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.)