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The President of the United States has said we cannot trust our election in November. A third of the country believes him. Two-thirds do not. And the man who said it commands the army.
And recently he said that the total obliteration of two large American cities by (presumably) Iran would be a small price to pay for freedom!
That is not a political disagreement. That is a constitutional crisis with a body count waiting to happen.
Let me be plain about the danger, because we have a habit in this country of underestimating it until it is already here. A third of the population is not a fringe. It is tens of millions of people. If even a small fraction of them are armed, organized, and convinced the system has failed them, you are not looking at a protest. You are looking at the opening phase of a civil conflict – the kind that does not resolve in a news cycle, but in years, and in graves.
History is not subtle on this point. Civil wars do not begin with armies. They begin with a story: that the other side has stolen something sacred, that the institutions are corrupt, that violence is the only language left. Once that story takes hold in a third of a country, the institutions themselves become the target. Courthouses. Polling stations. State capitols. The people who staff them.
And here is the part we do not like to say out loud. The President is not a bystander to this story. He is its author. When the commander in chief tells the country the election cannot be trusted, he is copying a playbook from regimes that have already run it. He is handing a grievance to people who were already looking for one, and he is doing it from the most powerful office on earth.
So what do we do?
First, we stop pretending this is normal. The two-thirds who do not believe him are not the problem. The problem is the one-third who do, and the man who told them. Every institution that still functions – the courts, the Congress, the governors, the press – has a duty to say, clearly and without apology, that an election is not a suggestion. It is a process. It has rules. It has observers. It has recounts. It has certification. And when it is done, the result stands, or the country does not.
Second, we prepare for the worst without surrendering to it. That means state and local governments hardening the infrastructure of democracy – the tabulation centers, the ballot chain of custody, the people who count the votes. It means law enforcement planning for civil unrest the way they plan for hurricanes – with logistics, with communication, with de-escalation, and with the understanding that the goal is to protect the process, not to win a fight.
Third, we have to talk to the one-third. Not to agree with them. Not to validate the lie. But to understand what they actually fear. Because most of them are not looking for a war. They are looking for someone to take their fear seriously. If the only voice they hear is the one telling them the system is rigged, they will believe it. If they hear other voices – neighbors, pastors, local officials, people they trust – saying the system is imperfect but real, some of them will listen.
Fourth, we protect the people who stand between us and the chaos. The election workers. The poll watchers. The judges. The journalists. The National Guard members who will be asked to keep order. These are the people who will be targeted first, because they are the ones holding the line. If we abandon them, the line falls.
And here is the warning we have been avoiding. The President commands the army. That is not a metaphor. It is a fact with teeth. He can deploy troops to American soil. He can federalize the National Guard over the objections of governors. He can place armed men in uniform at polling places, at state capitols, at the doors of courthouses where judges are weighing whether his claims have merit. He can do all of this under the banner of “restoring order” – and order, in the hands of a man who has already declared the election illegitimate, is a word that means whatever he needs it to mean.
The evidence is already in front of us, and it is moving fast. Recently he announced that his planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery will double as a military complex – housing drones, snipers on the roof and plaza, and large quantities of sniper ammunition. A memorial does not need a firing position. The only population those weapons could be aimed at is the one that lives here.
He has also shown us what he considers acceptable treatment of people. At a detention facility in Florida, detainees were locked in metal cages the size of phone booths – some for hours on end – simply for asking guards for something. That has become normalized. And then, an ICE agent shot a man in his car in Austin, Texas. Since this administration began, more than twenty people have been shot at by federal immigration agents – six of them killed. The pattern is not subtle. First it is the foreigner in his home. Then it is citizens in the street. Then it is whoever the President decides is the problem that day. Sound familiar – like 1930’s Germany?
And the pressure is not only military. It is economic, and it is aimed at the food supply itself. Canada furnishes roughly eighty percent of the potash American farmers spread on their fields, and there is no other source at that scale. The President has picked a fight with Canada anyway, and announced a “deal” to buy potash from Belarus instead – the same Belarus that backs Russia, and whose own president admitted within hours they do not have the volume to sell. That is not diversification. That is trading a reliable neighbor for a sanctioned dictatorship – and betting our American food supply on it.
Meanwhile he has launched a state propaganda channel, Trump TV, twenty-four hours a day, modeled on the information control of North Korea and Russia. Starve the economy, control the story, then point at the resulting chaos and say only the army can fix it. That is the playbook of regimes that have already run it, and he is running it here.
This is how democracies die, and it is not dramatic. It is procedural. The tanks do not roll in the night. They roll in the daylight, under a legal theory, with a press conference explaining that the President is protecting the very process he has spent months undermining. By the time anyone objects, the objection itself has been declared a threat to order. The courts are told to stand down. The Congress is told to stand down. The governors are told to stand down. And the people who refuse are the ones who get arrested, or worse.
We have seen this pattern before, in other countries, in other decades. A leader declares an election fraudulent. A portion of the population arms itself. The military is called in “to keep the peace.” And suddenly the peacekeepers are the ones deciding who gets to vote, who gets to count, and who gets to speak. The army does not have to fire a shot to win. It only has to stand there, in uniform, at the right door, at the right hour.
That is the threat. Not that the President will order a massacre. That he will order a presence – and that presence will do the work of intimidation without a single bullet. The two-thirds who do not believe him will find themselves voting under the eyes of soldiers. The judges who rule against him will find their chambers guarded by men who answer to him. The governors who resist will find their statehouses occupied “for their own protection.” And the country will be told, every step of the way, that this is democracy being saved.
It is not. It is democracy being replaced, one uniform at a time.
Finally, we have to be honest about what the President can and cannot do. He commands the army. He does not command the states. He does not command the courts. He does not command the people. The Constitution was written precisely for this moment – not to prevent a crisis, but to survive it. The states certify elections. The Congress counts the votes. The courts interpret the law. If the President tries to override that process with force, he is not exercising power. He is breaking the oath he swore to uphold it.
A third of the country bearing arms is not a hypothetical. It is a warning. And the only thing more dangerous than the warning is ignoring it – or pretending that the man holding the army is a neutral party in the story he started.
We have been here before, as a country. We survived the Civil War by refusing to let the story of stolen legitimacy become the story of the nation. We survived January 6, 2021, when a mob instigated by Trump stormed the Capitol to stop the counting of votes. We can do it again. But only if the two-thirds who still believe in the process act like it matters – because it does, and because the alternative is something none of us want to see.
Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Dickinson College graduate, Pennsylvania System Of Higher Education (PASSHE) Governor, former Shippensburg University Trustee, awarded numerous patents, as well as Founder and Chairman of eLynxx Solutions. eLynxx provides cloud-software for automated sourcing and managing of mail marketing, swag, packaging, and all things print. He is a board member, campaign advisor, successful entrepreneur, published author and commentator. He can be reached at Bill@eLynxx.com
