Achieving closure now imperative
How long will elected Republican leaders support Trump’s delusional victory claim, Brian Dickerson asks.
IF the 2020 presidential election were an athletic contest, Joe Biden’s apparent conquest of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes would signal its definitive end.
A buzzer would sound. Spectators would cheer (or head dejectedly for the parking lot) as the game clock ticked down to 0.00. A referee would hoist the victorious prizefighter’s arm aloft as his defeated opponent was helped back to the locker room.
But that’s not how presidential elections end in the US.
Since 1796, when Vicepresident John Adams beat former Secretary of State
Thomas Jefferson in the first contested one, the losing candidate has brought the curtain down by formally conceding the election, thereby signalling to partisans on both sides the need to stop campaigning and start governing, or at least preparing for the next election.
Donald Trump has been telling Americans for the better part of the past year he will never do this. On Friday, as a riptide of absentee ballots swept his last hopes of reelection out to sea, he made good on his promise, doubling down on victory claims that brought gasps of incredulity from even his closest advisers.
Trump’s groundless boasts have made his critics apoplectic for decades, but this outburst was different. This was embarrassing, like watching an ageing relative soil themself in public.
The president’s words were combative, but his reasoning was deranged, his body language a pale shadow of his campaign trail brio. Republican surrogates looked at their hands, and many news outlets cut their live feeds.
On Saturday, as absentee ballot returns from Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia padded Biden’s prohibitive lead in Pennsylvania, the
Trump campaign released a statement declaring the election ‘‘far from over’’ and said the president’s lawyers would resume their attack on the legitimacy of the voters’ verdict on Tuesday.
Addressing Trump’s PTSD is a challenge for his doctors and family members. Achieving closure and assuring continuity of government in the absence of any concession is a practical imperative to which elected leaders in both parties must now devote their full energy.
To Michigan’s Republican congressional and legislative leaders I offer this lesson from the lifesaving course I took at a longago Boy Scout campout.
‘‘A drowning person is a panicking person,’’ our grizzled instructor warned us. ‘‘You’re trying to save his life, but he just wants to climb on to your shoulders, on to your head, on to anything that’s not water.
‘‘Your first challenge,’’ the instructor said, ‘‘is to make sure he doesn’t drown you, too.’’
Trump is drowning, and there is no saving his dream of four more years in the Oval Office. The question is whether he will drag public confidence in the legitimacy of government, and the integrity of everyone from Presidentelect
Joe Biden to newly designated Michigan House Speaker Jason Wentworth (RepublicanClare) down with him.
Elected leaders who indulge Trump’s baseless claims that Michigan’s mailin vote was fraudulent are undermining the legitimacy of their own elections, too. If the president succeeds in convincing a substantial number of Americans that local election officials, secretaries of state in both parties and judges across the country have engaged in a vast conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process, every elected leader’s authority will be suspect.
Sustaining Michigan’s ongoing experiment in selfgovernment depends on elected Republicans courageous enough to defend the results of the election against unfounded allegations of dead voters and rampant ballot tampering.
Sitting GOP lawmakers will likely keep their powder dry while courts scrutinise any voting irregularities the president’s lawyers surface. Only retiring US Representative Paul Mitchell (RepublicanDryden) had called Trump to account for his bizarre claims, pointing out in a tweet that ‘‘a legally cast vote does not become ‘illegal’ simply because a candidate does not like the vote ’’. Peter Meijer and Lisa McClain, two Republican newcomers who won seats in the US House on Wednesday, have a golden opportunity to establish themselves as leaders of a postTrump GOP that prioritises traditional Republican values such as fiscal responsibility and respect for the rule of law over delusional conspiracy theories.
Noone expects Meijer or McClain to welcome Biden’s win. But by recognising the legitimacy of his election, Michigan’s newest congressional members can distinguish their brand of Republicanism from their vanquished president’s selfaggrandising version. — MCT