Defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box has not stopped the rot in body politic. That rot proceeds apace.
Multiple attendees of the soon-to-be-former acting president’s election night watch party are infected with COVID-19. The boss’ chief of staff, Mark Meadows; four other campaign and White House aides (that we know of); and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. And now David Bossie, the non-lawyer chosen to lead Donald Trump’s quixotic attempt to undo his reelection loss in the court of public opinion and in actual courtrooms.
For strict-father conservatives, top Republicans are insanely indulgent with the man-child still “leading” their party. Indulging his aversion to mask-wearing means the people above face weeks of isolation with coronavirus symptoms. Their indulgence means the rest of us face weeks of propaganda campaign aimed at convincing Americans that, no, Trump did not lose the election by 4.6 million votes (so far) because he is a walking disaster. Their indulgence means further decay of institutions that have upheld the republic since its inception.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will outlast Trump in Washington, D.C. He is nonetheless willing to indulge Trump’s wounded ego:
McConnell (R-Ky.) said from the floor of the Senate that the president is “100 percent within his right” to pursue recounts and litigation. McConnell did not repeat Trump’s baseless assertions that fraud had cost him the election, but he said he had met with Attorney General William P. Barr earlier in the day and supports the president’s right to investigate all claims of wrongdoing.
“We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns,” McConnell said. “The president has every right to look into allegations and request recounts under the law.”
Separately, Barr on Monday gave federal prosecutors a green light to pursue allegations of voting irregularities in certain cases before results are certified. The memo appeared to reverse previous Justice Department guidance that prosecutors generally should not take overt steps in cases involving alleged voter fraud until results are in and official.
John Dean once described Richard Nixon’s Watergate coverup and the payments of hush money as “a cancer on the presidency.” In Trump, that cancer has metastasized to much of the Republican Party.
Anand Giridharadas believes no amount of increased understanding, bipartisan appeals, or attempts at unity will treat this political sickness. Indulging it got us here:
Yesterday the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to acknowledge the election results and actually boosted Trump’s conspiracy theorizing. These are not people you need to reach out to. These are people you need to constrain through law, as much as possible, and beat overwhelmingly.
The Union did not persuade the Confederacy to give up slavery. The Confederacy had to be defeated on the battlefield. It was not an intellectual exercise. But that’s how we treat political battles.
Giridharadas continues:
Perhaps the way to bring the country together is not to bring the country together but to fix it. Perhaps the way to heal divisions is not to heal divisions but to get the government working again. Perhaps the way to get people to believe in science isn’t to get people to believe in science but to roll out a vaccine successfully, fairly, and efficiently. Perhaps the antidote to the poison of this era isn’t the active pursuit of kumbaya but good, old-fashioned progress: steady and palpable life betterment, and the repair of institutions so they can’t be hijacked again.
Republicans indulging Donald Trump has broken government worse than his party had since the Reagan revolution. Trump indulging rather than defeating the coronavirus contributed to 240,000 Americans losing their lives. Rather than address the crisis at hand, Republicans will now indulge Trump’s obsession with settling scores over the next two months while tens of thousands more Americans die in the latest Covid surge. Hospitals again are headed toward reaching capacity in what looks now to be a death march to Jan. 20.
It is not liberal permissiveness that led us here.