Republicans still have a chance to keep control of the U.S. Senate into 2021. The acting president, however, has little chance of retaining his sinecure. Revenge his byword, he will try to burn the place down before he goes. His followers in the provinces will try if he doesn’t. I am not the only one warning of that.
The North won the Civil War but lost Reconstruction. That ushered in a century of Jim Crow bolstered by the myth of the Lost Cause. The losers in this presidential election are running the same play.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent writes:
With Trump unlikely to formally concede, you can see a kind of Lost Cause of Trumpism mythology taking hold, in which many supporters continue believing the election was stolen from him and that squeamish Republicans betrayed him by not fighting hard enough against it.
That could do serious civic damage: As Rick Hasen suggests, it appears designed to place a cloud of illegitimacy over Biden’s presidency. What’s more, it will require Republicans running in 2024 to do a delicate dance maintaining fealty to that mythology for years, just as they tiptoed around “birtherism.”
After Ronald Reagan left office, Grover Norquist sought to cement the Reagan myth by plastering his name on “as many buildings, highways, airports, schools, mountains and parks, libraries and museums around the country as possible.” Norquist started the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997. Apparently, he was still trying to turn the Gipper into a minor deity in in 2016. He’ll have to compete for space with Confederate names and monuments from Key West to Portland, Ore.
We know how much the proprietor of Trump Tower enjoys seeing his name plastered on things. Since his followers already consider him a minor deity, perhaps he would settle for a statue here and there as a consolation prize for getting out of town without razing it first.