Nothing funny about Trump’s clownish actions
WASHINGTON—Eleven days after he definitively lost the U.S. election, President Donald Trump was tweeting on.
“I WON THE ELECTION. VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!” Trump proclaimed Wednesday morning in a barrage of statements immediately flagged with misinformation labels by Twitter.
Well before the election, Trump telegraphed that he would not submit quietly to a peaceful transfer of power. By mid-week his rage-tweeting, political shenanigans, legal pratfalls and the vengeful firing of a respected official signalled he remains unwilling to go gracefully.
There’s a clownish element to all this, like a production of “King Lear” staged by SCTV. The performance suggests that Marx’s famous maxim about history playing out first as tragedy and then as farce may not require repetition after all: these historical moments of broad farce are adding up to an unfolding tragedy.
Rudy Giuliani has taken over the president’s legal manoeuvres. It’s difficult to know which generated more laughter recently — his cameo appearance as the victim of a Borat comedy setup or his leading performance in the not-that-Four-Seasons news conference at the moment Joe Biden was declared president-elect. The Giuliani road show moved into a courtroom this week. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result has been dealt a series of legal defeats, and most of his high-profile lawyers have been withdrawing. So Giuliani has been given the reins to prove in court what the president alleges in tweets. Before a judge in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he claimed to not understand basic terminology and acknowledged that despite the rhetoric, his lawsuit does not allege fraud.
Indeed, election officials in all 50 states have told the New York Times, and a team of international observers from 13 countries have reported, that they’ve seen no evidence of fraud. Many specific Trump claims have been debunked. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security issued a statement on Friday declaring the election the most secure in U.S. history. “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the statement emphasized in bold type.
Trump had a response to that. “Effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
Krebs, the DHS official responsible for election security, had reportedly told others he expected to be fired over the statement. Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger called it part of a White House “loyalty purge.”
The goal of the Trump efforts was evident Tuesday night when Republicans on Michigan’s Wayne County election board initially refused to certify results because of minor and reportedly usual tallying irregularities affecting a handful of votes. An outcry during a public comments period preceded the board later changing its vote and certifying the result. But before the reversal, Trump and one of his lawyers issued statements.
“If the state board follows suit, the Republican state legislator will select the electors. Huge win for @realDonaldTrump,” Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis tweeted — celebrating the prospect of partisans awarding Michigan’s electoral college votes to the man who lost the state by 146,000 in the popular vote. Trump agreed: “Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!”
In the meantime, Trump Senate ally Lindsay Graham got caught in a controversy after Georgia’s secretary of state — a Republican — alleged that Graham had pressured him to throw out legally cast ballots. (Graham denies the allegation.)
It appears Trump’s manoeuvring will fail. Yet it won’t be as simple as “no harm no foul” even if he eventually agrees to leave office.
On Saturday, I walked to the Supreme Court building in Washington alongside tens of thousands of Trump supporters who were demanding the election result be overturned. A man with a megaphone called for Biden’s execution: “We’re going to hang him high! On live TV!” Some laughed. Some cheered. Some spoke of civil war.
There were some violent confrontations reported with counterprotesters, but most people I encountered Saturday afternoon loudly advertised their peacefulness in contrast to what they saw as the approach of the “rioters” and “looters.”
But they were angry. A woman began bellowing when she sized me up as a journalist. “Be sure to underestimate the crowd size, Mr. Reporter! Be sure to call us all racists!”
When I approached her, she looked at my credentials. “Make sure you make me look as crazy as possible, Mr. Journalist-from-the-Toronto-Star!” she said.
She also said she was afraid she’d be fired if she told me her name.
“We’re all upset. We’re all upset with journalists because you gaslight us. The media has declared Joe Biden the president.”
Then, “Honestly, do you not think there’s voter fraud?”
Her shouting voice was wavering, as if she were on the verge of tears. I told her I hadn’t seen any evidence of fraud.
“You haven’t seen evidence? Of course! Of course! Of course you haven’t!” She said there had been people right there beside her who were prevented from observing the count in Pennsylvania — a claim a court had struck down by Tuesday. “You’re gonna stick with the lie and the gaslighting that there’s no voter fraud. So go ahead, stick with it. Everybody hates the media. Everybody. Everybody thinks you’re liars and crooks, and gas-lighters. We can’t stand you and nobody trusts you anymore.”
She was one of tens of thousands there. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday suggests more than half of Republicans (and more than a quarter of all Americans) believe Trump rightfully won the election.
It’s true that many Americans view Trump’s strategy as farcically dishonest and inept. But it’s also true that a lot of other Americans don’t trust those who see it that way. Many of them will come out of this, when the tweeting and the court cases and vote certifications are done, believing the election was stolen, and that their democracy is a malicious farce.
That, all by itself, is a tragedy for American democracy. And the implications of that loss of faith seem likely to extend far past the day Joe Biden moves into the Oval Office.