally go to war. They could well end up making Jan. 6 look like the peaceful protest they insist it was, at least in comparison to the violence and bloodshed they’ll potentially unleash should their fuhrer lose.
And at that point, it’s going to be much better to not have to deal with a transfer of power - to have a president already in place with a full set of aides and well-established communication channels, and to keep that president in office for as long as it takes to withstand the fascists.
As I said, that just struck me, and I haven’t fully analyzed it, but I think it has some merit.
And never in my life did I think that things might reach the point, at least in my lifetime, at which I’d be considering the best strategy to combat an impending bloody fascist coup in the US…
That’s certainly a possibility, but I don’t think it’s as likely as others, mostly because the right made a concerted effort to gain control over the balloting process and for the most part resoundingly lost. There are places in which they have the necessary control to rig the election, but they’re limited to places that are so thoroughly red that Trump would win them anyway, so aren’t going to be relevant. In the places in which it could be relevant, in spite of their determined efforts, I don’t think that the right gained enough control over the system to get away with large-scale fraud.
It’s still a possibility - we’re up against entirely unprincipled people who will stop at literally nothing to impose the bloody tyranny for which they lust - but at least that particular scenario is, I believe, somewhere down on the list of threats.