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WASHINGTON (AP) – Winston Churchill was not known for not having said his thoughts. One of them was, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other forms that have been tried.”
President Donald Trump, who has professed an admiration, if not a thorough knowledge of the British Prime Minister, puts Churchill’s observation to one of his greatest tests by refusing to accept the results of an election. who gave victory to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, calls this a “dangerous path” for the United States.
Trump forced to dust off the mysteries of Electoral College procedures, which for most of the nation’s history has been a formality and not an instrument for overthrowing people’s votes.
A sitting US president is trying, for the first time, to convince the people that they should not believe in numbers that clearly demonstrate his rival’s victory. Rather, Trump is making baseless allegations of massive fraud, demanding recounts and calling for audits in an attempt to discredit the outcome and in so doing bring democracy itself to trial.
It’s possible that the mercurial president is one tweet away from a change of mind, but so far that’s not the case. And the vast majority of his fellow Republicans allow him to play that.
Obama, who invited Trump to the White House shortly after Trump was elected four years ago and pledged to cooperate in the transfer of power, is not shocked that a man who “never admits his loss ”refuses to acknowledge his defeat now.
“I’m more troubled that other Republican officials, who clearly know better, are accepting it, are making him happy in this way,” Obama told CBS “60 Minutes”. “This is one more step in the delegitimization not only of the new Biden administration, but of democracy in general. And it is a dangerous path.
With one eye on Trump, Republicans can have the other set on Georgia, where they want his energy to help their candidates win two rounds in the Senate in January and ensure at a minimum that Biden faces a government divided. Republicans have seen how Trump beats dissidents, and few have chosen this momentous moment to meet him.
“Republicans are staying with him out of fear,” said Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert who worked in White House communications under Ronald Reagan. “Fear has always worked for Trump. Temper tantrums have always paid off.
“Republicans fear that if they don’t support him, a midnight tweet will cost them Georgia,” he said. More broadly, “they don’t want to make him angry”.
Trump is not only using his influence over the party but also the levers of government to keep Biden at bay for at least a while.
A little-known agency outside Washington, the General Service Administration, delayed Biden’s recognition as president-elect, denying him access to the money, offices and machines regularly granted to the incoming team . Biden was also denied the confidential briefings previous presidents shared with presidents-elect so that growing threats to national security did not take the next administration and the country by surprise. Trump installed loyalists in the Pentagon and sacked his defense secretary after Biden’s victory.
In the meantime, a contagion of lies has spread from the losing side, amplified on social media and given by Trump himself.
In Philadelphia, a besieged city commissioner from the conduct and counting group said he was stunned by the traction the mad stories of fraud had gained in the state that won Biden’s victory . The commissioner, Al Schmidt, is a Republican.
“One thing I can’t understand is how hungry people are to consume lies,” he told CNN. When asked if he held Trump himself responsible for this, Schmidt said, “People should be aware that there are bad actors lying to them.”
During a hiatus from even more pressing election matters, his team verified the voting allegations of the deceased. “We researched,” Schmidt said. “Not a single one of them voted in Philadelphia after their deaths.”
Trump is also making unsubstantiated allegations of unfairness in five states, repeating allegations even when they have been firmly debunked. This while his supporters hail the media’s calls to run when those calls get through and denounce the calls as illegitimate when they do not.
Not everyone in the public service shares the timidity of GOP lawmakers when it comes to standing up to Trump.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency quelled the rumor after an unfounded rumor about voting abuse and joined state election officials in a statement saying the election was “the most sure of American history ”.
By secure, they meant that there was no evidence that a voting system deleted or lost votes, altered votes “or was in any way compromised”. It was a clear repudiation of Trump’s baseless accusations.
States have until December 14 to complete the count and certify the results. It is also the day when delegations from electoral colleges are due to meet in their respective states to vote and count electoral votes, with a joint session of Congress scheduled for January 6 to confirm the count and declare the official result. It’s a thick process with pro-forma minutiae that Americans rarely need to understand, but this time probably could.
The United States has long promoted the vanity that it is the global beacon of democracy. Now, the most essential tool of democracy, the vote, is under attack.
The story of the presidential elections overnight, the next day or even weeks of indecision later has been one of candidates swallowing the bitterness of defeat and paving the way for the winner. The presidential transitions took place as if through muscle memory. The peaceful transfer of power has never been questioned in living memory until now.
The presidential election of 1876, when Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, appeared to win, was perhaps the closest to the United States in today’s conflict, for Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, to have eventually declared the winner after reaching an agreement to secure the elections. vote in three southern states in exchange for the effective end of reconstruction.
This election, unlike this one, did not involve an incumbent trying to cling to power. Neither do others who occupy an important place in more recent history.
In 1960 Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated Republican Richard Nixon by only about 112,000 votes out of over 68 million votes, although Kennedy holds a decisive advantage in the Electoral College. Nixon felt cheated and considered challenging the result, but refused, conceding the day after the election.
Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000, won the popular vote by about 540,000 votes out of 100 million cast. But he conceded twice – first prematurely on election night, and then again weeks later, when a Supreme Court ruling handed Florida and a constituency majority, 271-266, to Republican George W. Bush.
Bush had turned to the High Court with a legal case based not on fraud but on his claim that voters were denied equal protection because Florida did not have proper standards for recounts.
In 2016, Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a total of 77,000 votes; Democrat Hillary Clinton called it on election night and publicly conceded it the next day. His advantage in the popular vote of nearly 3 million has fueled grievances among his supporters to this day, but the arithmetic of the constituency was inexorable and could not be questioned.
Obama then welcomed Trump to the White House in an exhibition to the world of the rituals of an American democratic transition.
In 2008, Obama had received a similar grace. It was then that Republican rival John McCain conceded in front of a crowd of supporters, converting their boos at the mention of Obama’s name into cheers and applause for the Democrat, for the process and for the historic achievement of the first black American. to win the presidency.
“I wish the man who was my old opponent and who will be my president good luck,” McCain said.
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