Juan Williams is worried that a Shakespearean tragedy awaits the nation in 2020 if President Trump loses his re-election bid.

The fictional witches in “Macbeth” chanted “double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble” as they worked their magic, but the Fox News analyst says Mr. Trump has a “witches’ brew” that is legitimately dangerous.

“It is no longer outside the realm of possibility that Trump could refuse to leave if he loses the 2020 election,” Mr. Williams warned in an op-ed for The Hill on Monday. “And if he does not accept an election defeat — a scenario he threatened in 2016 — he will have a virtual army on social media to defend him.”

Mr. Trump said in October 2016 that he would accept a “clear election result,” but that he also reserved the right “to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result. And always, I will follow and abide by all of the rules and traditions of all of the many candidates who have come before me. Always.”

The crux of Mr. Williams‘ argument is that Mr. Trump is cut from the same political cloth as Jacob Wohl, the former columnist for The Gateway Pundit website who was permanently banned by Twitter last week for running four fake accounts.

“Wohl’s abuse of social media is in line with Trump’s use of a witches’ brew of outright lies and distortion to hold the support of at least one-third of Americans,” Mr. Williams wrote. “Don’t forget another element needed for a good brew of disinformation — several spoonfuls of attacks on journalists, such as the president’s recent tweet that the New York Times is a ‘true enemy of the people!’”

The Fox contributor’s op-ed then went on to warn of “alt-right social media accounts” that would aide the president’s campaign by disseminating “inflammatory, conspiratorial nonsense into our politics on a daily basis. They are aided by trolls, bots and all manner of digital malfeasance, especially by the Russians.”

Readers countered that it is Mr. Williams who sounds conspiratorial.

Some of the reactions include:

“Juan Williams engages in the hysteria he himself claims to loathe. 98% of America doesn’t even know who Jacob Wohl is.”

“The problem for Williams and others in the hard-core Democrat media is that they define an illness, but don’t recognize that they, themselves, are the most virulent patients of that disease.”

“Will you people ever get tired of being so ridiculous? You nut jobs need to accept the fact that YOU LOST!”

“The race-baiting game began with Obama viewing every pathetic policy through a race lens. If you disagreed with him you were a racist.”

Mr. Wohl’s verified account, @JacobAWohl, had roughly 186,000 followers when Twitter banned him Feb. 26.

“I knew this day would come,” Mr. Wohl told The Washington Times in a phone interview afterward. “I basically knew [this] was going to happen. The question was just when.”

It is no longer outside the realm of possibility that Trump could refuse to leave if he loses the 2020 election. And if he does not accept an election defeat — he will have a virtual army on social media to defend him. Where does this stop? https://t.co/WKhFugPFXA — Juan Williams (@TheJuanWilliams) March 4, 2019

Sign up for Daily Newsletters Manage Newsletters

Copyright © 2020 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.