Adam Serwer makes a very good point about The Trump Rules (boldface mine):

The argument that Trump cannot be disqualified because it would enrage his supporters applies as much to criminal prosecution and civil sanction as it does to disqualification. Trump himself has threatened “death and destruction” in response to being indicted, and “tens of millions” of his supporters will see a conviction or even defeat as a “negation of democracy” as surely as they would disqualification. This logic ultimately rules out any limits on Trump’s will of any kind, a troubling notion given that Trump’s lawyer yesterday asserted that a president can murder his political rivals without risk of prosecution unless impeached. Chait himself has previously recognized this danger, arguing that the price of ignoring presidential criminality “is simply too high for our country to bear.” As the legal journalist Garrett Epps writes, “To create special rules for Donald Trump would be to perfect the assault he has mounted on American law.” It is a remarkable triumph that one can now read affirmations of the Trump Rules from both the left and right.

Why Trump in particular is entitled to his own laws and his own Constitution remains unclear to me. Despite Trump’s loss of the popular vote in three straight elections, many commentators across the political spectrum regard him implicitly or explicitly as he regards himself, as the unassailable avatar of Real Americans, whose conservative beliefs grant them a superior claim to political legitimacy, one that supersedes the political rights of every other American and the Constitution itself. As another New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, writes, “Trump’s voters are not the only ones who count.”

The Trump Rules apologists know the answer. When they say they want the elections to appear legitimate to Trump supporters, what they really mean is this:

If Trump is thrown off the ballot, Trump supporters will engage in (more) political violence.

Which is to say, murder and terrorism. But no one says, “If Trump is on the ballot, anti-Trumpers will view the election as illegitimate, and then themselves engage in political violence.” The beliefs of ‘Real Americans’ are backed by a credible threat of violence and so, are taken seriously by the political system, whereas the beliefs of anti-Trumpers are not taken seriously because they have no credible threat of violence (bleatings about TEH ANTIFA! notwithstanding).

I am not arguing that anti-Trumpers need to develop a credible threat of violence and mayhem: we do not want to live in an America where political parties and organizations have paramilitary wings (though Republicans already have this in parts of Virginia). Down that path lies madness. But America is a big country, and somewhere, some idiots will begin to believe that.

If we don’t prevent the Trump Rules from operating, then people will start making their own ‘counter-Trump rules’, and that’s not a country we want.