Will Trump accept defeat and leave the White House? Yes, experts say

Donald Trump may never concede that he legitimately lost the 2020 election and the US presidency.

That in itself will probably not matter too much, but he may use his final months in office before Joe Biden takes office in January, 2021 to push the divisive politics that have become his calling card. He may even boycott Biden’s inauguration ceremony.

But even if Trump and his colleagues sow a sloppy, chaotic and vindictive transition of power, it’s still unfathomable that the one-term president would belligerently barricade himself inside the Oval Office and refuse to leave, says Lawrence Douglas, a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College.

“I do not see that happening,” says Douglas, whose book Will He Go? considers the aftermath of the 2020 election. “I think at some point, Donald Trump will submit to defeat.”

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After flirting with the idea of rejecting unfavorable election results for years, Trump has stoked fears of worst-case scenarios: civil war, a weaponized supreme court, and even the end to American democracy. With only 10% of Trump’s supporters initially believing Biden won the presidential contest, many Americans are also concerned about an outburst of violence, even as the rancorous commander-in-chief paints a baseless picture of rigged, fraudulent results.

“I had such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by. Perhaps these leads will return as our legal proceedings move forward!” Trump tweeted on Friday.

In a last-ditch effort for Republicans to hold onto the executive branch, Trump and his allies have already begun filing a firestorm of lawsuits around the election. But they’ve made little headway thus far.

“If the number of contested ballots are not greater than the margin, courts are not eager to tear open an election,” although judicial scrutiny could actually address a “lingering cloud of illegitimacy” around the vote counts, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School.

If any of Trump’s legal challenges do find sympathy among Republican lawmakers and federal courts, that could cause a messy, fraught environment leading up to 20 January, when Biden is supposed to take office.

But it’s more probable that Republicans will remain silent even if Trump continues to fuss and largely refuses to cooperate with Biden’s people in the interim, says Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University.

“The difficulty with that is it just doesn’t give the new administration the best tools, the best information, and the best transition that we would hope for,” Zelizer says. But “my guess is Biden’s already expecting that”.

Even as a lame duck, Trump could strategically force Democrats to oppose executive orders that underscore their party’s vulnerabilities ahead of runoff elections in Georgia that will determine who controls the US Senate, Turley says. If the outgoing administration does lean on executive orders, those can be dismantled by Biden.

But after Democrats spent four years challenging whether Trump could rescind former president Barack Obama’s policies, Turley says, they’ve created a “precedent of their own making” against reversing such orders without long administrative slogs.

Trump may use the power of the presidency to push for more conservative court appointments, another tax cut or environmental deregulations – measures to “remind Republicans of why a lot of Republicans voted for him”, says Zelizer, even as he exits the White House. Although he lost re-election, he still won more than 70m votes, and he could wield significant authority over his base for years to come.

“He will continue to tell tens of millions of Americans that the Biden presidency is illegitimate, that essentially the Democrats have committed a coup,” Douglas says. “That could certainly pave the way for a resurgence of Trumpism, if not Trump himself in 2024.”

Meanwhile, Biden may inherit a divided government that’s struggled to cooperate and compromise in recent years, shaken by a tumultuous transition.

“He’s a decent person who genuinely will try to unite Americans,” Douglas says. “Now, whether he’ll be successful at doing that remains to be seen.”