Hopefully, you accept that President Trump lost the election, but maybe you still want to see a hand recount in Georgia, you believe Trump, the RNC, and others in various states have every right to sue in court. Great. Those lawsuits are going forward, as is the hand recount.
Hopefully, you understand that the recount and the lawsuits will not change the outcome of the election. No recount will overturn 70,000 votes across Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, which is what Trump would need in order to win the election. The lawsuits, if you look at them, are not arguing that tens of thousands of votes were invalid or changed. They are instead making very small claims, and if the plaintiffs win, it won’t come close to changing the outcome in a single state.
Maybe you accept these facts but still want more investigations, are still upset about how poll watchers were treated, and still think mail-in ballots are fertile ground for fraud or coercion. Fine, but I have bad news for you: Trump has made it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about these issues now.
Trump is claiming, contrary to all evidence and all probability, that he won the election.
I won the Election!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 16, 2020
On one level, this is simply embarrassing: Our president is detached from reality and is unable to accept the totally unsurprising fact that he lost reelection. Three of the previous seven presidents lost reelection, and Trump now makes it a 50/50 question. Given his persistent unpopularity, and the fact that his first victory was against the colossally unlikable and untrustworthy Hillary Clinton, it’s not a shock that Joe Biden could swing five close states and thus win the election. Trump should be enough of a grown-up to grasp that.
On another level, it’s disturbing that Trump is not accepting the election. The presidency imposes duties on its holder. The president is obligated to take care with his speech and to not degrade trust in the rule of law and our democracy. Trump has never taken care with his speech, and in his current temper tantrum he is actively and deliberately undermining the public’s trust in the rule of law and our democracy.
It’s not much of a defense to say Democrats did the same thing in 2000 (calling Bush’s election a “coup d’etat”), 2004 (lodging a frivolous and dishonest protest against Ohio’s electoral votes), and 2016 (spying on Trump’s campaign, claiming his presidency was illegitimate, and peddling unfounded conspiracy theories that Russia stole the election). Trump is playing the same game, just far worse.
He’s peddling theories of a conspiracy so vast that it is impossible to imagine a legitimate democracy ever. Republican governors, voting machines, precinct-level volunteers, and even conservative media would have to be in on this conspiracy for it to make sense.
The president is wielding every little doubt about mail-in voting, every little question about vote counters, and every critique of politicized courts as a weapon against the legitimacy of our democracy right now. That makes right now the time to drop these topics. It’s nearly two years until our next round of elections for federal office, so we’ll have plenty of time to discuss, debate, and reform these areas if we just wait for Trump to go away.
Here’s an analogy: There’s plenty of reason to think public health authorities overstate the danger of alcohol. While your alcoholic neighbor is ruining a neighborhood cookout by smashing things and yelling at his wife for saying he’s drunk, plus threatening to get in the car to drive a few miles and buy a new bottle of Jack Daniels, that’s not the time to say “actually, there’s plenty of hyperbole about the dangers of alcohol …”
Yes, I, too, am bothered about mail-in ballots and Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court rewriting election law. So let’s get this conspiracy-theorizing crank out of the way so that we can really address these issues.
