Our drawn-out, Covid-driven, vote-count drama has begun to resemble an old Monty Python sketch. Biden likely will win the presidency in the end, but Trumpism is not dead yet.
Joe Biden will put up a greater popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton’s 2.9 million votes in 2016. With votes still being counted in a handful of states Biden’s margin is already 3.7 million and likely to grow. California, which famously takes weeks to complete its final vote tally, will add to it in bulk.
The only reason Biden is not the president-elect at this minute is the Electoral College, an absurdist leftover of America’s slave past. It also means Biden’s victory will not be the definitive repudiation of Trumpism for which Democrats (and much of the world) had hoped.
Daily Beast Editor-At-Large Molly Jong-Fast shakes her head over the polling failures. She was promised another “blue wave,” that suburban women would turn against Trump in numbers sufficient to “once and for all reject the racism, the stupidity, the sexism, the hate, the anti-science rhetoric.” Yet here we are. Trump may be defeated. Trumpism will linger.
I’ve argued for years that Republicans’ flag fetish, pocket constitution-clutching, and teary singing of “God Bless the USA” are emotional affectations, no more true to the Founders’ vision for this republic than the prosperity gospel is to Jesus. They are the hypocrites Jesus condemned who “love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.”
Moreover, people raised from the cradle to pine for the return of their god-king were primed to accept an earthly one. They are at heart more royalists than patriots, heirs not to colonial revolutionaries, but to the loyalists who remained committed to a system of government by hereditary royalty and landed gentry. In this moment, one wonders whether Trump’s followers are still Americans except on paper. They wear America like a corporate logo.
Conservative commentator David Frum warned three years ago that, like the poor, conservatives will always be with us. Frum argued for the country to endure, conservatives must escape the dead end of Trumpism and find its way toward “conservatism that cannot only win elections but also govern responsibly, a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and U.S. leadership internationally.” Because if “conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” Indeed, many have.
George Packer concurs at The Atlantic:
Tens of millions of Americans love MAGA more than they love democracy. After four years of lawbreaking and norm-busting, there can be no illusions about President Donald Trump. His first term culminated in an open effort to sabotage the legitimacy of the election and prevent Americans from voting. His rallies in the final week of the campaign were red-drenched festivals of mass hate, autocratic self-absorption, and boredom, without a glimmer of a better future on offer—and they might have put Trump over the top in Florida and elsewhere. Even as “freedom-loving people” came out in unprecedented millions to vote, their readiness to throw away their republican institutions along with their dignity and grasp of facts suggests that many Americans have lost the basic qualities that the Founders believed essential to self-government. There is no obvious way to reverse this decline, which shows signs of infecting elements of the other side as well.
Donald Trump wore the Republican Party “like a rented tuxedo” to get elected, a CNN commentator quipped this morning. Now Republicans are stuck with the dry cleaning bill. So are the rest of us. The party now represents whatever whim Trump tweets on whatever day at whatever hour. Where counting votes favors him, he is for it. Where counting them does not, he is opposed.
The acting president’s followers roll with Dear Leader’s whims. “Stop the vote count,” they shouted last night in Detroit. “Count the votes!” they chanted in Maricopa County, Arizona. In both places, Biden was ahead:
Without citing evidence, some Republicans have accused election officials of manipulating the results to indicate that Mr. Trump is losing in Maricopa County, which is home to about 60 percent of Arizona’s population.
“The only way Biden can win Arizona is through fraud,” said Jim Williams, 67, a welder who attended the protest. “I won’t accept a Biden victory. I don’t want to live under Communist rule.”
Many in the crowd were holding Trump flags, and numerous people were wielding AR-15 rifles and other firearms.
COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 234,000 American lives so far. That is 20 percent of the world’s deaths in a country with just over four percent of the world’s population. To borrow a phrase, this was no boat accident. It was Trumpism. Should their king win a second term, the pandemic here will continue to claim American lives by the tens of thousands. (Republicans know where they can stick their talking points about four Americans lost in Benghazi.) Should Trump lose, his amped-up followers will take lives without needing more prompting.
Quietly or not, they are not going away.