Quick take: Regarding the riots/insurrection, what if Trump had succeeded in stealing the election?

 Time for one of my "make you uncomfortable" questions.  Yes, last week was one of the ugly stains on American democracy, the consequences of which cannot yet be known in their entirety.  Yes, the rioters/insurrectionists were engaged in acts of violence to overthrow American democracy.  They were the villains.  Yet, every "good" villain, so to speak, thinks he is the hero of his own story.  The rest, like Trump, Hawley, and Cruz, are just mustache-twirlers.  Bor-ring.  The rioters and insurrectionists kept invoking 1776 because they believed, falsely, that the election had been stolen.  Their primary problem was that they were stupid enough to believe an idiotic lie.  They were gullible, credulous dupes, in thrall to the most transparent con man in history, thereby demonstrating how cognitively deficient they are.

But let's turn this around.  Remember that Georgia phone call?  That wasn't the only action Trump was taking to try to steal the election through institutional means, and his probability of success, at the outset, wasn't zero.  (Had he hired competent people to do a decent job, he might have succeeded!)  So what if he had pulled off his coup, through quasi-legal means?  What if governors, courts and other actors had just stolen the election for him?  Hell, I was convinced it would happen!  2000 wasn't exactly stolen.  It was the wrong outcome, but not a stolen outcome, which is a lecture I have given many times, but what if Trump had succeeded, and stolen the election through political actors?

How angry would you have been?  Angry enough to protest?  How would the protests have gone?  Could they have turned violent?  We would have become effectively a dictatorship.  Anyone protesting in the aftermath of that alternate history would be protesting an actual stolen election.  Anyone invoking 1776 in that alternate history would have been justified.

See where I'm goin' here?

The problem, as always, is the lie.  Well, the lie and the stupidity.  And... their fanatical devotion to Donald Trump.