Desperate and 'out-of-control' Trump might prompt violent insurrection to stay in office: columnist

Writing for the Daily Beast, columnist Michael Tomasky made a strong case that Donald Trump has removed any doubt that he is "morally unfit" to be president and, faced with the possibility he may not be re-elected, could resort to encouraging his followers to take up arms in his defense.

"Naively, I always thought that even Donald Trump would stop short of actually inciting violence. I mean, he’s the president of the United States," Tomasky began before adding, "History means nothing to him, and the future means even less. Presidents—all presidents, even ones I didn’t like—think about the office, the future implications of their actions, the future of our institutions."

Noting that the president spends a great deal of his time in the White House "tweeting out poison" meant to rally his fans and malign his critics, the columnist explained, "...it’s obvious that he will do and say literally anything to advance himself. Anything."

"The big worry I’ve had in the back of my mind since Trump took over the GOP back in 2016 and we started seeing those rallies is that Trump would literally raise a private army," Tomasky wrote. "Many of his fervent backers own guns, and sometimes stockpiles of them. All it would take is a suggestion from Trump, in that on-the-one-hand-on-the-other noncommittal way of his: 'I don’t know, if the police can’t handle it, maybe armed citizens should form their own patrols. Maybe they shouldn’t. But maybe they should, who knows? Thank you!'"

Predicting that Trump will "... spend the campaign vomiting out lies about how the 'Democrat' Party is going to steal the election. He’ll spew out racist lies about voter fraud. Fox News will find one example of some small thing that they can make look suspicious and dishonestly blow into a scandal," the columnist mused what would happen if it was all for naught and Trump lost in November.

"If he loses, imagine what might happen" he stated. "I shudder to think, and I don’t even have to spell it out. I know this is all hypothetical, and I don’t want to sound alarmist, but at the same time, being alarmist is less dangerous than being naive. We better think about these things. Trump is out of control. He’s capable of anything."

"He is so morally unfit to be president. He’s morally unfit to be anything. If he were president of a bank, he’d have been fired ages ago. School principal—fired. Partner of a law firm—fired. Hell, chief mechanic at an auto body shop, head of a plumbing business, chief custodian at an office building—fired. Any human being with any measure of professional responsibility spitting out that many lies, that much hate, that much open racism, would be fired from his job, and it wouldn’t even be a close call," he wrote before taking GOP lawmakers to task passing on the opportunity to boot the president from office during the impeachment hearings.

Noting that removing Trump from office could have led to President Mike Pence, Tomasky suggested that the GOP will now reap what they have sown.

"You’d have to think most of them would admit, as many do when their name isn’t attached to the quote, that he’s not morally fit for office, in which case they are chickenshit moral cowards who are witting accomplices in letting this country’s democratic institutions be stomped to death by a conscience-less madman. But some of them presumably think Trump is morally fit, in which case they’re fascists at heart, too," he concluded.

You can read the whole column here (subscription required).