When do we start calling this criminal? I’m not a lawyer, but if what Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and the whole parade of charlatans and falsifiers behind them are doing isn’t illegal, it’s only because people who write laws never imagined that any human being in a position of public trust would behave so explicitly and remorselessly like members of the Gambino family.
We have entered a three-week period, possibly the most fateful in our history, or certainly in the top three (the post-election period of 1860, the fight to settle the election of 1800) when American democracy will live or die. I think it will live. I’d rather know it will live. And even though I very much doubt these crooks will pull this off, I can’t honestly say today that I know that.
Thursday, we watched Rudy Giuliani give a sweaty press conference—hair dye literally dripping down the side of his face—in which he claimed to have hundreds of affidavits from people who saw Democratic poll workers get up to a hundred kinds of no good. If it’s all true—backdating ballots, ballots getting counted three times, and so on—then it’s a big scandal I guess, but the greater likelihood, given the Trump legal team’s 1-25 won-lost record on the same claims he was putting out at this presser, is that none of it is true, or maybe 1.5 percent of it is true. Because let’s put it this way: If everything he’s saying is true, it would be rather amazing that we’ve had, what, 61 presidential elections in this country, and hundreds of other elections, and this is the first time ever we’ve had fraud on a scale grand enough to flip around 400,000 votes in the state of Pennsylvania, which is what Giuliani claimed. The big scandal here appears to be not these wild claims, which Giuliani said he couldn’t share his evidence for, but Fox News (and OAN and Newsmax) airing all that live, along with wild talk about how Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, and George Soros have supposedly stolen the election that Trump supposedly won.
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Also Thursday, Trump summoned Michigan lawmakers to Washington to meet with him. To be briefed on the alarming spread of the coronavirus in the Grand Rapids area? Not exactly. The President of the United States has given no public indication that the death now consuming this country—death he helped bring on, death his admirers deny and mock, until the very moment it takes them—is of the slightest concern to him.
It’s enraging beyond belief to any moral person. He could be saving lives, even right now, even after all the damage he’s done, by telling his America that it’s time to take this seriously. But he says nothing. He’s sitting there watching TV and talking to Hannity and worrying about being called a loser. He is the moral equivalent of a man sitting on the deck of a sinking ship with a box of life vests at his feet who refuses to throw them. I’m not sure we legally call that man a murderer. But we sure call him evil.
The traveling Michiganders include the state senate leader and lower house speaker and comes right before the state’s board of canvassers meets next Monday to certify the results.
The needle is deep into the red zone, folks. A sitting president refusing for nearly two weeks now to accept the results of an election is something that has never happened in this country. And again, it’s not against any law because no one ever anticipated that any sitting president would do it.
We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves about being the world’s greatest democracy. And it was, for a while. But then, one of our two parties, driven by hatred and paranoia about how white people were beginning to lose their historical privileges and by a network of propagandists who stoked that hatred, became anti-democratic. It nominated an authoritarian for president.
He won an election, and he did a lot of shocking things, but always looming ahead was the next election, and the opportunity to vote him out. As a friend from a small troubled country said to me on Election Night in 2016, look, at least you have a chance to correct this in four years.
And correct it America did. And now, he and his henchmen seek to nullify it. It is terrifying.
We ought to be done congratulating ourselves about our democracy. We’re on the verge of congratulating ourselves to death. Because this is exactly how democracies die. If Trump somehow gets away with this, if he persuades four state legislatures to somehow invalidate Biden electors and either seat Trump electors or send the election to the House of Representatives, where Trump would win yet another undemocratic victory, then American democracy is dead.
And if he doesn’t, which is still the far, far likelier outcome, democracy in this country is still dying. Trump isn’t going away. And the Republican Party is now fully and completely an anti-democracy party. I’ve used this phrase before, but it’s worth reminding you of it right now: competitive authoritarianism.
It’s not my phrase; I’ve just read about it and maybe helped popularize it a little. It means a system of governance where superficially, things look democratic, because there’s a free press and an independent judiciary and what have you. But once you look under the hood, those things aren’t really so true, and the system is rigged so that one party always wins.
We have a free press. But we also have a propaganda press that is sometimes more powerful than the free press. We have an “independent” judiciary, but Republicans have waged an open war to fix it in their favor. And the gerrymandering and the inherent inequity of the Senate and so on. If we saw all this in a different country, we’d have no trouble calling it competitive authoritarianism.
And now, the leader of the competitive authoritarian party is in the midst of striking the ultimate blow against democracy: not honoring the results of an election. He will much sooner kill democracy than lose. Will our system let him?
I don’t think so. But we’ll soon see. The “system,” specifically, means the judges who’ll be called upon to defend the voting and the counting (they’ve been forthright so far); the Republican state officials and governors who’ll be called upon in coming days to certify the results; the Republican state legislatures whom Trump will pressure to invalidate electors; and, maybe, if it comes to that, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Do all of these people want power or democracy? We’ll know by Dec. 14.
In the meantime, we already know that we are not the country of our fairy tales. And the ways things look right now, it’s hard to see how we ever will be.
