Today, Joe Biden will be elected president by the Electoral College. If you think this is some injustice or travesty or fraud, and that Donald Trump is being wronged, you are in error. It is you, the believer, who has been wronged.
All presidents help or harm their country in ordinary ways, and to varying degrees. Trump has inflicted many of those ordinary harms and benefits on the nation, much as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and all their predecessors did. Just because these harms and benefits are ordinary doesn’t mean they are mild. Indeed, as one would expect from the executive branch of a trillion-dollar leviathan, our presidents’ policies reshape our country for better and for worse.
Trump has been extraordinary, though, in severely reshaping one specific part of the country: his most loyal supporters.
However you account his effect on the country writ large, you should lament how Trump has harmed the souls of his followers. His dishonest (or alternatively, insane) performance since the election (claiming that the vote was stolen and then promoting or countenancing conspiracy theories to craft an unfalsifiable story that he deserved a second term) is Trumpism boiled down to its essence. It’s a more concentrated version of what he’s been doing all along: trying to destroy anyone he sees as disloyal and demanding increasingly extreme and immoral things from those who pledge loyalty to him.
An analogy: If anyone asked me advice about seeking a spouse, I would probably say, “You will need to be fiercely loyal to your husband or wife, right or wrong, so choose someone whose decisions you won’t mind fiercely defending.”
Everyone who decided to join Team Trump chose poorly. It was perfectly possible to vote for Trump, for his judges, for his tax cuts, without becoming an obeisant loyalist. It was perfectly possible to point out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of many of Trump’s critics without pledging slavish loyalty.
Yet, many signed their souls over. They defended his misdeeds as much as his good deeds. And after the election, they had to believe and defend increasingly crazy and harmful slanders and conspiracy theories in order to stay on his good side. If you dissented, you were cast as an evil sellout by his followers, and he wouldn’t defend you a bit.
Bill Barr, Trump’s (overly loyal) attorney general, has said no significant voter fraud has been found. Trump-appointed judges on all levels of the federal courts have ruled against the lawsuits aimed at overturning election results — often dismissing these cases with opinions that remark upon their absurdity.
To the impressionable, devoted follower, this only proves that these swampy deep-staters are in on it too, or at least that they are cowards in the face of a massive, evil conspiracy.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger is an “enemy of the people,” according to Trump, because he did his job and told the truth. Consider the implication here: In order to stay in Trump’s good graces and avoid a torrent of abuse from Trump and his followers, Raffensberger would have had to lie and betray his oath of office.
Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who still believe they need Trump’s support, felt compelled to join in Trump’s attacks on Raffensberger, calling on him to resign.
Here you see clearly what Trump has done. He’s dragged Perdue to the point where he attacks his own party’s state officials for not becoming a law unto themselves. Trump made Perdue, and hundreds of other Republicans, choose between him and the rule of law.
It is, of course, a choice. Nobody was forced to choose Trump to the point of rejecting truth and law. And I suppose it’s unsurprising that politics would be filled with so many who bow to political expediency. But a better man, and a normal president, would not demand so much debasement from his party mates and supporters. A good leader would not lay such moral traps before his own followers. But we weren’t given a good leader. We got Trump instead.
