Noam Chomsky on Trump: He can’t afford to lose

Like Chomsky, I have zero faith in GOP Reps, Senators or Governors to do the right thing.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are various maneuvers that theoretically they might undertake. One might be to try to throw the election to the — to refuse to accept the vote, to make sure that the Republican governors don’t authorize their own electors. This is routine and automatic, but technically they could refuse. Could throw it into the House, where there’s enough Republicans in the House to essentially turn the election into the kind of farce that you find, as I said, in some tin-pot dictatorship. That’s one possibility. Another possibility is he might just try to call out the military to impose martial law.

And the point is, he cannot lose. First of all, he’s psychologically incapable of losing. Secondly, if he loses, if he leaves the White House, he may be facing serious legal problems. Now he has immunity, but there’s a whole swamp around him. He’s tried to keep it from being investigated. He fired all the inspectors general when they were beginning to investigate it. The federal attorney for the Southern District of New York — that’s Wall Street and so on, the most important — started looking into it. Fired him, replaced him with a flack from the private equity industry. There’s nothing he would not do to try to maintain office, virtually nothing you can think of.

This is a major crisis. There’s been one or other form of parliamentary democracy for 350 years in England, and 250 years here, and nothing like this has happened before. We’re dealing with a figure who’s out of the political spectrum for functioning democracies. And he has a political party behind him which by now has just turned into cowardly sycophants. They’re terrified to cross His Imperial Majesty. He’s got a popular base of heavily armed, angry white supremacist militias. There’s no telling what he would do. I think the country, by November, may be a different country — and a different world, given U.S. power.