Militant supporters of Trump are sure he will win. That could be dangerous.

Trump himself has contributed to that certainty by insisting the only way he can lose is if the other side cheats. There’s little reason for pro-Trump extremist groups or radicalized MAGA fans to demonstrate when they foresee the presumptive Republican nominee coasting to victory over President Biden in five months and positioned to enact promised “retribution” against his enemies in seven, political violence trackers say.

Polling shows a tight race: Trump and Biden are roughly tied among registered voters nationally, with Trump tending to hold small leads in several of the all-important battleground states that Biden won four years ago.

But in the eyes of many Trump backers, he is almost certain to prevail if the vote is fair. Their confidence carries risk: Experts warn that should Trump lose, the gap between expectation and reality could make for a highly combustible period after the election.

“They’re assuming that Trump is going to win, and what’s jazzing them up right now is, ‘Then it’s going to be time for retribution,’” said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who now leads the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, a Georgetown Law Center focused on threats to US security and democracy.

Should Trump lose, however, “it’s just going to be the same thing [as 2020],” she said. “‘This was rigged, they cheated, they stole this.’ That narrative is super dangerous.”

Given a national discourse rife with dehumanizing speech, and studies showing US attitudes becoming more supportive of political violence, many extremism researchers fear the current lull is only a pause. Those fears are compounded, they add, by the hard right’s portrayal of Trump as not just a candidate but a savior, a messiah-like figure who represents their only hope of rescuing the republic from the “radical left.”

Supporters view the former president's four criminal cases, including one that ended with 34 felony convictions last month, as "deep state" election interference. They printed his mug shot on T-shirts. They compared his indictments to the persecution of Christ. "Jesus went through a sham trial too, and I still follow Him," reads one popular right-wing meme.

The religious-like fervor around Trump is dangerous, watchdog groups say, because it means a loss in November could turn him into a “martyr” that militant supporters then feel compelled to avenge.

Extremism monitors have warned for years that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric inspires real-world attacks. Assailants have invoked his name in dozens of violent episodes, and his “Stop the Steal” rallies in late 2020 and early 2021 after his election loss became magnets for members of the violent far-right groups that were instrumental in the Capitol attack.

Online chatter about “civil war” has surged when Trump has appeared threatened, from the FBI search of his Florida estate in 2022 to his convictions last month in a Manhattan court.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which monitors extremism, recorded around 9,300 online posts related to civil unrest within a day of Trump’s conviction, nearly the same number after the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago. The posts included “hundreds of calls for violence and open fantasies about a violent overthrow of the government.”

“While mass mobilization is unlikely at this time, conspiracy theories encircling this development have the potential to serve as a catalyst for individual acts of violence,” the report concluded.

Serious threats to US federal judges and prosecutors have more than doubled in the past three years, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the US Marshals Service. The data show an increase that began around the time of the 2020 presidential election, when officials were under attack by Trump supporters who rejected his loss.

Prominent election deniers such as Joe Oltmann, a Colorado podcaster with a national MAGA following, repeatedly have suggested violence as a way to deal with Democrats and other political foes. In March, Oltmann said on his podcast that President Biden “should be hung by the neck until he’s dead” for supporting a ban on assault weapons.

“The question becomes: When do they stop being armchair warriors and move it back to the physical realm like we saw in the past?” said Rachel Goldwasser, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist movements.

In the countdown to November, authorities are hardening up security at polling sites and teaching election personnel how to de-escalate hostile situations. Poll workers, election observers, journalists, and campaign staffers are taking part in security trainings for the worst-case scenarios.

Extremism researchers are of two minds about the moves. On one hand, they say, the focus on security could scare off voters by exaggerating the risk on Election Day, which historically is calm. On the other, there is a real threat of an unforeseen flash point in the run-up to the vote — and not necessarily related to Trump.

Analysts say the lull could be broken by wild-card events such as a terrorist attack, foreign meddling, or problems at the borders. Even now they are gauging whether the quiet will hold through June, Pride Month, which in recent years has seen a spike in attacks on LGBTQ communities. Doyle, the data researcher, recorded a fourfold increase in far-right activity during Pride last year.

“If this year looks anything like that, this month might be a time when we see an increase in far-right organizing,” he said.

McCord, the former federal prosecutor, said the likeliest threat isn’t a Jan. 6-style siege on the Capitol but a targeted attack by an individual acting on conspiracy theories that have traveled from the far right to mainstream conservative circles.

For example, Trump and other prominent Republican figures routinely trade in white racial anxieties and echo tropes from the once-fringe “Great Replacement” theory, which imagines the engineered erasure of white people. Mass shooters have cited those ideas in manifestos that attempt to justify deadly rampages.

“These are lone actors carrying it out,” McCord said, “but they’re not lone actors in the sense of what inspired them.”

Extremism researchers say election denialism is another worrisome factor, with a cottage industry springing up around the conspiracy-fueled idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, and that supporters should brace for a similar fight this year.

“They are continuously amped up. They’re constantly active, they’re constantly talking publicly, loudly — videos, forums, anything they can possibly do,” said Goldwasser. “They’re radicalizing people in large numbers.”

Trump has a long record of floating violent ideas should he not get his way, with references to riots and “bedlam.”