His Legitimacy, the President-Elect
My Democratic friends tell me to just hang on. On January 20th, Joe Biden will be inaugurated President of the United States. Once he’s taken the oath of office, Donald Trump will be out, and everything will be better. They’re certainly right in one way: things will be better. Joe Biden had already demonstrated that his governing goal is something we haven’t seen for the past four years: competence.
The Biden cabinet members (so far) aren’t the “radical socialists” that Republicans threatened. In fact, if you are on the “left” of the Democratic Party, so far you haven’t gotten much. Even Neera Tanden, Biden’s most controversial nominee for the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, is a “mainstream” progressive. There was plenty of corporate and even foreign money behind her liberal “Center for American Progress”.
But the one thing the Biden cabinet “exudes” is the ability to take office and go to work. They are all experienced and ready to hit the ground running – and all that means they are eminently qualified and competent.
A Loser Baby
Donald Trump has done everything he can to delegitimize the Biden election. He has gone to court over fifty times claiming that there was election fraud, and lost almost every case. And if it was just Donald Trump by himself, we could write it off as “sour grapes” and being a “sore loser”. That’s what would have happened in the past, when the “norms” pushed the losing Presidential candidate to concede the election.
The traditional thinking was: once a candidate was declared the “loser”, they had to move as quickly as possible to end the contest. If they didn’t then the nation would look at them as that “sore loser”, and end any future political career. Think about what happened to Al Gore. By (legitimately) fighting for the 2000 election in Florida, he knowingly risked his future political life. If he won he was President. But when he didn’t, he never got the chance to run again. It wasn’t just a matter of “American tradition” to concede quickly, it was a matter of political survival.
But like many other areas of American political life, Donald Trump has thrown all of those “norms” out the window.
True Believers
There are two key factors that make the actions of Donald Trump so different. The first is that he convinced a significant minority of Americans that the election was stolen. “Stop the Steal” is the new “Lock Her Up” chant of the “Trumper” crowd. And they aren’t being stupid. All of the information, all of their media reports, everything they see is telling them that “their” America is being stolen from them.
We can certainly argue that they are getting all of their information from one “silo”. But that argument isn’t going to fly with them. Twenty years of high-pressure sales has them convinced that “their” sources are correct, and everyone else is watching “fake news”. And while that’s a battle for some future tomorrow, it’s not a winnable one today.
But the second factor is there are so few other Republican leaders who are saying, “Biden won”. In a Washington Post questionnaire last week, only twelve of fifty-two Republican Senators acknowledged the Biden victory – that’s twenty-three percent. The rest evade or obfuscate or outright deny the will of the American voter.
Leading from the Rear
So when the Trump crowd chants, “Stop the Steal”, where are the leadership figures telling them the truth? We know better than to expect that anyone in the direct Trump orbit will do so, but what about McConnell or Portman or Cruz or Scott (South Carolina or Florida)?
The answer is they are nowhere to be found. They all have excuses: we need Trump voters in Georgia, or, Trump will “Tweet” and destroy my political career, or, we can wait until the Electoral Votes are counted, or it won’t matter, everything will be OK on January 20th.
It won’t.
A large minority of Americans believes they have been robbed. They are Americans with the same traditions as the rest of us. I simply ask my Democratic friends: if they shoe was on the other foot, and we believed with certainty (not like 2016) that the Presidency was stolen and the vote of America ignored, what would we do? To what lengths would we go to preserve our Democracy? Would we march in the streets or refuse to obey government orders? Would revolution be in the air?
And for those who say, just wait until: the Electoral votes are counted, or Georgia, or the inauguration; I ask, “who’s gonna tell ‘em”? And why, after months of believing, should they listen? Does anyone see Mitch McConnell standing in front of the riot, like the man before the tanks in Tiananmen Square, saying go home, it’s all OK?
Me neither.
