Trumpers undermining democracy

Perhaps the only good to come out of Donald Trump’s latest disgraceful foray into undermining our democracy could come in today’s Georgia election runoff.

The Trump camp’s refusal to accept defeat in the Nov. 3 election and to participate in the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joe Biden could, should, cost Republicans control of the Senate while continuing the erosion of public trust in our form of government.

This same hyper partisanship, on the other political side, also marked the aftermath of the 2016 election, but with some major differences. Although many Democrats refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote, conceded to Trump the night of the election. And President Barack Obama ensured his administration’s cooperation in the transition, and welcomed the newly elected president to the White House for a one-on-one meeting.

Trump has refused to do any of that. And now some Republicans are challenging the pro-forma counting of Electoral College votes this week by the incoming Congress. More than 100 House representatives and 12 senators have said they will formally object to the count.

The senators’ plan is to persuade state legislatures to overrule their Dec. 14 Electoral College certifications for Biden, which would ostensibly throw the election into the House where Trump might somehow salvage a second term.

That won’t happen. For one thing, Democrats still control the House. But while this latest tactic won’t change the result, it will delay a formal tally as members of Congress will have to spend hours debating the objections to each state’s results. Courts have rejected all the challenges his legal team has brought forth about state results — with many of the rulings by Trump-appointed judges.

The president has never accepted responsibility for his actions, much less any defeatHis actions also could prove disastrous for the Republican party.Trump’s call over the weekend urging Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn Biden’s victory in the state, was full of the usual unfounded claims about voting irregularities, which Raffensperger rightly refused to consider. Republican voters in Georgia understandably may decide that since Trump says election results in the state are fraudulent, they need not bother to vote in the Senate runoff, where Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have been leading in polls against incumbent Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, and already seem to be making good showings in early voting.

Trump apparently could not care less. His claims of rigged and fraudulent elections are all about the only person or cause he cares about: Donald J. Trump.

Try to imagine the response in America if Trump’s latest gambit somehow worked. Republicans would be decimated in the 2022 elections, and then Trump would be impeached again, and this time convicted.

But what this really is about is who is going to control the Republican party. That’s why Trump and his minions are fiercely attacking those Republicans who refuse to along with their scheme — including senators Mitch McConnell, Ben Sasse, Roger Wicker, John Thune and Pat Toomey, who seem ready to support the election result. Trump has never trusted the Republican establishment, so further dividing the party could keep his movement alive in coming years. Then he could run again in 2024 and if he lost the Republican primary, mount a thirdparty challenge which would guarantee a victory for the Democratic nominee.

Republicans should have spent this interim celebrating what actually was a good outcome overall for the party in the 2020 election, and then let Democrats fracture over their progressive-moderate split.

Instead, the party seems poised to be yet another casualty of the corrosive chaos spread by the Trump presidency, even in its final days.