So, this happened. Trump hinted that he won't necessarily abide by a peaceful transfer of power. Given the norm-shattering nature of his presidency, this has set people's hair on fire. "OMG, he's going to launch a coup!" We also have a story about Trump's planners trying to come up with a plan for state legislatures to award Trump their state's electoral votes, bypassing the will of voters. Like what is happening with the Supreme Court, the Constitution does allow for state legislatures to award their Electoral College votes - that's in fact how it happened in the first few decades of the Republic.
However...this is an astonishingly implausible plan. It MIGHT work in Wisconsin, because of how heavily gerrymandered it is, but Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina all have Democratic governors that could make this action very hard. If Biden wins the first three states on that list, he's president. And while Democrats and Republicans currently hold each other in complete contempt, it's a stretch to say that even odious apparatchiks like Mitch McConnell would support a coup. McConnell has his judges.
If Trump loses clearly, much less in a landslide sweep, then it would be impossible for state Republicans to make any sort of plausible argument about the legality of switching their state's electoral college vote. In fact, multiple Republicans, including Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and, yes, Mitch McConnell have come out and say that all sides must abide by the electoral results.
However, the clearest path out of this is a massive blue wave that captures Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and North Carolina.
While there is legitimate concerns over whether Republicans still believe in democratic governance, much of that has been of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge category. They will make it incredibly hard for minorities to vote - see Florida and Georgia - but they haven't embraced the full-on Jim Crow anti-voting violence. They are also unlikely to.
So what's going on? Some of this is just that Trump is always best understood as a Twitter troll, as Shitposter in Chief. These statements of his represent a number of things.
First, he wants chaos and he doesn't want you to vote. He wants you to despair that any of this will matter. This is the sort of psychological vote suppression that worked for him in 2016. Sure, he was a grotesque ignoramus and serial sexual assaulter, but Hillary Clinton was a corrupt politician and harridan. For various reasons, this is unlikely to work this time around, mostly because Joe Biden is obviously immune to the misogyny that destroyed Clinton, but also because...holy shit, Trump. Even Brooklyn trust-fund Socialists like Walter Bragman are stumping for Biden.
Second, he's losing. Survey Monkey dropped a bunch of garbage polls today. They aren't partisan like Rasmussen/Trafalgar, they are just shit. Don't look. Biden isn't winning Virginia by 15, North Carolina by 8, Montana by 4 and losing Nevada by 2. That's bonkers... but look at most of the other polls and we see the following: Biden has a consistent 7+ point lead in the polling averages. Most polls have him over 50% in Michigan and Wisconsin and getting close to that in Pennsylvania. (It should be noted that in 2016, the polls accurately captured Clinton's vote shares in those states, it just underestimated the share of Trump's votes.)
Trump knows he's losing. So, like the whiny little bully he is, he's going to start whining and complaining about non-existent voter fraud. Remember, narcissists are incapable of external corrective steps. Any rejection of them is illegitimate. Still, he can see the polls and no doubt some poor schmuck, probably Bill Stepien, has been drilling it into him that he's losing. Since he's a pathological narcissist, he can't accept that. Public displays of anger towards him are incredibly humiliating. The recent disastrous town hall showed what happens when confronted with reality. He craves the safe space of his Volkstrum rallies to the reality that a majority of Americans hate his gut (his disapproval rating average is 53% and that includes Rasmussen).
Look, it's absolutely right to be worried that the GOP will embrace some harebrained scheme to keep Trump in office. But it's also worth noting that most Republican elites hate him as a much as they fear his voters. Once Trump loses, his power over them dissipates. They've got their judges. They've got their tax cuts. They've got the example of 2010 to look back on and hope that they will once more ride grievance to control of the House. Their incentives to go along with a coup are very slim.
The possibility of launching a civil war are too real to ignore.
Freaking out over every Trumpist scheme to destroy the Constitution isn't productive or mentally healthy. Vote. Make sure your voice is heard. The absolute most likely outcome is a reasonably decisive Biden victory. Trump slinks away like the empty suit he's always been.
But, yes, if they try and subvert the will of the electorate, then the future of the United States is in jeopardy.
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