Trump descending
Commentary: Departing president still sowing chaos but being shown his limits.
President Donald Trump is learning the hard lesson of his predecessors: Power ebbs.
Trump on Wednesday demonstrated his continued ability to foment turmoil and his increasing inability to control the course of events. He is scattering nails on the road President-elect Joe Biden is about to travel, including raising doubts about the democratic process, but his frantic efforts since Election Day have failed to stop his successor from going down that road and taking office.
On Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans displayed the most dramatic intraparty divide of Trump’s tenure when dozens of GOP lawmakers defied his demand that they challenge the Electoral College results. In Georgia, Trump’s unfounded charges of election fraud were blamed by some Republicans for the possible loss of two Senate seats and control of the chamber.
“It turns out that telling the voters that the election was rigged is not a great way to turn out your voters,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said. On his flight to Washington on Tuesday, some proTrump passengers had greeted Romney, the GOP’S 2012 presidential nominee, and an occasional Trump critic, with chants of “Traitor! Traitor!”
Trump is leaving the White House as he arrived, hurling debunked charges and sowing chaos. He has reshaped the Republican coalition, put a conservative stamp on the federal courts and tapped a powerful vein of American populism. But without the power of the office and after being rejected by the voters, he will now be trying to keep control of his party and the nation’s political conversation in a way no past president has done in modern times.
“There’s a tremendous amount of chaos and confusion” within the GOP, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said. “There are internal disputes that could spill over into an outright civil war, if they aren’t careful.”
Welcome to the ex-presidents’ club, Mr. Trump.
For the next two weeks, he will still be in the Oval Office, with all the powers of the commander in chief. He can order the armed forces into action. He can and almost certainly will issue additional pardons to allies, family members and perhaps even himself. And he can still command center stage.
“We will never give up; we will never concede,” Trump vowed in a Wednesday speech to thousands of supporters at a “Save America” rally on the Ellipse. He derided “weak Republicans” who were refusing to join in the challenge the Electoral College results. “We have to primary the hell out of the ones who don’t fight,” he told the crowd, many wearing red MAGA hats and many not wearing masks.
That defiant scene by the losing presidential nominee was unprecedented in U.S. history.
Many of the protesters then marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, and hundreds of them stormed metal barricades and ran onto the Capitol grounds as law enforcement officials tried to hold them back.
Inside, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was gaveling to order another historic occasion.
At a Joint Session of Congress, a group of Republican senators and House members challenged the slates of electors from several battleground states, starting with Arizona. Never before had the largely ceremonial exercise be turned into a concerted effort to overturn results that had been certified by states.
But most Republicans in the Senate and a third of those in the House opposed the president’s effort. Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, Trump’s reliable legislative partner for the past four years, delivered an emotional rebuke to the president on the Senate floor. “The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken,” he said. “If we overrule them, it would damage our republic forever.”
While Trump and his loyalists have no realistic path to reverse the election outcome, their efforts have had an impact, complicating the political task of his successor and raising doubts among millions about the democratic process itself.
In a Morning Consult survey taken Monday and Tuesday, a 53% majority of Republicans said Congress should object to the certification of Biden’s victory, a step that would overturn the will of the voters. A slightly bigger majority of Republicans, 56%, said it was “appropriate” for Trump to call the Georgia secretary of state last Saturday and pressure him to “recalculate” the state’s vote in his favor.
In contrast, 81% of Democrats said Trump deserved being impeached for that.
“At the end of the day, all the hullabaloo isn’t going to amount to anything; Biden is going to be inaugurated,” said David Barker, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. “But it just deepens the polarization in the country ... and it slowly whittles away further and further trust in the system. We’re getting perilously close to a constitutional crisis.”