The mills of democracy grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine. The hour-by-hour unravelling of the Trump presidency may not produce a made-for-television knockout punch, nor a traditional concession speech, but it has broadcast the president’s authoritarian character in ultra-high definition and set the stage for deeper humiliations. As the vote count in key battleground states drifts, irrevocably, towards his rival, Trump’s baseless accusations of rigging and his madcap assertions of victory have distilled four years of erratic leadership to their lunatic essence, isolating the president from all but his most cultish acolytes.
“We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie,” wrote the poet Adrienne Rich. “We assume that politicians are without honour … The scandals of their politics [is] not that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed.” On Thursday night Trump finally exhausted his credibility. After uttering more than 20,000 falsehoods in the last four years, he spoke one lie too many. Several US networks cut away from his rambling White House statement to warn viewers that Trump’s claims of victory were unsubstantiated and that there was, in fact, no evidence of vote rigging. The leader of the short-term OSCE observer mission found Trump’s call for the end of vote counting “disturbing” and a “gross abuse of office”; after years of dithering, the New York Times finally called him a liar in its headlines.
Trump has always lived in a parallel informational universe. One in which bizarre conspiracies about Barack Obama, Mexicans, Muslims and environmentalists are taken at face value. Small wonder then that he should clutch at the flotsam and jetsam of social media amid the shipwreck of his political career. Fortunately, American courts adhere to a higher standard of proof and his wild claims – most of which were instantly debunked by journalists – will not suffice to overturn a democratic election. What they may do, however, is inflame the millions of his followers who have been warned that Democrats will destroy America by imposing a socialist government.
Faced with a legitimate reckoning, Trump has shown that he would rather court chaos than concede defeat, would rather subvert democracy than be rebuked by it. This alone should disqualify any politician from being considered a legitimate president. The contrast with John McCain’s extraordinarily graceful concession speech to Barack Obama in 2008 could not be more striking. Given McCain’s loathing of Trump, it is, perhaps, poetic justice that the Arizona vote – and Fox News’s determined projection of the state for Biden – turned out to be one of the key moments in Trump’s political demise.
“Freedom of opinion is a farce,” wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt “unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” In a moment of remarkable prescience, she also warned that “Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers … who ‘exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches [him] and by interpreting the outside world for him.’”
Throughout his presidency Trump has gorged on “alternative facts” and cultivated flatterers, men and women whose “consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth” has, as Arendt warned, eroded public trust, caused many citizens to lose “bearings in the real world” and blurred the distinction between truth and falsehood to the point at which it is no longer operative, or even, perhaps, relevant.
“Under normal circumstances” says Arendt, “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer … even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.” Nevertheless, twentieth century totalitarianism produced several leaders with a “frightening confidence in the power of lying – in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the ‘political line’ of the present moment or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology.” Mercifully, Trump’s spluttering rage in the White House press room suggests that he has not, ultimately, been able to reproduce this con successfully.
The outcome of the US election may not be settled neatly, or soon, and inauguration day seems a long way off. But Donald Trump has provided irrefutable proof that there has never been a greater need for America to protect its democracy and to allow its voters, rather than its leader, to determine who should be president.
