WHAT DON’S SORE-LOSER ACT WROUGHT
JUST after noon on Jan. 20, 2017, Republicans had control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. On Jan. 20, 2021, Democrats will control all three. It took President Barack Obama’s Democrats eight years and three elections to lose them. It took President Trump’s Republicans half as long — four years and two elections: They lost the House in 2018. They lost the White House on Nov. 3, 2020. And they lost the Senate on Tuesday night.
On Wednesday, Trump directed the participants at a rally he had convened to the Capitol to embody his displeasure with the results of his own spectacular political failures, and they did as they were bid.
The embarrassing, stupid, false and disgusting claim of a stolen election has led to the nightmare of a mob assault on the legislative branch of the US government — and the confirmation that Trump is the worst sore loser in American history. He is deserving of eternal political infamy for what has just been done in his name.
Why not enact historic damage on the government? He had already done historic damage to his own party. In fact, once installed as president, Trump did far more to improve the rival party’s political prospects than he did for his own.
Obama’s Democrats lost the House in a 63seat shellacking in 2010. Trump’s Republicans lost the House in a 40-seat shellacking in 2018. Obama’s Democrats surrendered control of the Senate in a nine-seat blowout in 2014. Trump’s Republicans surrendered the Senate in a three-seat loss following Tuesday night’s Georgia humiliation.
Republicans lost two races in a single evening they had every reason to think they would win
— due to the whining and mewling and raging and failed extortion attempts by the leader of their party.
We know Trump lost the GOP its control of the Senate, because he spent the two months of the runoff period dominating the news in Georgia — not with messages about how Democratic ambitions could only be blocked by returning the state’s two Republicans to the upper chamber, but about how Republican officials in the state were part of a gigantic conspiracy against him.
At his disgusting, appalling, noxious and riot-provoking rally on Wednesday — the one in which Trumpers, who had spent the summer inveighing against #DefundthePolice, physically attacked police officers at the US Capitol — Trump complained again about how the polls before the election showing him losing by landslide margins were acts of voter suppression.
And yet the most significant voter suppression effort in modern American history was the one he just pulled off. In Georgia. Just now.
Trump insisted to his fans in Georgia that the November election had been rigged — and enough of them in Republican areas believed it that they decided not to bother voting in the next one.
Here’s one way to look at it: Misery loves company. And Trump is miserable. He’s miserable, because he lost, and he wanted company, so he made Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue lose, too. In so doing, Trump has given new meaning to the term “sore loser.”
Indeed, Trump might now deserve the title of worst loser in all of recorded history — a loser so transcendently loser-ist, that his loserism requires me to coin neologisms containing the word “loser” to capture the degree to which he both personifies and represents the very act of losing.
It isn’t enough for him to lose; if he loses, the people who like him and admire him and follow him should lose, too, because winning itself is suspect if Trump himself is not in the winner’s circle.
This is a psychological crutch we’re going to be seeing Trump lean on for the next four years, and it will be central to his pitch to remain in control of the Republican Party. He says he won. He didn’t. But enough people will think he actually did that, in their eyes, defeat will become victory.
After the November election, the GOP looked like it had lived to fight another day. The results in the House of Representatives were surprisingly favorable to Republicans, even though they remain in the minority. And Democratic efforts to knock off vulnerable senators like Susan Collins, Joni Ernst and Lindsey Graham proved to be failures.
But Trump’s defiance of reality has caused the party to descend into barbaric fantasy. And if it remains in lockstep with the man who was American history’s most surprising winner and has now become its most egregious loser, the GOP will march itself straight off a cliff.