The forever presidential election
Save for the debacle of Florida’s hanging chads and an ill-fated intervention by the US Supreme Court in 2000, presidential elections have pretty much ended the same way for centuries. When one political party’s nominee lost, he — and only once, she — would call their opponent to concede, acknowledge the hard fight fought by their downtrodden supporters, and offer some vaguely conciliatory speech about bringing the country back together after months of demonizing the other side.
The defeated nominee would then mostly disappear into a buzzy, lucrative life of speaking engagements, book deals, and countless questions about their political future. And we would get a brief but necessary respite from presidential politics.
Then came 2020, the election without end.
Donald Trump decisively lost his reelection bid to Joe Biden. But since Nov. 7, 2020, when Biden was officially declared the president-elect, there has rarely been a day when all that happened after that event hasn’t been a topic of debate and discord.
Since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection three years ago, there have been dozens of trials and convictions of those who breached the US Capitol to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election. Parts of 2021 and 2022 were dominated by televised hearings of the Democrat-led House Select Committee investigation into Trump’s actions during the weeks leading up to the insurrection and its violent attack on democracy.
Then last year ushered in the Trump indictments and court cases. So. Many. Court. Cases.
Overshadowing the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 15, the first contest of the 2024 presidential primary season, are Trump’s legal morasses, most connected to his schemes to flip the outcome of the 2020 general election in his favor. He is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court last month to keep his name off that state’s primary ballot. A narrow majority of Colorado’s justices ruled that Trump is disqualified from holding office again because he fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection, a violation of Section 3 of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Trump has filed an appeal to the Maine Superior Court for a reversal of a similar decision delivered last month by Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who barred Trump from Maine’s primary ballot.
Out of Trump’s quartet of indictments — and 91 felony charges — two of those cases directly concern the former president’s reported post-election interference in 2020 and 2021 while he was still in office. In Georgia, Trump has been charged with, among other things, pressuring election officials to flip the state’s election results from a Biden win to a Trump victory.
And then there are all of Trump’s legal machinations to stall, derail, and thwart Special Counsel Jack Smith’s unprecedented 2020 election interference case against the former president. Even indictments for an alleged hush money scheme prior to the 2016 election and Trump’s removal and mishandling of highly classified documents after he left the office have kept the nation mired in the detritus of Trump’s catastrophic presidency.
Of course, this has had an impact on the current election cycle. Republican candidates, who’ve largely and foolishly avoided bashing Trump, have still been inundated with questions about him, his conduct after the election, and Trump’s indictments and charges.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was considered a serious contender for the Republican nomination until his disastrous presidential campaign began, claimed the Trump indictments “distorted” his party’s presidential primary campaign. During a Christian Broadcasting Network interview last month, DeSantis said that all of the attention Trump has received “just crowded out, I think, so much other stuff and it’s sucked out all the oxygen.”
That’s true. The media remains drawn to Trump like moths to a flame, and all the coverage, whether merited or not, does Trump’s heavy lifting for him. Why show up for debates when he’s gifted hours on cable news networks that keep his face and name on the air, usually at the expense of other candidates or even Biden?
Still lying about an election he lost, Trump left office three years ago and has held national attention hostage ever since.
Forget 2024 election fatigue. We’re still dealing with the nausea of a Trump hangover that’s lasted since 2021. And depending on what happens in the coming months, this malady may continue well beyond what this beleaguered nation can abide or survive.