‘There’s People That Are Absolutely Ready to Take on a Civil War’
Tucker Carlson’s eyes narrowed as he conjured the image. A Donald Trump victory, he said at a campaign event in Gwinnett County, Georgia, last night, “will be a middle finger wagging in the face of the worst people in the English-speaking world.”
Trump maintains that he’s running for president a third time to restore and unite the country. But many Democrats and even some Republicans have expressed profound concern for democracy and overall safety if the former president wins this election. Last night at the Gwinnett County event, sponsored by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, I asked Trump’s supporters to consider the inverse: What do you think will happen if Trump loses?
The more Trump rallies I attended, the more this question had been gnawing at me. He has framed this presidential contest as a “final battle,” and he may well win. But if he doesn’t, I wanted to know if he and his supporters would really go quietly. I heard a range of answers last night, from promises to accept the outcome to predictions of a new Civil War.
I approached the former Trump-administration official Peter Navarro, who was signing copies of his book The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform. Earlier this year, Navarro spent four months in prison. Like another Trump ally, Steve Bannon, Navarro had been found in contempt of Congress after failing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee on January 6. If Trump loses the election, Navarro told me that “the country will disintegrate,” and he warned of “very hard times.” I asked him if he thought something akin to another January 6 might occur. “By asking that question you’re trying to stir up shit, man,” he said. He told me that my query would be better suited for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. “Those assholes put me in prison,” he said. “Do you hear me?”
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Another former Trump-administration official, Ben Carson, took a more conciliatory approach to my question. “I think we’ll have to regroup and try to figure out how we can save our country,” Carson said. He told me he doubted that another event like the storming of the Capitol would take place. “I think regardless of who wins or loses, we’ve got to tone down the dissension and the hatred that’s going on in our country, or it’s going to be destroyed,” Carson said.
Rank-and-file Trump supporters had varying opinions on the matter. I chatted with one attendee, Joshua Barnes, while he waited in line to buy strawberry smoothies for himself and his wife at a food truck outside the arena. The couple had driven four hours that morning from their home in Alabama to hear Trump speak live for the first time. “If she does become president, as much as I would hate it, you kind of do have to accept it,” Barnes said, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. He told me he did not want another insurrection to occur, but he acknowledged the possibility of something worse: a period of postelection unrest, or even civil war. (He pointed me to a Rasmussen survey from the spring that had shown a distressingly high percentage of respondents saying the same thing.)
A man from Gwinnett County named Rich who works in construction told me that this was his fourth Trump rally. “I’m a pretty good judge of character, and when people are trying to shovel me a load of garbage, it’s like, No, it stinks, okay?” he said of Harris and the Democrats. He predicted protests no matter who loses, but did not anticipate another January 6, which he referred to as a “situation” and not an insurrection. As for something closer to a civil war? “I think anything’s possible; I don’t think it’s out of the question, and I really can’t elaborate on that,” he said, adding only that he was hoping it wouldn’t happen.
In the parking lot, I met a man named Mark Williams, who told me he ran the biggest political printing business in Georgia. I took a seat in a folding chair behind his table of yard signs and other wares, and he offered me a red-white-and-blue can of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right 100% Woke-Free American Beer. (“Eat steak, lift weights, be uncensorable, drink a little beer,” read the slogan.) Though Williams supports Trump, he was levelheaded about both the current election and the previous one. He did not believe Trump’s claim that he’d really won in 2020. “I think we’re more accepting than the media gives us credit for,” Williams said of he and his fellow Republicans. “The actions of a few get painted with that big brush,” he said, pointing to January 6. “So, yeah, there’s going to be some crazy people that do some crazy shit; that just happens. But the actions of most of us, I mean, we’ll bitch about it and scream at each other and all that kind of stuff, but we’re not going to break into the Capitol and stuff. I’m as big a Trump supporter as anybody, but I didn’t feel compelled to go breaking into the Capitol. And those people that did that did wrong. And I don’t know that all of them did wrong, but the ones that did, they needed to be punished.”
Williams told me he had never considered a new civil war seriously until he attended Kid Rock’s Rock the Country festival in Rome, Georgia, earlier this year. He described some of the chatter he heard at the festival, such as When we have to go out on the field and fight these people, y’all going to be there with us? “It did surprise me a little bit, the tone that some of these guys were taking; I think there’s people that are absolutely ready to take on a civil war,” he said. “I think that if there was an overwhelming view of a crooked election or something like that—yeah, I could see it happening.”
Many of the Trump supporters I interviewed sounded worried about future political violence. Some identified as pacifists. Others believed that unrest was almost a given. A 23-year-old named Ben told me he had skipped his classes at the University of Georgia to attend yesterday’s rally. I asked him if he thought January 6 could happen again in the event of a Trump defeat. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’ll be real this time.” He told me that he wasn’t sure what he, personally, would do if Trump lost. “I wouldn’t want to act on instinct, but I would be angry,” he said. He volunteered that he believed that Church and state needed to be remarried. “If Trump was dictator, I would support him,” he said. He insisted that he wasn’t trolling me.
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When Trump addressed the crowd, he made no secret of his authoritarian aspirations. He raised the possibility of suing 60 Minutes over its editing of an interview with Harris, and made the baffling claim that gang members were taking over Times Square with weapons that the U.S. military doesn’t have. (“But we have guys that want to confront them, and they’re gonna be allowed to confront them, and we’re gonna get ’em the hell out of here.”) Once again, he promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in history. He also said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which would grant him authority to detain, relocate, or deport foreigners deemed an enemy, and called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills an American citizen.
That last point is a particularly charged issue in Georgia. A 63-year-old attendee I met named Linda told me her daughters had been in the same sorority as Laken Riley, the 22-year-old student who was murdered earlier this year while jogging. Riley’s alleged assailant is a man from Venezuela who entered the U.S. illegally, and her death has become a conservative rallying cry, especially for Trump, as it was again last night. (“I feel like we’ll be more like Venezuela if the Democrats get in there,” Linda told me.)
After losing Georgia in 2020, Trump tried to overturn the state’s election results. In the four years since, he’s only grown more unstable, and he’s predicated his 2024 campaign on retribution. This time around, Trump has been encouraging his supporters to vote early, and he’s pushing a new catchphrase: “Too big to rig.” He’s not thinking about what happens if he loses; he wants a landslide victory.