From insurrection based on a Big Lie to death on a scale never before seen in our country, Donald Trump is finally on his way out.
One year after the first case of COVID-19 diagnosed in the United States 24,246,230 Americans have been infected and 401,553 have perished.
Joe Biden has a steep hill to climb.
(Image: Seth Abramson on Twitter.)
When we last checked in with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, he had issued a statement that failed to hold Donald Trump responsible for months of lies about the election, underhanded attempts to overturn it, and then the violence on the 6th.
McCarthy subsequently spoke on the House floor, in a call for unity, explained why he would oppose impeachment:
A vote to impeach will further divide the nation. A vote to impeach will further fan the flames of partisan division.
Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but it is not the path we are on today.
He continued by placing a measure of responsibility on Trump:
That doesn’t mean the President is free from fault. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.
These facts require immediate actions by President Trump: Accept his share of responsibility. Quell the brewing unrest. And ensure President-Elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term.
In the context of a months-long campaign before November 4 to undermine the election, repeated attempts to overthrow the results afterwards, and stirring up a mob to demand that the Vice President and Congress declare Trump, not Biden, the victor, this is pretty weak tea.
Nor is this circumscribed view of the President’s responsibility surprising considering Congressman McCarthy’s role in the subversion.
On November 5 on Fox News, McCarthy insisted:
We can unite together. And you don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, if you believe in American process, join together and let’s stop this.
McCarthy — whom Trump affectionately calls, “My Kevin” — ingratiated himself with Trump with a lie, which he followed up with a call to action: “Let’s stop this.”
A month later, McCarthy was one of 126 GOP House members — well over half the caucus — to sign onto a meritless court challenge to Biden’s victory.
On January 6, he voted to reject Biden’s victory in Arizona. And then, hours after the violence in the Capitol, McCarthy cast a vote with 137 other House Republicans to reject the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.
McCarthy lied about the outcome of the election. He urged on others to act on this lie. He joined a suit in court to overturn the results. Then he voted to throw out Biden’s victories in two battleground states that Trump falsely claims he won.
McCarthy doesn’t offer a mea culpa or an apology or even an excuse for this string of “undemocratic, un-American, and criminal” actions (to borrow his words). He doesn’t acknowledge his bad behavior at all. Instead he appeals for unity.
In his spoken remarks that evening, McCarthy said, “this call for unity may ring hollow.” That’s for sure.
(Image: PBS.)
Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–
We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–
And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.
Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.
There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.
This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.
To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.
The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).
Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:
In a nutshell, it goes like this:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.
Editor’s note: more to come.
(Image above headline: ABC News.)
[See Update below.]
The headline is cribbed from the first sentence of a George Will column, “Trump, Hawley and Cruz will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of a seditionist.” While I don’t share Will’s politics, we both deplore the current state of the Republican Party. With this post, I highlight Will’s condemnation of the two ambitious scammers from the Senate who — with Trump — put into motion yesterday’s shameful events at the Capitol:
Hawley announced his intention to object to the certification of some states’ electoral votes, for no better reason than that there has been an avalanche of “allegations” of election irregularities, allegations fomented by the loser of the election. By doing so, Hawley turned what should have been a perfunctory episode in our civic liturgy of post-election civility into a synthetic drama. He turned this moment into the focus of the hitherto unfocused fury that Trump had been stoking for many weeks.
Of Cruz, Will said:
With his characteristic unctuousness, he regretted the existence of what he and kindred spirits have not only done nothing to refute but have themselves nurtured — a pandemic of suspicions that the election was “rigged.”
“I want to take a moment to speak to my Democratic colleagues,” said Cruz. “I understand your guy is winning right now.” Read those weasely words again. He was not speaking to his “colleagues.” He was speaking to the kind people who were at that instant assaulting the Capitol. He was nurturing the very delusions that soon would cause louts to be roaming the Senate chamber — the fantasy that Joe Biden has not won the election but is only winning “right now.”
Will observes that Trump will soon be gone.
Yes, and I’m in complete agreement with Will regarding the two senators: “from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.”
Both Hawley and Cruz, of course — privileged fellows who strike populist poses — claim to be intent on examining allegations or dispelling suspicions, though they have had a heavy hand in spreading the disinformation that Trump’s followers accept. No matter their clever language, they are liars, as another conservative, Yuval Levin, notes (“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age”):
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical liars.
