Logic can’t bring back normalcy now
President Donald Trump will soon be gone — but, tragically, not forgotten. His campaign to comfort his bruised ego and reinforce his precious “brand” by disputing his election loss long past the bitter end means his legacy will poison our politics long past Inauguration Day.
Logic and reason matter because our democratic processes worked well enough to put Joe Biden in the White House. But these qualities won’t restore normalcy because Trump requires his loyal supporters to ignore them. Volume and passion matter in Trumpworld. Argument and arithmetic do not.
On Friday, the Supreme Court ended Trump’s authoritarian attempt to use the courts to overturn Biden’s victory. On Monday, the Electoral College made Biden’s triumph official. And all the while, Trump has furiously wailed and moaned like the sorest — and least dignified — of losers.
He tweeted his now-familiar lies, distortions and conspiracy theories about the November vote. He accused the Supreme Court justices of having “chickened out” by not entertaining the notion of disenfranchising millions of voters, many of them African Americans, in states that Biden won. He blasted Republican state officials who declined to break the law and help him steal the election. He even issued a not-so-veiled threat that if GOP officials in Georgia did not bend to his demands and somehow overturn the will of the voters, the Jan. 5 Senate runoffs there “could be a bad day” for the party.
Nice (very) little Senate majority you’ve got there, Republicans. Shame if anything happened to it.
None of this had any impact on what happened inside state capitols as the Electoral College vote took place. Wall-to-wall cable news coverage was like a daylong civics lesson, with the 538 electors casting their ballots in a formal process designed for an era of fountain pens and steam-engine travel. They had to vote on paper, twice, once for president and once for vice president. Then they were required to sign six copies of the officially certified tally of their votes. These documents were then to be sent by registered mail to a designated list of officials, including the U.S. district judge for the jurisdiction where they met and Vice President Mike Pence in his role as presiding officer of the Senate.
Outside of the buildings where the electors met, however, the nation was still enduring the chaotic final days of the Trump administration — a time of great hope, but also of hopeless division and mistrust.
Michigan, one of the states where Trump has squawked loudest about losing to Biden, offered perhaps the best illustration of the dichotomy. In Portage, trucks rolled out of a Pfizer plant carrying doses of the first approved coronavirus vaccine to the health care workers who were to receive them. Just 75 miles away in Lansing, the state Capitol grounds were closed to the public because of “credible threats of violence.” In October, alleged far-right domestic terrorists were arrested and charged with plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, because of restrictions she had imposed to try to limit spread of the coronavirus.
Such is the bitterly polarized country Trump will leave behind. On Saturday, members of the Proud Boys far-right group came to Washington to stage a rally — really, a tantrum — that degenerated into a riot. A newly elected member of Congress from Virginia — a Republican named Bob Good — praised the crowd for not wearing masks. “This looks like a group of people that get that this is a phony pandemic,” he said, disregarding the more than 300,000 Americans who are dead because of what he thinks is a hoax.
Republicans who should be disabusing Trump supporters of their false and dangerous notions instead continued to move the goalposts. First, they said the election would be over when the votes were all counted, recounted and certified. They were, and Biden still won.
Then Republicans said it would be over when Trump had exhausted his legal options. Judges at every level roundly rejected the president’s fanciful claims, including a Trump-appointed U.S. federal judge in Wisconsin, Brett Ludwig, who took a rhetorical blowtorch to the Trump team’s specious arguments about voting procedures.
Surely, then, Republicans would universally acknowledge Biden as president-elect after the Electoral College cast its ballots? Of course not. While the electors voted, lost-cause diehards were already looking ahead to Jan. 6, when the new Congress will officially count the electoral votes.
There is no reason to believe this will ever end.
There is no reason to believe Trump will ever accept his loss. His attempt to stage what amounts to a coup d’etat is being defeated, but the battle is not yet over. Do not expect Trump’s cries of anguished grievance to fade. Defenders of our democracy are going to have to drown him out.