When Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen testified to Congress last week, as The Inquisitr reported, he finished his opening statement with a dire warning about Trump, a man who he has known for more than a decade. Cohen warned that if Trump were to lose the 2020 presidential election, he may simply refuse to leave office, at least not without a fight.
“I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power. And this is why I agreed to appear before you today,” Cohen told the members of the House Oversight Committee, as CNBC reported.
On Wednesday, another longtime Trump acquaintance issued a similar alarming warning. Former advertising executive and TV host Donny Deutsch, 61, has known Trump for more than 20 years, and in an interview on the MSNBC cable news network Wednesday afternoon, according to Raw Story , Deutsch went beyond what Cohen was willing to say in front of a congressional committee concerning Trump’s intentions if he is forced to leave office.
Asked by host Chris Matthews what he believed Trump’s “end game” would be were he required to leave office due to impeachment or a lost election, Deutsch also said that Trump would not allow a peaceful transition of power — the foundation of American democracy since the early days of the county, as The National Archives document.
“Donald Trump, I believe — whether he’s going to be impeached, whether they’re disqualifying him for running for office, even if he gets elected out — he will tell his people to take to the streets. I know that sounds extreme — that’s who this man is,” Deutsch said in the interview. “I believe Donald Trump is not beyond starting a civil war.”
The “peaceful transition of power,” symbolized by the presidential inauguration that takes place every four years on January 20, has been an established principle of American democracy since the election of 1800, which, as the Teaching American History site explains, was the first U.S. election to transfer power between two deeply opposed political parties — the Democratic-Republican Party and the Federalist Party — without violent opposition.
The election was won by Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson, ousting incumbent Federalist president John Adams, as 270toWin recounts. Federalists favored a strong central government and an alignment with Britain. The Democrat-Republicans favored alignment with France, and supported a decentralized government.
The rivalry between the parties was so bitter that four years later, Jefferson’s vice president Aaron Burr killed the Federalist Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel with pistols. Nonetheless, the transition of power between the parties remained peaceful, as it has in every election ever since.