Update: Josh Hawley’s mentor, former senator John Danforth set aside his opposition to Trump in backing Hawley’s bid to knock-off former senator Claire McCaskill:
Hawley was Danforth’s guy. They met at a Yale Law School dinner when Hawley was still a student and Danforth was the smitten elder statesman. Enough so that years later, Danforth, a Never Trumper, turned a blind eye to Hawley’s cynical embrace of the president, intended to ensure the support of rural Republicans who love the president for all the wrong reasons.
Republican after Republican has “turned a blind eye” regarding Trump over the past five years. Finally, with less than two weeks to go, they are backing away:
“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Yesterday was the physical culmination of the long attempt (by Hawley and others) to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.”
One of Hawley’s biggest Missouri donors, David Humphries, has also rebuked the senator. “Along with his sister, Sarah Atkins, and his mother, Ethelmae Humphreys, his family provided $4.4 million of the $9.2 million Hawley raised for his 2016 campaign for attorney general.” The Humphries added another $2 million to Hawley’s senate campaign.
Now David Humphries has had enough:
Josh Hawley … has shown his true colors as an anti-democracy populist by supporting Trump’s false claim of a ‘stolen election.’ Hawley’s irresponsible, inflammatory, and dangerous tactics have incited violence and further discord across America. And he has now revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold.
“Hawley should be censured by his Senate colleagues for his actions which have undermined a peaceful transition of power and for provoking yesterday’s riots in our nation’s capital. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to protect our country and its Constitutional underpinnings.”
None of this means that Hawley’s bet that his recent showboating regarding “allegations” won’t pay off with Republican voters in 2024, or moreover, that the blowback he is experiencing now won’t pay dividends in that campaign. But at this stage, the Republican Party is split in two and (at least for the time being) the bet that Hawley and Cruz made is hardly a sure thing.
(Image above headline: KSDK TV.)
With fewer than 16 days left in his term, Donald Trump continues to try to wheedle, bully, beseech, and whine his way into staying in office beyond January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in — as revealed in the recording of an hour long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (reminiscent of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky).
“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made any sense.”
In addition to rally size, Trump made many disparate appeals — to rumors, social media trends, conspiracy theories, and lies, none of which were grounded in fact, evidence, or reason.
A rambling Trump brought up 250-300,000 mysteriously lost ballots; a couple hundred thousand forged signatures; the promise of providing an accurate number – in the 50s of thousands – “with certified accountants”; 4,504 voters who weren’t registered; 18,325 vacant address voters; 904 with only post office box numbers; a burst water main (and vanishing Republican poll watchers); suitcases or trunks with ballots, rather than official ballot boxes; 4,925 out-of-state voters; 2,326 absentee ballots with addresses, but no names; drop boxes that were picked up, but not delivered for three days according to affidavits from many people; ballots dropped in massive numbers; close to 5,000 ballots from dead people; 300,000 fake ballots; 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots; a big issue with Dominion removing voting machines, or replacing the internal parts; a person identified on the internet as responsible for 18,000 to 56,000 phony ballots, including a “devastating” new tape showing the ballots fed through voting machines 3 times; and a “corrupt” Fulton County taking advantage of Raffensperger.
The vote margin of Biden’s win — 11,779 — is referenced multiple times, including the ask that Raffensperger somehow, someway find 11,780 votes to put Trump ahead in the count.
Trump reminds the Secretary of State that he is a Republican, calls him a child, objects that the GBI and FBI (who have found no evidence of voter fraud) are “either dishonest or incompetent,” and mocks him: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell ya.”
Trump references “corrupt” ballots, warning Raffensperger:
And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.
Whatever else this call reveals about the pathetic, incoherent, flailing narcissist who sits in the White House, it exposes something else: an abuse of power that clearly constitutes impeachable conduct.
The President of the United States is actively, compulsively (albeit fecklessly) intent on overturning the results of a democratic election.
A majority of the Republican caucus in the House is on board with this theft, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, while nine-term member (and former judge), Louie Gohmert, responded to his loss in federal court (where he sought to overturn Trump’s defeat) with these words: “But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not gonna touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.”
In the Senate, a dozen Republicans intend to resist Biden’s victory.
