Trump Can’t Ignore the Election Results Without a Lot of Help

Last night, President Donald Trump took a tiny step back from his repeated refusals to say he’ll leave office if he loses the election. Yet he continued to portray a fair election as nearly impossible. The result is to continue to cast doubt on the election result and give himself room to challenge it if he loses the election “unfairly.”

These claims are deeply harmful to our democracy — that much should be obvious. But it’s useful to divide the harm into two parts, to understand how worried we should be and figure out what we should do about it. Merely saying that he might not agree to leave office violates our unwritten democratic norms. Actually not leaving would violate our written laws. The first Trump can do alone, and he already has, on several occasions. That alone throws public confidence in our system into disarray.