President Trump’s slow-moving and mercifully incompetent coup underscores the scale of his defeat. Each failed court challenge – his legal team has chalked up a solitary, minor victory in almost 30 cases – reveals the lengths to which his enablers must go to soothe their leader’s authoritarian tantrums. And yet, although most of his chaotic and underhand manoeuvres were anticipated, in detail, by his sharpest critics, few sane observers could have foreseen the parallel universe, teeming with Internet conspiracy theories, that Trump is now foisting on his base.
In the world of ascertainable facts, Trump lost a democratic election. In his febrile alternative reality, a vast international left-wing conspiracy has insinuated itself, without leaving any concrete evidence, into America’s voting systems. This, we are told, is the true reason why he lost in key states, and it is a problem that no amount of recounting can rectify. Without any facts that satisfy legal standards, Trump keeps asking the courts to set aside certified results and name him as the winner. As that gambit fails, he has pressured state officials to block formal certification of the vote and asked state electors to break ranks and support him.
Within the senior ranks of the Republican party only Sen. Romney has denounced Trump’s “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election” and his failure “to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law”. In unusually forthright language, Romney’s statement concludes: “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.” The rest of the party, perhaps chastened by the turnout Trump mobilized for the elections, has remained culpably silent and their cowardice has normalized his transgressions.
In 2016 Trump bragged that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot a bystander without losing any supporters. That now looks like an understatement. More than a thousand Americans are dying each day because of his administration’s slapdash approach to the pandemic, but Trump ignores daily Covid updates, has withdrawn from the task force meetings for almost five months and has even blocked the incoming administration from access to essential data about the spread of the virus. While this may no longer be surprising on his part, the pusillanimity and craven conformity it has exposed within the GOP will tarnish the party for decades.
Norms have never constrained Donald Trump. From his first day in office he has ignored the emoluments clause, appointed unqualified family members to important posts, pressed foreign leaders for domestic political gains and either discounted or dismissed other customary limits on presidential power. Recently, for example, he held the Republican convention at the White House – a clear contravention of federal law. With the exception of his impeachment, he has not been held accountable for these actions. Each unpunished mischief has emboldened him further, to the point at which he no longer blushes at the prospect of overturning a democratic election.
American democracy still seems unlikely to yield to Trump’s autocratic ambitions, but his erosion of public trust and his incitement of further passions within what is already a dangerously divided electorate have meant that more than a fortnight after the US election the peaceful transition of power remains more of a hope than an expectation.