A handful of Senate Republicans have spoken out against these attacks on an election that was free and fair, and in which Donald Trump lost decisively. Most prominent among these dissenters are Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. But most national Republicans are Trump enablers — actively endorsing his conspiracy theories that Biden’s election was fraudulent; pretending that the election is in doubt, while dodging and weaving to avoid embracing the lie that Trump won; or maintaining silence, so as not to offend their vindictive leader.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose a grave threat to democratic governance. The GOP is seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, cast aside the votes of millions of Americans, and keep the Republican loser in power. That is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
A full recording and transcript of the call is available from the Washington Post; the link to the recording in the first paragraph is from Atlanta’s 11Alive on YouTube.
(Screengrab of firefighter extinguishing an arson fire at a ballot drop box in Los Angeles from KCBS report.)
Joe Biden, the president-elect, received 81,283,098 votes in the November election, beating President Donald Trump, who received 74,222,958, by more than seven million. More critically, the Democratic candidate won the Electoral College vote 306 to 232.
● State and federal officials (including Trump’s Department of Homeland Security) have concluded:
“The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.
“When states have close elections, many will recount ballots. All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
● Bill Barr (before his resignation last month as Trump’s Attorney General) concluded:
There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.
And yet, though there are exceptions, much of the leadership of the Republican Party refuses to reject Donald Trump’s lie (“We won the Presidential Election, by a lot.”), while often ducking and dodging to avoid straightforwardly asserting that lie. That middle ground is occupied by men and women who lack the courage of their convictions, or simply lack the principled convictions that elected officials ought to have (including the commitment to honor their oaths of office).
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has recently declared his intention to challenge the election outcome on January 6, when the Congress meets to certify the results of Biden’s Electoral College victory: “Millions of voters concerned about election integrity deserve to be heard. I will object on January 6 on their behalf.”
Hawley does not dispute the outcome. He denies that he is subverting the results of a popular election. Rather, he insists, “My objective in this is, as I’ve said repeatedly, is this is my one opportunity in this process to stand and be heard.”
Sasse continues, pointing to “a bunch of ambitious politicians,” without naming the Missouri senator who is widely expected to seek the 2024 GOP nomination for president (if Donald Trump gets out of the way) and engaged in a transparent ploy to gain support from Trump’s base (and perhaps from Trump himself):
The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking – first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress – to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.
Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.
“Adults don’t…” is an interesting choice of words. But of course Hawley — a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, who taught law, and served as an appellate litigator and then as Missouri’s Attorney General before his election to the U.S. Senate — is hardly a juvenile or (as Daniel Drezner has dubbed a psychologically damaged Trump) a toddler.
For better or worse, the senator — who has taken aim “at the heart of self-government” — is an adult. What he isn’t is a decent adult. Or at least: not an adult with a decent respect for our country’s democratic institutions, the Constitution, or the rule of law. He is a man so eager to advance his career, to please the base, to exploit partisanship for personal advantage, that he is willing to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The junior senator from Missouri will be joined by ten additional Republican senators:
The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and also includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
“When people show you who they are, believe them.” We know who Josh Hawley is. And Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson and Steve Daines and John Kennedy and Marsha Blackburn and Mike Braun and Cynthia Lummis and Roger Marshall and Bill Hagerty and Tommy Tuberville.
“December is shaping up to be the U.S.’s worst month of the pandemic by a significant margin . . .”
“First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.”
“Days after several US agencies confirmed their networks were compromised in a massive data breach, federal officials are still struggling to understand the scope of the damage — highlighting the sophistication and breadth of an ongoing hacking campaign that has been tied to Russia.”
What’s Donald Trump thinking about? Let’s look at a sampling of the 34 tweets and retweets he has blasted out in the past 24 hours: The great majority related to his bogus claims that he won the election (“We won Wisconsin big. They rigged the vote,” “We won the Presidential Election by a lot,” and “Just released data shows many thousands of noncitizens voted in Nevada.“), including a Washington Examiner report of Peter Navarro’s 36-page report on “voting irregularities“; complaints about “so-called ‘Republicans,‘ ” in Georgia who won’t agree to “give us the State“; and no less than ten tweets and retweets commending Tommy Tuberman, who heaps praise on Trump and “may save the Republic” by disrupting the Electoral College count in January as a man of courage, in contrast to Republican senators who lack toughness.
