Disgrace after Defeat

By Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru

Thursday, December 17, 2020

 

It had long been obvious that if Trump lost the election, his exit would be graceless.

 

It was hard to see him conceding defeat in any circumstance, even if he got buried in a landslide. Having flouted norms throughout his presidency, there was no way that he would begin honoring them on his way out the door. Given to insulting his opponents and complaining of unfairness in the best of circumstances, he wasn’t going to find resources of classiness hitherto not in evidence.

 

Yet Trump hasn’t even managed to clear the low bar of realistic expectations for his post-election conduct. Even before the counting had ended, he declared himself the winner by a landslide. He spread rank disinformation on his Twitter account every day and pursued lawsuits that sought, based on the thinnest of justifications, to throw out millions of votes and invalidate state elections. He lobbied Republican officials to refuse to certify results and to award him the electors in states he lost, and failed only because the Republicans knew such acts would be a gross violation of the public trust at best and illegal at worst.

 

All in all, it’s the worst thing he’s done in his presidency and the worst exit of a defeated president in U.S. history, an effort that is not less infamous for being incompetent and risible.

 

Vote fraud is a serious offense against democracy and the law, and should be combated as such. But the Trump team and its allies have not been able to provide evidence of widespread illegal activity despite an intense, indeed fevered, search for it. While the rhetoric of Trump’s lawyers has emphasized a fraudulent, stolen election, the arguments in court typically haven’t been about alleged fraud at all. They have focused on changes in procedures prior to the election, disparities in how counties handled absentee ballots, and the distance Republican observers were kept from the counting — none of which has come close to supporting the drastic remedies Trump has sought.

 

Trump was clearly preparing the ground for his fraud allegations prior to the election. His obsessive attacks on mail-in voting were out of proportion to the threat such voting represented. Yes, mail-in voting is less secure than in-person voting. Yes, some states were ill prepared to handle the tsunami of mail-in ballots. But the states that have long had robust mail-in voting programs, such as Colorado, Utah, and Oregon, haven’t experienced widespread fraud.

 

In eschewing vote by mail, Trump created an even heavier political lift for himself by urging his voters to vote only in-person, thus kicking away an opportunity to bank votes and requiring a massive same-day turnout to overcome what Democrats had been building over the course of weeks. If a quarter of the Georgia Republicans who cast absentee ballots in the primary but didn’t vote at all in the fall election had instead voted by mail, Trump would have won the state. By contrast, in Florida, where Trump won more comfortably than he did in 2016, the state GOP didn’t discourage voting by mail. In the Georgia runoffs for Senate, even Trump has urged people to vote by mail.

 

Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting were useful, however, in enabling him to discredit the election. The politicization of voting methods meant that same-day ballots would be heavily Trump while absentee ballots would skew Democratic. The fact that key states counted the same-day ballots first created the impression of a Trump lead that got overtaken in the dead of the night or in the days after the election. If the order of the counting had been reversed, Biden would have established an early lead that steadily eroded but never disappeared.

 

But that’s not the way the count went. And the misleading impression created by the sequencing of it in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania is still, so many weeks later, one of the Trump team’s chief arguments that the election was stolen.

 

That Trump would look for a way to undermine the legitimacy of a loss should have been obvious from the 2016 campaign, when he promised, with characteristic frankness, to accept the result “if I win.” Even after winning, he made ludicrous charges about how wide­spread illegal voting had cheated him of a victory in the popular vote, just as he had after defeats in the primary.

 

His post-election argument this time has been a magnified version of past practice. He has shown even more of the indifference to the Constitution, the rule of law, and simple logical consistency that has marked his political career. He claims to be defending the integrity of U.S. elections, even as he demands that state legislatures ignore the laws they have passed and judges ignore federal statutory deadlines concerning the appointment of electors. His lawyers, meanwhile, advance half-baked theories that would enable state governments to use federal courts to interfere with one another’s election procedures: something that has never before been done, or really even contemplated.

