If you look up "presidential results 2020" on Google, you will find a pretty clear cut case: Democratic nominee Joe Biden has 306 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 232. Under any normal circumstance, this would be as clear a case as any, but these are not normal circumstances.

Vice President Mike Pence has said that the administration is still intent on "four more years" despite an obvious defeat. Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has vouched in bizarre press releases about unsubstantiated cases of fraud, even as both Michigan and Georgia solidiied that Biden had won those states.

Donald Trump's admiration for dictators and despots seems to stretch toward a legitimate attempt, the first that I am aware of in American history, to establish a coup d'état which would place him as an unelected sovereign.

When Trump first ran for president, multiple people compared him to a fascist. Glenn Beck, a once famed right wing radio host who has since joined the Trump Train, compared him in 2016 to Adolf Hitler. Others have remarked that he is "Cheeto Mussolini." WW2 analogies may be a bit extreme - Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin all evolved out of genuine paramilitary movements and had ambitions and tactical abilities beyond that of a bloated con artist.

Nevertheless, there is serious precedent for someone like him in Latin America. Journalists once compared Trump's run on press conferences to those of Fidel Castro. Both Central and South America have been rift for a significant amount of time with coups and counter coups, presidents who end their terms with the possibility of incarceration, and an extreme polarity between right wing reactionaries and leftists.

Trump opened his campaign with absurdly demagogic comments about Mexico that would have been more appropriate for a Mad TV skit than a presidential statement, saying that "when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people with a lot of problems. They're sending drugs, they're sending crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people." During a debate with Hillary Clinton, he referred to "bad hombres" coming over the border from Mexico.

Trump repeated that phrase in a phone conversation with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. Nieto has since been succeeded by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), a progressive politician who previously made several runs for the Mexican presidency.

The thing about corruption is that you can't really explain it. It doesn't hold up to the logic and consistency that we take for granted in an open society. You just know that it's there. Corrupt figures don't necessarily line up with the people you think they should line up with - deception about who is who is a big part of it. Our ability to not really be able to read it is what makes the possibility of it in this country so palatable. AMLO has reportedly cooperated greatly with Trump while he has been president, and has been one of a few world leaders, including Vladimir Putin, who was defiant in taking their time to recognize the winner of the 2020 election. I once mentioned on this site that AMLO seemed to be working with Trump and a commenter said that it was the result of Trump blackmailing Mexico. However, AMLO seemed pretty firm in refusing to recognize Biden as the winner, saying that Mexico "is not a colony." 

The unprecedented flirtation with authoritarianism in the United States comes at the same time that progressive ideas have more force and weight than ever. It is a political climate much more like what exists south of the border than what we are familiar with here. A Trump coup, if successful, would be completely unacceptable for many pockets of America and an era of cancel culture, safe spaces, and lockdowns would already have many people aghast at an American dictatorship ready to experiment with radical alternatives.

How all of that would play out in real life is anyone's guess, but it would look a lot more like the "shithole countries" that we used to lecture or intervene in than what we are used to.