Former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He really did.
It might have been a narrow loss — a matter of 40,000 votes in a handful of key states — but it was a loss all the same. And any objections to the conduct of that election, at this point, are moot, at least insofar as the 2020 result is concerned.
How this reality is lost on Republican state legislators even today is completely baffling. It is, in fact, intensely discouraging to see legislators in Wisconsin talking about decertifying Joe Biden’s victory there in 2020. The 2022 election is almost upon us now. Such a pointless exercise would accomplish nothing — well, except to enable a lot of very dumb behavior by Trump and other Republicans who should know better.
I’m aware that many Republicans — most, even — feel a need to skirt the issue of whether Trump rightfully lost. His Twitter account once struck fear in the hearts of GOP incumbents, and his endorsement is often effective — even when he endorses lousy candidates.
When asked whether Biden is legitimately the president, some Republicans want to avoid an outright denial, but they also don’t want to say it. (I have a lot more respect for the cutesy yet clear and affirmative answer that “Biden is the worst president of the United States,” which does, at least, contrary to the false headline at that link, clearly include an unmistakable admission that he is the elected president.)
This isn’t to paper over the very real issues that arose in 2020 due to the unusually large mail-in vote. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has said as much. It makes perfect sense to pass election integrity measures. Problems with the last election certainly justify thinking ahead to the conduct of the next one. But the point has to be to improve the next election — not to relitigate the last one.
The electorate is looking forward. Voters are already thinking about how to recover from the Biden years. They’re not interested in pretending Biden never won, or that his election was actually the result of some massive voter fraud conspiracy. They are not interested in embracing presidential sedevacantism. Besides, there’s no way that decertifying Biden’s win in any state or any number of states could possibly result in his being removed from the presidency.
If Trump wants to run in 2024, he needs to stop this obsessive behavior over 2020. He needs to start talking instead about what he would do if voters returned him to the White House. All he does by focusing on 2020 and demanding that other Republicans do the same is poisoning his own voter pool.
And if Trump doesn’t intend to run in 2024, he’s just further poisoning his legacy by refusing to accept what already happened. He and his political allies in Georgia began to dismantle what he accomplished in the White House when they helped convince Republicans not to vote in the January 2021 runoff, allowing Joe Biden to come to power with a Senate majority. As a consequence of this self-defeating behavior, Trump allowed Biden to start undoing his work in the lower courts.
And for what it’s worth, Trump has also already convinced 48% of the electorate that he committed a crime in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. One would think, or at least hope, that by now, he would have given up on whatever feeble efforts there ever were to prevent the winner of the electoral vote — that is, Joe Biden — from taking office.
For the moment, several polls show Trump very narrowly beating Joe Biden in a hypothetical rematch. That doesn’t mean Trump would actually win, though, nor does it mean that his obsession with 2020 is somehow helping him. Indeed, if he weren’t so fixated on 2020, he might be winning in those polls by 10 points.
However, if Trump spends the next six to 18 months relitigating his loss in the 2020 election, he is going to poison his own favorability and his own and his party’s chances, now and well into the future.