Trump also offers swipes at the Supreme Court and the New York Times, insists that “I have NOTHING to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden, or the Biden family. It is just more Fake News,” and offers more than one tweet each regarding Liz Cheney, Peter Strzok (adding a complaint about “the Russia hoax), and a Daily Caller report of a move to strip Lincoln’s name from a high school. Trump’s nod to legislation is a threat to veto the defense bill, which mentions Lindsey Graham’s attacks on social media companies.
Trump’s references to the pandemic (“the China virus”) include four tweets on the vaccine, including the approval of Moderna’s candidate and praise for the FedEx and UPS drivers delivering the doses across the country and three retweets of Buck Sexton, who couches his insistence that “Masks work” is no more than a mantra and his ridicule of California’s failures to stem the rate of infections as defenses of freedom of speech.
Trump references the economy — that is, the rising stock market, not unemployment or struggling businesses on Main Street — once (one of his four tweets referencing the vaccine): “All-time Stock Market high. The Vaccine and the Vaccine rollout are getting the best of reviews. Moving along really well. Get those “shots” everyone! Also, stimulus talks looking very good.”
He hasn’t tweeted (or spoken of) the Russian incursion into U.S. government and corporate databases, much less offered criticism of Putin’s mischief or assurances of taking any action to counter the threat.
Thirty-three days to go until January 20. Joe Biden will have his hands full.
(Image from “Donald Trump: A Study in Leadership.”)
Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an afront to principles of constitutional democracy.
. . .
Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated. — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The quotation (the first and last paragraphs of the preliminary statement) is from Pennsylvania’s response to the suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the Supreme Court to prohibit four battleground states where Biden beat Trump – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin – from appointing electors to the Electoral College based on the results of the election. Instead, Texas proposes a do-over, asking the court to order each of the four states to call a special election, which would determine the selection of electors.
Seventeen Eighteen states have joined Texas’s appeal.
One hundred and six House Republicans (over half the caucus) filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. [Update: the number has reached 126.]
Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is seeking allies in the House (and Senate) to cast votes against official certification of the Electoral College results.
“In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States,” Brooks said in a phone interview with AL.com today. “And I can either ratify that illegal vote system, or I can object to it, in hopes that our election system will become more secure in future elections.”
Almost all Republicans in both the Senate and the House, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, continue to play along with Trump’s defiance of the election results, refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect.
A whining, blustering Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum over his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. The President of the United States is determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is acting openly, persistently, in plain sight.
Governors, legislators, attorneys general, party leaders, and others have heard from a desperate Trump, who has sought to have Republican-controlled state legislatures nullify the decision their voters made.
Though his efforts, in the courts and among state officials, to throw out votes have met with consistent failure, Trump’s rampage represents a frightening erosion of democratic principles and practices. Yes, state election officials have stood firm. (This time.) But this threat to democratic governance is far more consequential for having found such broad support across the Republican Party at the national, state, and local level.
The voices we are hearing are not marginal figures in the Republican Party. Nor are the elected Republicans who have chosen to give tacit backing to Trump’s fever dreams. This is the primary message of the party right now — weeks after the results of the election have become clear. What we are witnessing is not a fringe movement within the party. This fierce fight against democracy — against the sanctity of elections and accepting the possibility of victory by ones opponents — has been embraced by the Republican Party.
The GOP’s party line is beyond the pale — beyond reason, facts and evidence, and democratic principles. The Arizona Republican Party asks whether its followers are ready to give their lives for the fight against the Trump loss in a democratic election.
Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are the last candidates standing in the way of Democratic control of the Senate. While Perdue is in hiding, Loeffler’s campaign consists of repeating, like incantations, scary names for her opponent and an insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The campaign message in Georgia (an increasingly diverse state with enough Democratic constituencies to appear more like the nation, and less like the solid South that Republican pols have become used to) is the message of the national Republican Party.
And, unsurprisingly, the Republican majority of the Georgia state senate has responded to Trump’s loss with promises of investigations of “fraudulent activities,” “misconduct,” “criminals” (purported out-of- staters who may have infiltrated into the state to cast votes), and — of course — additional proposals to suppress the vote and reduce turnout in future elections:
The Republican Party, trafficking in “discredited allegations and conspiracy theories,” is furiously pushing back against the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That the grounds for overturning the election are flimsy, that the efforts are meeting with failure after failure, that it is tempting to regard the whole spectacle as pathetic and ridiculous — none of this diminishes the indecency of the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of the election.
