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A former reality TV star eight years ago tweeted of President Barack Obama, “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” The first statement was a lie — Obama won by almost 3.5 million votes. But that lie exhibited the facility with lying for which the faux billionaire would become infamous. He tweeted, “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” and “More votes equals a loss…revolution!”
Those November 7, 2012 tweets followed others fired off the night before:
That last tweet is as true now as it was not then. And it is Donald J. Trump’s doing. Having lost the popular vote twice himself, the now-outgoing president suddenly he has use for the electoral college. His legal team is the laughingstock. But no less a threat to the country.
While the republic still stands, it is not for Trump’s and the Republican establishment’s lack of of trying to demolish it. Election law expert Rick Hasen has reassured voters those efforts to game the electoral college ultimately will fail:
The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles.
Team Trump’s gonzo lawyering might fit well within a hallucinogen-laced, Hunter S. Thompson novel. Judge after judge recognizes the frivolousness of the conspiracy-fueled effort to undo Trump’s loss through litigation aimed at altering the electoral college count.
Judge Matthew W. Brann in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed Trump’s demand to throw out almost 7 million votes. A “conservative Republican” before his appointment, the Washington Post reminds, Brann wrote in his opinion:
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
“That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
But that harsh rebuke is not enough to alleviate Hasen’s concerns:
All of that is indeed good news, but I am quite concerned about what comes next. By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since the election, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.
Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy also will make things worse when it comes to voting rights. The common thread in his campaign’s postelection litigation connecting Trump allegations of people of color illegally voting in Democratic cities in swing states and corrupted voting machines is a lack of any evidence to support the claims. Many of the lawsuits have been laughed out of court for lack of evidence, voluntarily dismissed, or involve so few votes that they could not plausibly change the outcome. These unsuccessful lawsuits will nonetheless provide a false narrative to explain how it is that Mr. Biden declared victory and serve as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws in Republican states. They already provided a basis for the now-aborted attempt of Republican canvassing board members in Wayne County, Mich., to reject votes from Democratic-leaning Detroit, and could be the basis for a similar move by Republicans when the Michigan state canvassing board meets Monday.
When our system works as intended, citizens have the luxury of largely ignoring it, the Washington Post Editorial Board observes. People entrusted with its operation, for the most part, act with integrity: “Secretaries of state of both parties, county judges, tireless vote counters and state boards like Michigan’s have managed a successful election, with a record number of Americans voting despite the challenge of a pandemic. Some of these officials undoubtedly rejoiced at the results, some undoubtedly despaired; they all did their jobs.”
Yet integrity is of no use to the outgoing president, nor to members of his cult of personality, nor to a disturbingly large fraction of his party’s members of Congress and in the states.
Despite failure after humiliating failure in court, Trump persists, the Post continues:
His target Monday is the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is scheduled to meet to certify the results in their state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by the healthy margin of 154,000 votes. Ronna McDaniel, the servile chair of the Republican Party, and her Michigan counterpart, Laura Cox, on Saturday called on the board to delay certification. Their ostensible justification: “numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities.”
Never mind that overturning the counting tables in Michigan will not undo his loss. Trump hopes to inspire similar delays in enough states to somehow turn failure into success. Never mind that it would turn the republic into a petty dictatorship.
But more than that, Trump’s targets are as old as his demand innocents be put to death, no matter the weight of exonerating evidence. Nonwhite Americans are in his view suspect by definition, as are cities with large, nonwhite populations, Trump’s targets of opportunity.
Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times write:
“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”
This ain’t over with the settling of this election. Nor with the inauguration of Joe Biden as president in January. One major party is committed to a de facto rolling back of the Reconstruction amendments as Jim Crow did for 100 years, and relegating nonwhite voters again to the back of the electoral bus, even those nonwhites who vote with them. Republicans will, as they have demonstrated time and again, sacrifice their own to secure power.