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WWhen an American president is inaugurated, he is supposed to mark the height of American democracy and power. The elaborate ceremony is designed to convey the peaceful transfer of power and that no matter how bitterness the election is, the nation moves forward.
But when Joe Biden is inaugurated on Wednesday as the 46th US president, the ceremony will seem anything but. America arrives at the inauguration at an incredibly perilous time, just two weeks after a violent pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol and several Republican members of Congress voted against certification of the election results. For months, Donald Trump refused to recognize Biden as the rightful winner of the election – a belief shared by legions of his supporters. The ceremony will have a strong military presence due to threats of violence. Trump doesn’t bother to attend.
As Trump accelerated this dangerous moment, it was shaped by a deliberate Republican strategy to undermine confidence in the election and make voting more difficult. The myth of electoral fraud and repeated allusions to election theft have moved from marginal theories to the center of Republican ideology in recent decades. The refusal to accept the election and the attack on the Capitol are a consequence of this strategy.
“Donald Trump was definitely the spark and he had a lot of enablers and enablers, but the wood had been laid,” said Wendy Weiser, Democracy Program Director at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The strategy has been to slowly and steadily undermine Americans’ confidence in election security, to increase their belief in the existence of widespread electoral fraud in order to enable them to accept what would otherwise be perceived as truly illegitimate. and undemocratic. program to restrict access to voting. “
For years, Republicans have used misleading and flawed data to suggest that the election is threatened with fraud. In Kansas, former secretary of state Kris Kobach used the threat of non-citizen voting to justify a law requiring people to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote (the law has since been blocked by a federal court). In recent years, conservative lawyers have also used deceptive data analysis to suggest that voters lists are filled with ineligible voters.
In 2016, when Trump claimed that electoral fraud cost him the popular vote, it fitted perfectly into the narrative the Republican Party was starting to adopt.
Two years later, there were signs that questioning the election results was turning to Republican orthodoxy. Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, said it was “bizarre” and “strange” that Republicans fell behind in races in California as more mail-in ballots were counted after election night . When Trump began making similar claims last spring and summer that mail-in ballots would lead to fraud and cost him the election, few Republicans objected.
The party began to attack the ballot boxes and postal voting, which Republicans have long relied on. When Trump claimed there was something wrong as states continued to count ballots after election day, Republicans – with few exceptions – backed him as well. The rhetoric began to have real consequences, as supporters began to protest at counting sites and harass workers who were trying to count the ballots in the November election.
And by the time the electoral college was certified, efforts to undermine confidence in the vote had gone so far that they allowed two-thirds of the House Republican caucus and a dozen senators to support the idea of rejecting. entirely the election results. .
“It went from voter fraud in a particular election to a ‘stolen election’,” said Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers-Camden University who has studied allegations of voter fraud. “I don’t think it would have been so successful if the myth of fraud hadn’t been planted a long time ago.”
Kobach, a Trump ally who briefly led a White House panel to investigate voter fraud, said it was “entirely appropriate” for members of Congress to oppose certification of college votes electoral. He noted that since 2000, Democrats have repeatedly opposed the counting of electoral colleges for Republican presidential winners (in all of these cases, however, the effort was not supported by the Democratic candidate for election. Presidential, Hillary Clinton, who had previously conceded the race.).
He rejected the idea that there was a connection between raising concerns about voter fraud and the attack on Capitol Hill.
“I have spoken to a small audience and a very, very large audience about voter fraud over 100 times. Maybe several hundred times. It has never ignited passions for people to want to step on something and smash windows, ”he told The Guardian. “The idea that talking about the integrity of our elections is inflammatory is silly.”
Kobach, who has built a national reputation for focusing on voter fraud, also downplayed the importance of a Biden presidency in which a significant number of people do not accept him as a legitimately elected figure.
“I would say it’s going to be very similar to the last four years where you had a lot of people on the left thinking that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected because they believed that Russian interference caused him to be elected,” did he declare. “You will have many on the right who doubt that the results in these five states are accurate accounts of the legal votes in these five states, but I don’t think it will be that different.”
Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the polls closed in 2016.
Since last week’s constituency vote, several companies have announced that they are suspending donations to Republican members of Congress who voted against maintaining the election results. The hiatus comes after business interests have supported for years conservative groups that facilitated voter identification laws and extreme partisan gerrymandering that allowed Republicans to vote without fear of the consequences.
“People were prepared to tolerate this anti-democratic conduct up to a point. And then when it boiled over, when it got so extreme that people couldn’t ignore it, they became ready to repudiate it, ”Weiser said. “Seeing him so vividly all at once broke that complacency.”
Biden will be inaugurated on the Western Front of the Capitol on Wednesday amid growing rejection of this complacency. But convincing Trump supporters that the election was legitimate and overcoming the doubt sown in the US election may be an impossible task. We may have only started to see the consequences of the damage.
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