These are the actions of a political party that has become authoritarian. That transformation constitutes a grave threat to our democracy, to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
President Trump called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) on Saturday morning to urge him to persuade the state legislature to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and asked the governor to order an audit of absentee ballot signatures, the latest brazen effort by the president to interfere in the 2020 election.
Hours before he is scheduled to hold a rally in Georgia on behalf of the state’s two GOP senators, Trump pressed Kemp to call a special session of the state legislature to get lawmakers to override the results and appoint electors that would back him, according to a person familiar with the conversation. He also asked the governor to demand an audit of signatures on mail ballots, something Kemp has previously noted he has no power to do. — Amy Gardner and Colby Itkowitz, “Trump calls Georgia governor to pressure him for help overturning Biden’s win in the state”
More than 2,900 Americans died of COVID-19 on December 3, one month after the election. The death toll has topped 2,600 every day this month, while the United States leads the world in overall fatalities at more than 285,000. The President of the United States — who predicted that the virus would “disappear” and asserted that it would no longer be featured in the media after November 3 — has demonstrated complete indifference to the raging pandemic since his defeat in the election. Instead he throws holiday parties in the White House.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die (written during the first year of the Trump administration) suggest, “Perhaps President Trump’s most notorious norm-breaking behavior has been lying.” Certainly the man has proven to be a prodigious liar; as of October 22 — reflecting the most recent update — Trump had told more than 22,247 whoppers since the inaugural.
Note also Donald Trump’s disregard for the welfare of the American people and refusal to serve the public interest — as we can plainly observe — which constitute among the most egregious violations of the governing norms that other presidents have adhered to. We have, before Trump, taken for granted that our presidents were committed to acting in our best interests.
This president is hell-bent on evading the decision of the electorate to remove him from office and put Joe Biden in the White House. His torrent of lies, attacks, and conspiracy tales in recent weeks have focused on discrediting the electoral process, denying the outcome, and — as in his phone call to Governor Kemp — to overturning the decision of the people.
This behavior is straight out of the authoritarian handbook. Trump lost the election. His off the rails conduct to fend off this fact does grave damage to democratic institutions, Americans’ trust in the integrity of our elections, and the nation’s standing in the world.
This would all be bad enough. The damage is compounded by the complicity of the Republican Party, whose leadership (with few exceptions) has made the decision to go along to get along with the Republican in the White House. Consider the 249 elected Republicans in the House and the Senate:
The lies, the disregard of the public good, the defiance of a free and fair election — these are the acts of a would-be authoritarian strongman, not a leader committed to democracy — no matter the wishes of the Republican base.
As Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, it is political parties that sustain governing norms threatened by authoritarian incursions. Responsibility for opposing extremists, and upholding democratic institutions, falls on our political parties.
Potential demagogues exist in all democracies, and occasionally, one or more of them strike a public chord. But in some democracies, political leaders heed the warning signs and take steps to ensure that authoritarians remain on the fringes, far from the centers of power. When faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, they make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them. Although mass responses to extremist appeals matter, what matters more is whether political elites, and especially parties, serve as filters. Put simply, political parties are democracy’s gatekeepers.
The Republican Party has absolutely failed to safeguard democracy. After limited efforts at constraining Trump fell short, the GOP has chosen to remain loyal to an erratic, reckless leader. To do otherwise, as Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, would damage careers. So:
. . . Trump’s deviance has been tolerated by the Republican Party, which has helped make it acceptable to much of the Republican electorate. . . . There is no “containment” strategy for an endless stream of offensive tweets. Unwilling to pay the political price of breaking with their own president, Republicans find themselves with little alternative but to constantly redefine what is and isn’t tolerable.
Recall that this was written during Trump’s first year in office. By the end of 2020 — in a process accelerated following a near party-line vote to acquit an impeached president — the ongoing redefining required thrashing core democratic institutions, such as fealty to the results of free and fair elections; graceful, timely embrace of the peaceful transition of power; and (as outlandish as it appears today) doing what one could to ensure the success, for the benefit of the American people, of the incoming president. Instead, Trump is deliberately sabotaging his successor — through vindictive purges, frantic rulemaking, capricious national security actions, and — by doing nothing, except boxing Biden in – ensuring that both the raging pandemic and the faltering economy are far less manageable on January 20, than they are today.
