Trump puts democracy to the test
WASHINGTON – Winston Churchill was not known for leaving his thoughts unspoken. One of them was this: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.”
President Donald Trump, who has professed admiration for, if not deep knowledge of, the British prime minister, is putting Churchill’s observation to one of its greatest tests by refusing to accept the results of an election that delivered a victory for Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, called this a “dangerous path” for the United States.
Trump has forced a dusting off of the arcana of the procedures for the Electoral College, which for almost the entirety of the nation’s history has been a formality and not an instrument to overturn people’s votes.
A sitting American president is, for the first time, trying to convince the people that they should not believe the numbers that clearly demonstrate his rival’s victory. Rather, Trump is making claims of massive fraud, demanding recounts and calling for audits in an effort to change the outcome and, in the process, put democracy itself on trial.
It’s possible that the mercurial president is one tweet away from a change of heart, but so far that is not the case. And the sweeping majority of his fellow Republicans are allowing him to play this out.
Obama, who invited Trump to the White House soon after Trump’s elec
tion four years ago and pledged cooperation in the transfer of power, is not shocked that a man who “never admits loss” is refusing to acknowledge defeat now.
“I’m more troubled by the fact that other Republican officials, who clearly know better, are going along with this, are humoring him in this fashion,” Obama told CBS’ “60 Minutes.” “It is one more step in delegitimizing not just the incoming Biden administration but democracy generally. And that’s a dangerous path.”
With one eye on Trump, Republicans might have the other fixed on Georgia, where they want his energy to help their candidates win two Senate runoffs in
January and ensure at minimum that Biden has to deal with a divided government. Republicans have seen how Trump handles dissidents, and few have chosen this consequential moment to cross him.
“Republicans are sticking with him out of fear,” said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert who worked in communications in Ronald Reagan’s White House. “Fear has always worked for Trump. Tantrums have always paid dividends.
“Republicans fear if they don’t stand by him, one midnight tweet will cost them Georgia,” he said. More broadly, “they don’t want to anger him.”
Trump is using not just his sway over the party but also the levers of government to keep Biden at bay at least for a while longer.
An agency little known outside Washington, the General Services Administration, has held off on recognizing Biden as the president-elect, denying him access to the money, offices and machinery routinely afforded to the incoming team. Biden has also been denied the classified briefings that previous presidents shared with presidentselect so that rising national security threats don’t catch the next administration and the country off guard. Trump installed loyalists at the Pentagon and fired his defense secretary after Biden’s victory.
In the meantime, a contagion of falsehood has been spread from the losing side, magnified on social media and given brute force by Trump.
In Philadelphia, a beleaguered city commissioner on the panel responsible for conducting and counting the vote said he has been stunned by the traction that wild tales of fraud have gained in the state that clinched victory for Biden. The commissioner, Al Schmidt, is a Republican.
“One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies,” he told CNN. Asked if he held Trump responsible for that, Schmidt said: “People should be mindful that there are bad actors who are lying to them.”
During a break from even more pressing electoral business, his team checked allegations of dead people voting. “We looked it up,” Schmidt said. “Not a single one of them voted in Philadelphia after they died.”