After President Joe Biden’s abysmal performance in the first debate, Democrats and progressives are sweating bullets. They have been in denial for four years about Biden’s … limitations, but now his obsolescence has become impossible to ignore.

Some Democrats, sensing the danger that the party is in and the likelihood of a Trump victory, have reached the obvious conclusion: it’s time for Biden to climb into his ‘67 Corvette and ride into the sunset (or, better yet, be chauffeured into the sunset — in the interests of public safety).

For a wide variety of reasons, however, Biden is unlikely to bow out, and, even if he did, the complications this would create for the Democratic Party might be fatal to its near-term prospects. Let’s assume, therefore, that Biden will remain the Democratic nominee for president, and that Kamala Harris similarly refuses to budge. The natural followup question is: what can the Dems do to rescue themselves from what they assume would be an extinction level event, i.e. four more years for DJT?

In a nutshell, the Democrats and their media, corporate and Deep State allies will have to get very creative.

Since, in Biden-Harris, the Dems are trying to sell the American people a bill of goods that they adamantly refuse to buy, the only sure-fire remedy is, as the Dems have been trying, to make the alternative — Trump — grossly unacceptable. Ninety-one felony charges, and now 34 felony convictions, were supposed to do just that, but there’s no evidence that the lawfare gambit has worked. Yes, Judge Juan Merchan could pull the “save democracy” rip cord during sentencing and throw DJT in jail, but there’s no guarantee that he would stay there long enough to matter, or that incarcerating him wouldn’t improve his poll numbers still further. And that, in turn, leaves the left with a very short list of even more desperate and extreme options.

Assuming leading Dems have watched and paid attention during House of Cards, they will know that the democratic process can be massaged and manipulated in an infinite number of ways. For instance, false flag or disinformation operations could be conducted to paint Trump as a traitor, a foreign agent or an insurrectionist. About the only charge that hasn’t been flung at Trump at this stage is murder, so why not frame him for that, too?

Alternatively, his supporters could be portrayed as insane, bloodthirsty, terroristic and/or seditious. Since leftists already believe most of these charges against Trump and Trumpers to be true, and journalists are primed to expound on these narratives anyway. “Evidence” to support these lines of attack could be incredibly thin, but still widely believed and potentially politically decisive.

We cannot rule out the possibility that political violence or civil unrest will be used, by either side or by both, as a tactic to achieve victory. There is, by some accounts, a growing acceptance of violence by Democrats, Republicans and independents, and a rising expectation that the democratic process will be fraught with violence. (In some some circles there has even been speculation on whether assassination is a real concern.) Whether riots or terrorist attacks or acts of intimidation or insurrections would ultimately work to the benefit of one party or the other, however, is harder to predict.

Assuming the worst happens, from a Democrat perspective, and Trump wins, the election could conceivably be canceled, based on concocted “national security” concerns, or it could go forward up to election day itself, when, for some specious reason, the ability of voters in certain areas to head to polling places could be curtailed. Republicans, more than Democrats, rely on traditional voters voting on election day, and any diminution of those vote totals, which did not affect the counting of mail-in and early votes, would almost certainly lead to massive victories for Biden and all swing state and swing district Democrats. Pursuing such electoral chicanery might, however, require Biden and the Democrats to override the legitimate objections of the courts, including the Supreme Court, which is a path that no Democrat would go down lightly. Of course, leftist propaganda has been cultivating contempt for the high court for years now, so this stratagem cannot be ruled out.

Similarly, the Dems could contest the results of an election they lost — and count on either the courts or the commander-in-chief and his woke military allies to back them up. Rank hypocrisy would dent the credibility of such a move, true, but, if there’s one thing that Democrats have shown repeatedly, it is that they believe that legal technicalities and moral scruples should not be an obstacle to the pursuit of the liberal Prime Directive: “get Trump.”

Lastly, if Trump did win the election, the Dems might consider taking action against his electors, whose affirmative votes would be needed to make him president. Could those electors be detained, or in some other way coerced or persuaded to withhold their votes from Trump? We saw skullduggery along these lines already in 2016, albeit at a very amateurish level. Who can say that Democrats won’t up their game in 2024?

These are just a few outside the box ideas that Democrats and progressives may be tossing around to “save America,” and themselves, from the cataclysm of another Trump presidency. Maybe, just maybe, their incendiary rhetoric about Trumpian dictatorship, tyranny and fascism is just that — hot air. In that case, they may, at the end of the day, take a deep breath and accept Trump’s victory in November, secure in the knowledge that they tied him up in political knots for four years before, and they can probably do it again.

The alternative is that the Dems and leading leftists believe what they say about Trump, in which case every desperate measure chronicled here, and perhaps some that we have yet to think of, will be on the table between now and Jan. 20, 2025.

After all, if Trump=Hitler, then what expedients would not be justifiable to avoid Hitler 2.0?

(Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an associate professor of history at Alfred State College and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.)