President Biden said he is “not confident at all” that there will be a peaceful transfer of power in January 2025 if former President Donald Trump is defeated.
“He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about 'If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have been a stolen [election],'” Mr. Biden told CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa in his first sit-down interview since announcing he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination. The interview will air on “CBS News Sunday Morning” on Sunday, Aug. 11.
“Look what they’re trying to do now in the local election districts where people count the votes,” said Mr. Biden. Repeating a familiar maxim about elections and democracy, the president said, “You can’t love your country only when you win.”
It actually gets really complicated if the damage he does is at the state or local level. A “coup” in the US capital is probably no longer a possibility, but he could cause a lot of chaos if he got a couple dozen scattered enclaves of lawless resistance to lawful voting procedures, and they didn’t back down. Are we gonna send national troops to half a dozen different states to make them obey? Is that even constitutionally feasible?
Anywhere we have the slightest doubt about that, we have to act now–Biden has to act now–to guarantee good-faith election management and fallbacks in case it doesn’t happen.