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The testimony of Michael Cohen before a Congressional committee last week was, by any objective measure, extraordinary. It’s one thing to accuse your former boss, a man you provided with

legal counsel for 12 years, of being a “racist”, a “conman” and a “cheat”. It’s quite another when that ex-employer is now President of the United States, holder of the most powerful office

on the planet. The comments, quite naturally, grabbed the media’s attention. But in doing so, they at least partly obscured a more specific, and arguably even more incendiary, warning.

Cohen, a man afforded the dubious honour of getting to know Trump as a person, asserted “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 there will never be a peaceful transition of power”. Now

the testimony of Cohen, a bitter fellow presumably seeking to minimise his spell in prison, shouldn’t be treated as sacrosanct. But the claim is surely far too explosive not to warrant

detailed investigation.   Donald Trump is not, to put it mildly, a man defined by his consistency. He has supported the Republicans, the Democrats, and then the Republicans again. At various

times he has been both pro-life and pro-choice, a supporter of additional firearms restrictions and a trenchant opponent and an advocate turned critic of the Iraq war. All of this means

that, when Trump does maintain a position, we should pay attention. One of the few areas Trump has maintained consistency, in recent years at least, is in his almost open disregard for

certain key democratic norms. That is for the rules, formal or informal, which are integral to the smooth functioning of a democratic society. Conventions like the total rejection of

violence as a political tool and the acceptance that, if defeated in a free and fair election, you have a moral duty to concede. This is an astonishingly serious accusation to make, and not

one I’d advance unless I felt the evidence was overwhelming. It’s worth stepping back to the re-election of Barack Obama in November 2012. Trump had spent the past year and a half promoting

the racially charged, and generally unhinged, claim that Obama wasn’t a legitimate US President as he was actually African born. Having gone all in, and burnt his bridges with progressive

America, Trump did not take Obama’s second triumph well. Taking to twitter, in messages he has yet to delete from his profile, Trump thundered: “This election is a total shame and a

travesty. We are not a democracy!” Just minutes later he added: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” He also

parroted the conspiracy theory that voting machines were switching votes from Republican candidate Mitt Romney to Obama. In short Trump’s reaction to his favoured candidate getting defeated

was to deny the legitimacy of the election and advocate what sounds like a revolution or coup to overturn the result. Trump continued to both ignore the most basic democratic norms when the

Republican Party abandoned reason and selected him as its presidential candidate four years later. Ahead of the vote he repeatedly claimed the election was “absolutely rigged” against him,

and refused to say he would concede if defeated. He maintained this line even after winning the electoral college vote, and thus the election, arguing he would also have secured the popular

vote if you deducted “the millions of people who voted illegally”. Naturally no evidence was put forward and a Presidential Advisory Commission on vote rigging, set up by Trump, was

disbanded by the President after only two meetings. The Republican nominee’s troubling behaviour ahead of the 2016 Presidential election went beyond vacuous accusations of electoral fraud.

Trump repeatedly vowed to jail his chief rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server as Secretary of State. Indeed ‘lock her up’, along with ‘build the wall’,

became his supporters chief battle cries. Threatening to jail your opponents, on charges which are clearly at least partly politically motivated, is of course a classic tool of the

authoritarian. Trump also exhibited a worrying sympathy towards political violence. Referring to one demonstrator he said “I’d like to punch him in the face” whilst he later vowed to pay the

legal fees of supporters who “knock the crap” out of disruptive protestors. All the indications are Trump will run a similarly provocative campaign in 2020. On Saturday he told supporters

at the Conservative Political Action Conference that some, presumably Democrat, members of Congress “hate our country”. Earlier this month he claimed the Democrats “cannot legitimately win”

the 2020 vote, suggesting he will resurrect claims of electoral malpractice if they do. So what happens if Trump narrowly loses the 2020 Presidential election, but claims the result has been

rigged by his opponents and refuses to concede? Possibly, by this point, Trump will have reason to fear jail time if he loses the Presidency thanks to Mueller inquiry revelations. Many of

his supporters, holding a barely concealed anxiety about America’s coming minority-majority status, will doubtless have been whipped into a fury by Trump and sympathetic alternative media.

They will be told, and some will believe, that the election has been stolen by those who pose an existential threat to their way of life. It’s worth noting this is a prospect that concerns

serious political scientists, not merely over imaginative bloggers. Jasmin Mujanovic for example, an expert in democratic decay, responded to Cohen’s warning by commenting: _“This was the

fear that many scholars of extremism and authoritarianism had going into 2016. This is a far more plausible scenario than many in US would like to believe. One of the things we’ve learned

since 2016 is that US institutions, checks and balances, and the general rule of law are far weaker than many assumed.”_ Reassuringly the chances of an outright collapse in American

democracy are vanishingly small. The military and ‘deep state’ intelligence services, all to often the gravediggers of struggling democracies, have shown a far greater loyalty to the classic

American political system than its President. Both have been at the forefront of resisting any rapprochement with Russia. The former Generals in Trump’s administration clearly acted as a

restraining influence, whilst the President has at times treated the intelligence services with something close to open hostility. Even the Republican Party, spineless though its

capitulation to Trumpism has been, would surely not tolerate an outright coup. But some violence, isolated and petty but also potentially deadly, would be very probable. There have already

been a number of nasty violent clashes between groups on the radical right, ranging from militantly pro-Trump to outright fascist, and their left-wing opponents. One of these,

Charlottesville in August 2017, claimed a life. There have been a number of bombings and shootings carried out by individuals from the far-right, including a terror campaign last October for

which a Trump supporting zealot has been charged. It’s reasonable to assume this would intensify, or at least continue, if Trump refuses to concede defeat and a section of his support is

convinced the election has been stolen. Perhaps more damaging though, at least in the long-term, would be the impact on the appeal of democracy itself. According to Freedom House 2017 was

the 13th consecutive year to see a deterioration in freedom across the planet. The rise of China, with its authoritarian state-capitalism model, means liberal-democracy is arguably facing

its first coherent and somewhat successful challenge since the Cold War. Should election results start being rejected in the United States, surely the greatest democracy on the globe, it

would send a terrible message across the planet. And for that, sooner or later, we would all pay a price.