THIS ELECTION CYCLE has seen so many terrifying moments—the violent Trump rally in Chicago, the recent firebombing of a Republican field office in North Carolina, the Russian-sponsored hack of the Democratic National Committee. But none of these is quite as scary as the fact that during the third and final debate Wednesday night, Donald Trump refused to say whether he would accept the results of November’s election.



“I will tell you at the time,” he said in response to moderator Chris Wallace’s question. “I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”

With that answer, Trump effectively asserted to the American public that he has the power to call this election in November. And whatever the news networks—or god forbid the courts—have to say about it, some subset of the American electorate will take Trump’s word as law. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, Trump already has all of the networks he needs—be it Twitter, Breitbart, Reddit, or who knows, maybe even Trump News Network—to spread his election-undermining message to millions of people with a single click.

Trump already has all of the networks he needs to spread his election-undermining message to millions of people with a single click.
“I think it’s a potentially dangerous statement when a candidate of one of the two major parties at such a late stage calls into question the election procedures and the whole voting process in general,” says John Tuman, chair of the department of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where the debate took place.

Why is it dangerous? Consider this: long before he ran for president, Trump became the public face of the birther movement, a racist conspiracy that while still fringe, crept just far enough into the mainstream that President Obama felt compelled to release his birth certificate as proof that he is, in fact, a legitimate president. And Trump did that back when he was little more than a reality star and real estate mogul—back when Twitter itself was in its infancy.

Now, a single tweet from Trump (see, for example, his tweets about Alicia Machado’s supposed sex tape) can dominate the news cycle for weeks. If a conspiracy like birtherism could take root and metastasize back then, what sort of power will Trump have now that millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world? And now that a web of niche media outlets like Breitbart, whose former executive chairman Steve Bannon now runs the Trump campaign, will be there to validate and disseminate his every utterance?

It Could Never Happen Here
As the pundits have surely noted by now, for a presidential candidate to deny the results of an election is fairly unprecedented in the United States. But not so in countries where political instability is rampant.

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Micah Zenko @micahZenko
In developing world, refusal to accept election outcomes an early warning sign of political instability/electoral violence. True in US too. https://twitter.com/PeterScoblic/sta...25636756836352 …
5:13 AM - 20 Oct 2016
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In 2010, for instance, two men, Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo, both declared themselves winners of the election in the Ivory Coast, the country’s first in 10 years. The election set off a bloody months-long battle between the two sides.

If that type of political unrest seems a world away, it’s because it is, and for good reason: presidential candidates have, one after another, for centuries, accepted the results of the election, and not just because American elections, fragmented as they are among local governments, are essentially impossible to rig.

Trump is threatening to torpedo that tradition. And while in the United States that battle may not play out in the streets, it would certainly play out online.


The good news, if you can call it that, is that so many of Trump’s supporters already believe the political system is rigged, and not in the metaphorical sense, says Tuman. “These are people who already didn’t accept the legitimacy of President Obama,” he says. “In that sense, I don’t know that it does much to change anything.”

But while Trump’s insistence the election is rigged may not change the outcome of the election itself, it could very well change the aftermath. If Trump declares the race illegitimate—using who knows what if any measure to come to that conclusion—all the anger, the ugliness, the threats, and the divisiveness that have drained the American public over these last 18 months may not end come November 8.

Trump, for his part, tweeted after the debate that the “era of division is coming to an end.” Trump is fond of saying that he alone can fix the country’s problems. In this case, at least, he’s right. All he has to do is respect the democratic process.