I think they'll do it, but not because they see Trump as a threat. They'll do it to prevent "hate speech". Websites that criticize Trump will be signal-boosted, and those that criticize Sanders or Clinton will be suppressed for using "hate speech" and for being "conspiracy nuts", even if their tone is identical to that of Trump's critics.

For the record, I don't care which of these contestants wins. I don't even care about media biases, because I think it's only natural. But I am disappointed when tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, that are not content creators, but are supposed to be just pipelines for content, exhibit clear biases.

For this particular issue, some people suggest a more benign explanation for the bias[1], and they might be right. But I still suspect some manual tweaking to boost some sites, and suppress others.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...

Trump's pretty bad IMO, but worst case scenario he'd only be the president. There's really good checks against the president's power. The unfortunate (glaring) exception being that we've somehow lost track of the bit about Congress being the only one who can execute a declaration of war.

A lot of those "checks" are just things that Presidents historically don't do, not that they're prohibited from doing so by the Constitution. Even then, it's not clear that Trump really gives a shit about the Constitution. Like all contemporary Presidents he would decide what he wants to do first and then have his lawyers provide some veneer of constitutionality to it, but in Trump's case the bar for such would probably be really, really low.

He's already mentioned going after news outlets that criticize him. What else can the President do? Can he instruct the military/NSA to spy on every sitting Congressman and Senator, and blackmail them? That's not explicitly unconstitutional, and these days "explicitly unconstitutional" seems to be the only thing that matters (i.e. unless the Constitution actually says you can't do a thing, then you can do that thing). What are the President's actual powers during a time of war, especially if the theater is in America itself? Can he mobilize the military in response to a domestic terrorist attack, and if so what sort of plenary power does he have domestically?

And the more important question, really, is not "what does the Constitution say" but rather "what are the American people ready for"? If Trump does become President, the answer would seem to be "quite a lot of really scary shit".

Why is Donald Trump "a very real threat"? To who? Maybe it's Google who are the true threat to democracy?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/aei-world-forum-donald-t...

"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute’s annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he “cannot support Donald Trump.”

The fact that establishment figures from both sides see him as "a very real threat" seems like a very good sign. For all the talk of democracy, it's pretty funny (funny ironic) listening to all the talk of subverting the election process. Can't entrust such a thing with the plebes after all...

Over half the plebes are opposed to Trump too. This is not a class divide.