“We have never seen anything like this before. This is a president abusing his very great powers to try to stay in office, even though it is obvious to everyone that he has been defeated in the polls. That is a prospect that terrified most of the founders.”

— Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, quoted by the Washington Post.

“A former speechwriter fired from the White House in 2018 for attending a conference at which white supremacists were also present has been appointed to a commission tasked with preserving Holocaust-related sites across Europe,” Yahoo News reports.

Graeme Wood profiles historian Peter Turchin in The Atlantic:

“The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.”

“He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an ‘age of discord,’ civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.”

“Presidential campaigns are essentially dramas, and for the past century, the moment of closure has come in the form of one simple act: the public concession,” NPR reports.

“There is no legal or constitutional requirement that the loser of a U.S. presidential election must concede. It began as a simple courtesy, with a telegram that William Jennings Bryan sent to his opponent, William McKinley, two days after the election of 1896.”

Ron Brownstein writes that, even if Donald Trump is defeated, it “still wouldn’t neutralize Republican power.”

“Republicans have erected a series of defenses that could allow them to impede their rivals—even if demographic and social change combine to more clearly stamp Democrats as the nation’s majority party in the years ahead. And that could make the 2020s the most turbulent decade for America since the 1850s, when a very similar dynamic unfolded.”

BuzzFeed News says researchers claim that a single number they call the “political stress indicator” can warn when societies are at risk of erupting into violence. It’s spiking in the US, just like it did before the Civil War.

From the political dictionary: “snollygoster.”

Dana Millbank: “For five years, my colleagues and I have taken pains to avoid Nazi comparisons. It is usually hyperbolic, and counterproductive, to label the right ‘fascists’ in the way those on the right reflexively label the left ‘socialists.’ But this is no longer a matter of name-calling.”

“With his repeated refusals this week to accept the peaceful transfer of power — the bedrock principle that has sustained American democracy for 228 years — President Trump has put the United States, in some ways, where Germany was in 1933. That is when Adolf Hitler, the appointed leader, used the suspicious burning of the German parliament to turn a democracy into a totalitarian state.”

“You want to go into history to look for something like this? Go into Italian history and look at Mussolini. This is the way dictators come to power.”

— Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, on MSNBC.