The president’s threat

Incongruous as this may sound about a president who has, three years into his term, made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims and statements, when Donald Trump says he may not accept the results of the November election, Americans had best take him at his word.

Yes, we’ve been down this road with Mr. Trump before, ever since he railed in his 2016 campaign that if he lost it would show the system was “rigged.”

But there’s a big difference now. He’s not merely a blustering candidate; he’s a blustering president, with real power. When he openly threatens our democratic process, we dare not shrug it off — none of us, from ordinary Americans to senators and representatives to Supreme Court justices to military leaders.

We should take it all the more seriously because Mr. Trump, having already spent close to four years trashing the norms and decencies of a system of government that has endured for 244 years as a model to the world, has shown an increasing willingness to abuse his power. He unleashed armed federal agents on peaceful protesters in our nation’s capital and forced them, and church workers providing them relief, out of his path to a bible-brandishing photo op that he later used for a fawning video more suited to a petty dictator than an American president. He had federal forces attack protesters in Portland, Ore., defying local and state officials who asked him to stop his provocations. He has threatened to do the same in more American cities where mostly peaceful protesters are demonstrating over the abuses, and in some cases killings, of so many Black people by police.

Through Attorney General William Barr, he has corrupted the Justice Department, threatening protesters with charges of sedition, threatening cities with being labeled “anarchy communities” and losing federal funding if demonstrations get out of hand — or any other criteria Mr. Barr deems “appropriate.” Will that include opposing Mr. Trump should he subvert the election?

And what’s to stop him?

Certainly not Mr. Barr, who has removed officials whose adherence to the rule of law threatened Mr. Trump; who has interfered with the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s loyalists; who proposes that taxpayers defend Mr. Trump even in private civil actions that have nothing to do with his official duties; and who, like the president, talks about Mr. Trump’s opponents as enemies of the state.

Nor will it likely be the obsequious, complicit Senate Republicans who refused to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment despite clear evidence that he had withheld military aid in order to extort a political favor from the president of Ukraine — even as that nation faces a threat from our common adversary, Russia.

Will it be the federal courts that Mr. Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell have been feverishly packing with conservative judges, some of them clearly unqualified for the job? Will it be the U.S. Supreme Court, on which Republicans are rushing to fill a vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

Many of Mr. Trump’s defenders will no doubt say this is all much ado about nothing, and take glee in how he’s just trolling and “owning the libs.”

We don’t buy it. Not when it comes to a president who lies multiple times a day as easily as most people breathe. Who separates immigrant children from their parents, cages them in hellish conditions and loses them in a system so they may never be reunited with their families. A president who fires the very officials whose job it is to keep his administration honest. A president who tried, and is still trying, to rig the census to his and his party’s benefit, and keeps defying Congress through executive orders even as courts find his actions illegal.

A president who, in a subversion of the Electoral College that the Founding Fathers created to keep would-be tyrants like Mr. Trump from attaining the presidency, is calling on Republicanled state legislatures to appoint electors who will be loyal to him no matter what the popular vote is.

And a president who is trying to push through a Supreme Court nominee and openly saying he needs a clear majority on the court to invalidate the results of any election he doesn’t win. Listen closely to Mr. Trump himself: “We need nine justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax, everybody knows that. So you’re going to need nine justices up there, I think it’s going to be very important. Because what they’re doing is a hoax, with the ballots.”

Listen even more closely to his answer on whether he will accept a peaceful transfer of power should he lose:

“We want to have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

Senate Republicans who have let Mr. Trump slide until now need to do better than state vaguely that the winner of the election will be the next president. They need to declare that they will see to it that the winner is fairly chosen, starting with insisting that Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee promise to not participate in any case that could decide who the next president is.

Every senator and representative must state unequivocally that they will not tolerate Mr. Trump’s threatened manipulation of the election — and say what they will do to stop it.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff need to declare they will not allow the armed forces to be used against the American people.

When he and Democrat Joe Biden debate Tuesday night, Mr. Trump needs to be confronted on his threats before the American people.

And every citizen needs to make a plan for how they can make a difference should Mr. Trump do exactly what he is threatening to do: destroy our democracy. Because on this point, we shrug him off at our nation’s peril.