The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt summarizes the various theories about what Trump is actually doing with his inane refusal to concede the election despite the fact that he clearly lost. In anyone else you would be talking about doing some kind of intervention and getting him some professional help, but this is Trump and he acts irrationally every day and his supporters love it so he remains in power, doing what he does:
Scenario 1: Start with the Big Lie: that President-elect Joe Biden stole the election. Proclaim it from the moment polls close, repeat it often and loudly.
Pressure right-wing media to amplify the lie, and crack the whip so your party echoes it.
Send out the lawyers to collect tales of fraud. There is none, but no matter; generate nonsense, and then pressure county and state Republicans to overturn honest counts and replace duly chosen electors.
Make sure that when the impostor slates reach Congress, your party will endorse the charade. On that front, he can still hope: after all, Republicans such as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) so far are cheering or acquiescing in his fiction.
Make sure, too, as Robert Kagan outlined in this section before the election, that the “power ministries” are with you. A pliant Attorney General William P. Barr instructed prosecutors to be on the lookout for fraud; the Defense Department seemed less reliable, so Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper.
Other firings will follow as needed, and then every base will be covered: State officials buy into the Big Lie, the Senate plays along, the Supreme Court slaps down any challenge, and military, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are ready to deal with any popular objections.
I am confident that they really were prepared to go with this scenario. The had real lawyers lined up in the swing states since June, ready to contest, particularly in Pennsylvania where they had that case about the late arriving ballots tee’d up. He expresses every thought that passes through his head so he told us this during the last weeks of the campaign. But it depended on the election being close and coming down to one state. It did not — and the win in Pennsylvania was too big for them to disenfranchise all those voters who followed the rules in place at the time to overturn the election.
Sooo:
Scenario 2: Trump knows he has lost and must leave office Jan. 20, but he is salting the soil to make governing impossible for Biden while preparing his own political and financial comeback.
In this scenario, the Big Lie is not a means to overturn the election but a stratagem to persuade as many of Trump’s nearly 73 million voters as possible that Biden is not a legitimately elected president. They, in turn, will press Republicans in Congress to obstruct Biden’s efforts to heal division and get things done.
After he leaves office, Trump will stoke the resentments to raise funds to support new businesses and pay old debts. The stolen election will be the lost cause that he redeems by running for president again in 2024.
This is what I think he is doing. Of course he’s humiliated that he decisively lost but he’s often had failures in his life that he was able to spin his way out of and get others to bail him out, sometimes more than once. I think he’s working that out right now. His verbal slip on Friday about “the next administration…” and his concede/not-concede tweets indicates that he knows the jig is up he’s just using this destruction of faith in democracy as a weapon for his own personal purposes (and the GOP is going along with it because they have been chipping away at our democracy for 20 years or more themselves.)
Then there is this:
Scenario 3: Trump has no plan but is lashing out in anger and disbelief that he could have lost an election.
In this scenario, the Pentagon purge is a settling of scores against people he resents and a frantic effort to declassify intelligence he thinks will burnish his image. McConnell and others are just playing along until his rage burns out. Barr’s memo is intended to appease the president, worded carefully to preclude any action. The court filings in battleground states are pathetic efforts to assuage a wounded ego, pursued by second-rate lawyers, with no hope of success.
Yes, that’s almost certainly part of it. And as Hiatt says, elements of all three are probably involved in this ridiculous spectacle. He doesn’t care about abstract concepts like dignity or legacy — he only cares about today’s news cycle and his own personal well-being — so he could have hoped for a closer election and had his future out-of-power in the back of his mind the whole time. And he is an infantile fool who is having a temper tantrum. That goes without saying.
Hiatt concludes:
One thing is sure: Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat is harming American democracy… We assumed that, unlike in so many countries in the world, losing incumbents would gracefully give way, knowing that they — or their party — would have a chance another day.
Trump has changed that. In the world he is shaping, election results are something you press partisan officials to overturn. Reality is what you say it is. Peaceful transfers of power are for chumps.
McConnell and McCarthy and the rest of their craven bunch are enabling this degradation. The lessons won’t disappear when Trump does.
Nope. From the moment Mitch McConnell stole the Supreme Court seat from Barack Obama in 2016, it was clear that the Republicans had finally completely gone rogue. They made it clear before Trump was even nominated that they no longer cared about hypocrisy and were going to retain power by any means necessary. Trump made that easier by taking all the slings and arrows from the rest of the country and allowing them to pretend that they were secretly embarrassed by him but couldn’t really do anything because their voters are a bunch of rubes and you can’t tell them anything.
They know now that they can get away with anything if they find the right points of leverage. It’s wide open now. The beltway establishment embodied by Hiatt is finally starting to come to grips with that. Let’s see if it sticks.