And let the Church say AMEN!

“Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago,” or so Barton Gellman writes last week in The Atlantic in a piece perfectly pitched to the growing belief among Democrats that the former president, in 2024, will succeed in doing what he failed to do last year.

This is not a new argument. Indeed, two months before the 2020 election, Gellman laid out a similar doomsday scenario. Republican state legislatures, in states won by Joe Biden, would be pressured by Trump to appoint a rival set of electors loyal to him. Then-Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over a joint session of Congress, would refuse to recognize any electors from those states, thus provoking a constitutional crisis and, potentially, a continuation of the Trump presidency. These efforts would also, it was said, receive the support of the Supreme Court and the Trump-controlled Department of Justice.

Even before the unimaginable chaos of Jan. 6, such scenarios, bandied around frequently by Democrats, seemed far-fetched— largely because they were. I noted then that “to steal the election, Trump would have to rely on an extraordinary confluence of events — dominoes lined up one after another and falling in precise order.” If one domino is out of place, the whole effort would fall apart.

Indeed, the assumptions about what might happen in 2024 consistently ignore the key reason Trump failed in 2020: The system held, and the Republican Party’s devotion to democracy over party was greater than many people had imagined.