[Flint]

God-damned well put. All of this. Thank you for summarizing these things-- I'm too emotionally exhausted to think about any of this long enough to form complete sentences-- basically all I do is listen to classical music and avoid any form of news or social media.

Originally Posted by Ibby

what I and, i think, a lot of people are more scared of than trump declaring himself president for life and the institutions of government supporting him, or whatever, is trump insinuating the election is invalid, attempting to delay certification of the votes or otherwise interfere in the handover of power, and sparking a wave of partisan violence around the country.

No matter who "wins", at this point, a huge proportion of the country will not consider the results valid. If Biden appears to win narrowly, the right-wing who believed Trump's bullshit about widespread voter fraud and jewish-i-mean-socialist soros manipulation and unhinged qanon conspiracies are not going to consider that a valid result, and given that an increasing number of them are convinced that just about any member of government that isn't Trump is a baby-eating human-trafficking secret new world order (again, read: "jewish") enemy of america, that's a recipe for widespread violence.

Considering that:
1. tens of millions of people are on the knife-edge of homelessness and eviction, and that the government is unwilling or unable to provide meaningful relief there, meaning that there's a huge chance that hundreds of thousands of people could be living on the streets during a pandemic;
2. COVID infection rates seem poised to only climb and climb unless the government takes action to return to some kind of lockdown and prevent the spread of infection, meaning that this will all be happening against the backdrop of either lockdown or an ever-growing death toll;
3. while the protests over police violence are somewhat dying down, there's every chance of them sparking back up, which has a high likelihood of being met with yet more police violence once again, and worse, from yet more right-wing terror attacks targeting protestors (usually with cars, taking a page from daesh's book);
4. the partisan sides of such a possible conflict barely agree on the very basic facts of reality in so many cases - in a conflict between left-wing partisans who believe that the government is actively literally trying to kill people for corporate profit (by refusing to take pandemic control measures) and is sliding rapidly and possibly inexorably towards fascism, and right-wing partisans who think a deep state conspiracy to traffic children is using a fake pandemic and a rigged election to push trump out of office, well, its hard to come to common ground without even agreeing on basic reality;

it's easy to see why people are afraid about what comes next.