The Trump Era Could Only End in a Final Attack on Democracy
On November 7, former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.” The very question, Mulvaney insisted, insulted the president and his supporters. “Most of the inquirers,” he sneered, “are the same people who still don’t understand why nearly half the country voted for Mr. Trump.” The delusional belief that Trump would refuse to accept victory was yet more evidence Trump’s critics remained out of touch with the real Americans who supported him.
Republican behavior in the Trump era has often followed a pattern: First, Donald Trump floats a wild notion into the atmosphere. Then Republicans dismiss the possibility that he would do it. Then he does it. Then they justify it.
This mode of response began when Trump first ran for president, prompting Republican officials to indignantly dismiss the prospect he could win as an insult to their party. Now we have reached the point where a dozen Republican senators, and well over a hundred members of the House, are joining his demands to discard the clear result of the election and hand him an unelected second term.
As is the case with nearly every bad thing in the world, this one has produced a range of responses, some of which exaggerate its severity or immediacy. So it should be reiterated that Trump’s bid to overturn the election is not going to succeed, and has been doomed since at least the time Mulvaney’s column ran. Had the election results been just a couple tenths of a percent closer, Republicans would have had the opportunity to challenge the results, perhaps by persuading the Supreme Court to discard mail ballots that arrived after Election Day.
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