 

The failure of this post-election campaign has not made it costless. Trump has encouraged millions of voters to believe that their votes do not count toward election results. He has sent them on a hunt for participants in a nonexistent conspiracy against the public. He has directed scorn and rage at state officials, including Republi­cans who backed him loyally, whose sin has been to follow the law instead of indulging him. And he has set a terrible precedent for future elections, especially ones that turn out closer than this one did.

 

Republicans who have not been willing to parrot his claim of a landslide victory have generally not contradicted it, either. Instead they have resorted to offering one shabby excuse after another for the president’s conduct. They say, for example, that he has every right to make his case in court, a claim that runs against decades of more sensible statements from Republicans about the evils of frivolous litigation. A president ought to have less leeway to abuse the courts than a fast-food patron scalded by hot coffee.

 

Or they say that Trump and his supporters have raised important questions. In many cases that is an ex­tremely charitable assessment: There is no important or even interesting question about Hugo Chávez’s ability to manipulate vote totals from the grave, for example. In other cases, the questioners refuse to listen to the answers. Take the widely broadcast claim that turnout in Milwaukee jumped suspiciously from 71 percent in 2012, when Obama was on the ticket, to 85 percent with Biden this year. The Republican National Committee spread that one — and didn’t correct the record when it was shown that turnout in 2012 was actually 87 percent, and therefore hadn’t risen at all. The lawsuits don’t merely ask questions, anyway: They request action, typically in the form of throwing out the ballots of thousands of law-abiding voters.

 

Another quasi-defense of Trump has been that many of his opponents refused to recognize the legitimacy of his election, too, and set out to undermine his new administration with investigations. That’s true. But this was not behavior to emulate, and Trump has exceeded it. Barack Obama did not delay the transition, let alone attack other Democrats for allowing it to proceed. Neither he nor Hillary Clinton urged state legislators to override their states’ voters.

 

Al Gore came closer to winning the 2000 election than Trump did this year, and put up a political and legal fight. But he didn’t spread conspiracy theories, urge that officials be put in jail for refusing to back his effort, or file dozens of lawsuits that got laughed out of court. Trump has plumbed new depths.

 

Of course, well before he became president, Trump had demonstrated that he does not care about truth, the viability of the political system, or even the Republican Party. He had shown an attraction to conspiracy theories of all kinds. (The Venezuelan–Serbian plot to steal the 2020 election isn’t any crazier than the notion that Ted Cruz’s father participated in the assassination of JFK.) In 2015, responding to criticism from National Review, Trump explained his method on TV: “I keep whining and whining until I win.” It turns out not to be a surefire strategy.

 

Through much of this, most elected Republicans followed their habit of keeping their heads down. This reflex started as an understandable, and probably prudent, decision. After he won in 2016, Trump was going to be president no matter what. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell doubtless figured that inveighing against him wouldn’t accomplish anything, while there were opportunities for fruitful cooperation and chances to steer him away from grievous mistakes behind the scenes. But this posture hardened into an unwillingness by most congressional Republicans to criticize Trump on much of anything unless the provocation was intolerable (e.g., Trump’s preposterous discussion with Putin in 2017 of starting a joint cybersecurity unit). Republicans got used to running away from reporters in the halls of Capitol Hill to avoid having to say anything about Trump’s latest outlandish tweet.

 

Their fear of Trump — of his ability to mobilize a lot of their own voters against them with one tweet or statement — was well founded. In the old days, it could take years for a president to exact re­venge on a member of his own party as he recruited an opponent in a primary, sent his operatives to work the race, etc. In contrast, Trump could mete out pain in a 280-character burst, sometimes diminishing his targets instantly.

 

This fear became only more intense as Trump whipped up passions about a stolen election, and so Republicans held their tongues even when the president began to actively and explicitly seek to overturn an election result not to his liking. He always said they were weak, and too many of them proved him right.

 

It’s not surprising that Trump would disgrace himself after an election loss; it is remarkable that he’s done it this grotesquely, and with so many who should know better effectively aiding and abetting him.