Yes, he is a clown. But he is a very, very dangerous one, even now. He has succeeded in discrediting our election system and invalidating Joe Biden’s win for more than 50 million Americans without any evidence. And all but a handful of elected Republicans are just fine with that.
Chris Hayes addressed this last night:
This remains a very frightening moment. They are all fine with this:
Alexander Burns in the NY TImes wrote a thoughtful piece on all this that’s well worth reading:
[E]ven without precipitating a full-blown constitutional crisis, Mr. Trump has already shattered the longstanding norm that a defeated candidate should concede quickly and gracefully and avoid contesting the results for no good reason. He and his allies also rejected the longstanding convention that the news media should declare a winner, and instead exploited the fragmentation of the media and the rise of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to encourage an alternative-reality experience for his supporters.
The next Republican candidate to lose a close election may find some voters expecting him or her to mimic Mr. Trump’s conduct, and if a Democrat were to adopt the same tactics, the G.O.P. would have no standing to complain.
Still more important, legal and political experts said, is the way Mr. Trump identified perilous pressure points within the system. Those vulnerabilities, they said, could be manipulated to destabilizing effect by someone else, in a closer election — perhaps one that featured real evidence of tampering, or foreign interference, or an outcome that delivers a winner who was beaten handily in the popular vote but scored a razor-thin win in the Electoral College.
In those scenarios, it might not be such a long-shot gambit for a losing candidate to attempt to halt certification of results through low-profile state and county boards, or to bestir state legislators to appoint a slate of electors or to pressure political appointees in the federal government to block a presidential transition.
Indeed, Mr. Trump managed to intrude on normal election procedures in several states. He summoned Michigan Republican leaders to the Oval Office as his allies floated the idea of appointing pro-Trump electors from the state, which Mr. Biden carried by more than 150,000 votes. And he inspired an onslaught from the right against Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who declined to affirm Mr. Trump’s false claims of ballot tampering. Though Mr. Raffensperger oversaw a fair election, both of Georgia’s Republican senators, channeling the president, called for his resignation.
Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the country had experienced a “‘Lord of the Flies’ moment” that revealed just how willing some powerful actors were to enable an undisguised effort to sabotage a free and fair election.
“It’s easy to laugh at the Trump challenges, just because they’ve been so out there,” Mr. Li said. “But what’s scary is, you step back from that a bit and see how many people were willing to go along with it until fairly deep in the process.”
“There will be closer elections, ultimately,” he added. “This one wasn’t very close. The fact that people are willing to go down dangerous paths should give us all pause.”
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump will wind up as a singularly sore loser or as the herald of a new Wild West era in American electioneering. There have been far closer elections this century — including the 2000 vote that plunged the country into a weekslong review of Florida’s rickety vote-counting procedures, and the 2016 election that made Mr. Trump president through a historically wide split between the popular vote and the Electoral College. But no one else has entertained the corrosive tactics Mr. Trump has sought to employ.
Like numerous other presidential schemes over the last four years, Mr. Trump’s plot against the election unraveled in part because of external circumstances — the large number of swing states Mr. Biden carried, for instance — and in part because of his own clumsiness. His lawyers and political advisers never devised an actual strategy for reversing the popular vote in multiple big states, relying on a combination of televised chest-thumping and wild claims of big-city election fraud for which there was no evidence.
Barbara J. Pariente, the former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court who was among the jurists overseeing the state-level battle over the 2000 vote, said it was essential for Congress to clarify the process by which elections are conducted and resolved or risk greater calamity in the coming years. Mr. Trump’s team, she said, had already breached fundamental standards of legal conduct by filing cases seeking to throw out huge numbers of votes “without any evidence of impropriety, and then asking a court to look further into it.”
“As I look at what is happening now, I think it’s a real attack on our American system of democracy, and it is causing tens of millions of Americans to doubt the outcome,” Ms. Pariente said. “It has grave implications, in my view, for the future of this country.”
This piece by election law expert Edward Foley makes some of the same points.
I would not be as concerned about this if Trump were out there flailing around with Rudy and the GOP establishment was pushing back with any kind of energy at all. They are not. The only people brave enough to stand up are the odd local official and some state-wide elected Republicans who balked at being asked to steal the election for Donald Trump. For the most part they are all just sitting back to see what he can get away with and watch him expose the weak spots they can exploit in the future.
This is very bad. Unless you think the Republican Party is just pretending and will somehow turn into nice, old-fashioned Main Street types who are acting in good faith, you can see that this is a very big problem going forward. After all, they have shown us that authoritarian white nationalism sits just fine with all of them and they have no problem destroying all democratic institutions. You know what that’s adds up to right? (The “F” word.)