All this — with the GOP’s silent blessing — has been redefined as American politics as usual. Citing Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s concept of defining deviance down, Levitsky and Ziblatt observe, “in the face of widespread deviance, we become overwhelmed—and then desensitized. We grow accustomed to what we previously thought to be scandalous.”
The Republican Party, in the wake of Donald Trump, sees no scandals among its partisans (though mean tweets from Neera Tanden may threaten her cabinet appointment).
(Image: Trump in Georgia via NBC News.)
In a letter today, Emily Murphy informed Joe Biden that the General Services Administration would permit the formal transition process to begin. After experiencing widespread criticism for the unprecedented delay, as Donald Trump has refused against all evidence to admit that he lost the election and has raged that he was cheated, Ms. Murphy insisted that no one had pressured her to slow walk the approval; rather, she had difficulty determining what to do because the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, as amended, “provides no procedures or standards for this process.”
Her missive resembled a defensive and obstinate, ‘Excuse me.’
There have been no reasonable doubts raised about the election’s outcome, notwithstanding Trump’s hurt feelings, his campaign’s frenzied maelstrom of litigation, or conservative media’s carnival of disinformation.
Joe Biden beat Donald Trump handily. By roughly six million votes. And, though some states were relatively close, by convincing margins that delivered a 306 to 232 Electoral College victory.
It is safe to say that few United States senators harbor any doubts about this — even Republican senators. Yet with Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey’s statement on Saturday, he became only the fifth Republican in the upper chamber (if we allow Marsha Blackburn a do-over) to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Ohio’s Rob Portman followed today, getting us up to six (out of fifty).
Why the playacting or silence by GOP leaders? They were mollifying an angry Donald Trump. And why not? As one Republican official explained:
The downsides are to the institutions that sustain democratic government, to respect for the people’s vote and the outcome of the election, to the sanctity of a peaceful transfer of power.
And — of course — to the winning candidate. Of the opposing party. That is to say: there is a downside to President-elect Joe Biden.
Let’s acknowledge: that’s an advantage to Republicans. Crippling the Biden presidency is a goal of Donald Trump, of Mitch McConnell, and of every Republican partisan who views Democrats as an enemy tribe.
Judging by his actions, Trump appears to have a motive other than overturning the election. He is determined to cripple Biden’s presidency even before it becomes official. No defeated president has ever undertaken such an audacious and anti-democratic act. There are short-term and longer-term consequences that could deeply affect Biden’s ability to govern.
. . .
This assault on the system, the government, the integrity of elections, the institutions of democracy, and on the truth, means Biden will take the oath of office with perhaps a third or more of the electorate viewing him as illegitimate. No amount of wooing will bring them around, however genuine Biden is in his outreach. — Dan Balz, “A vindictive Trump seeks to undermine Biden’s presidency”
Republican senators, who know full well who won the election, also know full well what Trump is up to. They understand that when playing along with Trump, they are also crippling the president-elect.
They have made a deliberate choice. It may be possible to look past (if not excuse) the blunt, clumsy shenanigans of a GSA administrator trying to please her superiors. She can’t do much more damage than she’s already done.
It is tougher to stomach the undemocratic stratagems of U.S. senators — leaders of the Republican Party — who lack the courage of their convictions, or simply the convictions, to uphold democratic values.
Richard Hasen observes (“Trump’s Legal Farce Is Having Tragic Results”):
By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since Election Day, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.
E.J. Dionne notes that “Joe Biden’s victory offered the cheerful prospect that we might begin to detoxify our politics.” Biden pledged “to be the president of all Americans and honored the dignity of voters who had supported Trump in the past by expressing an understanding of their discontents.”
Dionne suggests that we are confronted with “a form of conservatism that openly disdains democracy.” I am on board with Dionne regarding the antipathy of the Republican Party for the democratic tradition:
Those who lack the conviction to sustain that tradition by defending rationality and the democratic rules of engagement forfeit their standing to ask the rest of us to believe that they are operating in good faith.
(Image: Thomas Paine via Wikimedia Commons.)
