Hell hath no fury like the left scorned

Over a leg of lamb, I joined five other expat Americans for Christmas. Our topic du jour was which faction in our homeland we were most afraid of. Revisiting that boisterous conversation appeals, because in this re-enactment, I’m the only one who gets to talk.

With forbidding rapidity, one armchair assertion has gone from audacious augury to trite truism: that whichever party wins the presidency, a substantial proportion of the losers will not accept the result as legitimate. Imagine, then, that it is Wednesday 6 November 2024, and a presidential victor has been declared. Whose indignation would pose the greater threat to American civic order – the left’s or the right’s?

Now, much could happen in the next ten months. Should Donald Trump keep leading in the polls, especially in swing states, I wonder if Democratic apparatchiks won’t manufacture a last-minute ‘health emergency’ in the White House, even if they have to bash Joe Biden physically over the head – thereby necessitating a hasty presidential switcheroo on the ballot. But for now, let’s assume our current president defies all rational medical expectation and remains upright. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court invalidates any clumsy, bad-look judicial attempts to keep Trump from running at all. So we’re looking at a car-crash redo of 2020.

Unanimously, my all-liberal company at Christmas agreed that a Trump loss in November, however desirable, would threaten the more dangerous and destabilising fury on the ground. ‘They have the guns,’ someone noted. Having grown up in a conservative small town, one diner regarded the threat of white supremacists as all too real. Another guest threw in: ‘Look at January 6th.’

OK. Let’s do look at January 6th. After all, we already know how Trump supporters react when their man loses and many of them believe the election was ‘stolen’.