Defend democracy. Now.
Donald Trump lost the presidential election. One of the key states he lost was Georgia. On Saturday, he told Georgia’s secretary of state to change the official results — to “find 11,780 votes” and make it appear he won that state.
Legal experts, actual and armchair alike, may parse whether Mr. Trump’s actions technically fit the definition of a crime. But clearly, Mr. Trump sought, in an hour-long diatribe, to get a public official to change the results of an election. Criminal or not, Mr. Trump’s actions were undeniably anti-democratic.
The question is whether those who have the power — indeed, the duty — to hold Mr. Trump accountable will defend the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, or whether they will scurry to his defense, or stay silent and hope no one notices their complicity.
Mr. Trump has been at this so long — it’s been two months since Election Day — that the big lie he keeps telling of a stolen election might seem like a legitimate point of contention. It is not. States have certified that President-elect Joe Biden achieved some 7 million more votes than Mr. Trump, and the Electoral College affirmed Mr. Biden won 306-232. Mr. Trump and his allies have lost some 60 court cases of varying degrees of absurdity. Several judges, including even some Mr. Trump picked, scolded the lawyers filing these cases for the vacuousness of their complaints.
There weren’t tens of thousands of dead voters voting, nor live people impersonating other voters. There wasn’t some massive influx of out-ofstate people registering to vote. There weren’t people stuffing ballot boxes in secret. All this has been disproved.
The president’s insistence that the opposite of all that is true might lead some to think he genuinely believes the falsehoods and wild conspiracy theories no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is. If so — if he is truly sincere in his denial of reality — then the United States is being led by a president, and most critically, a commander in chief of its armed forces, in a deep state of delusion. He is, in other words, quite sick. The alternative is that he is fully aware that none of this is true, and he’s trying intentionally and deceitfully to subvert an election.
Delusional or dishonest, it makes no difference. Either way, he is unfit to serve. Yet we have no expectation that those around him with the power under the 25th Amendment to declare him incapable of holding office will have the courage to do so. So where does America go? Impeachment, surely, is justified, both to end Mr. Trump’s hopes of a political comeback in 2024, and to send a message to those who would mess with elections. But that’s a debate for a new Congress, especially a new Senate in which Mr. Trump’s party may be out of power after Georgia’s special election.
So, first, we go to Wednesday, when Congress is scheduled to affirm the Electoral College results. Usually a perfunctory act, this year it’s shaping up to be a political spectacle. Some of Mr. Trump’s loyalists plan to challenge electoral votes in swing states the president maintains were stolen from him — allegations he has, remember, had every chance to prove, and failed to. He was still claiming in that Saturday phone call that new evidence is about to come out — the same sort of con he played for years with his ridiculous birther conspiracy about President Barack Obama.
This is the chance for representatives and senators to begin to lead the nation out of this morass of delusions or lies — again, whichever you prefer — rather than follow Mr. Trump down the undemocratic path he seeks to take America.
There is no excuse at such an incendiary moment for the political posturing we’re seeing from Mr. Trump’s supporters, among them Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-schuylerville, who in a convoluted statement Monday said she will object to certain electors — no doubt those in swing states Mr. Biden won — as a way to both protect and defend the Constitution and follow the wishes of not just her constituents but “patriots across the country.”
Bunk. There is no fuzzy moral ground here. Either you stand for the rule of law and accept the results of an election that Mr. Trump has not a shred of credible evidence to challenge, or you follow a deluded or corrupt president — take your pick — and the mob he and his surrogates and radical right-wing propagandists have whipped into a frenzy.
Republicans have failed this test once already, letting Mr. Trump off the hook when he was rightly impeached for another corrupt phone call, that one to the president of Ukraine asking him to help damage Mr. Biden politically while at the same time withholding badly needed military aid — a blatant act of extortion and abuse of power. And here are the consequences of Mr. Trump being told that there are no consequences: a president telling a public official to fix an election for him.
What message will Republicans in the House and Senate send this time, not just to Mr. Trump, but to the next would-be autocrat — or madman, take your pick — looking to subvert our democracy? And will they vote not as if their political future depends upon it, but America’s?