I am not remotely surprised that, more than a month after the election, President Donald Trump refuses to concede that he lost — and that he keeps spouting cockamamie conspiracy theories to claim that he actually won.
I am not surprised that Trump is filing lawsuits and lobbying Republican state officials — such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia — to throw out the state’s election results and appoint electors pledged to him.
I am not surprised that most national Republicans are too cowardly to challenge Trump’s attempt to usurp our democracy. In a Washington Post survey of GOP members of Congress, only 27 admitted that President-elect Joe Biden won the election, two said that Trump won and 220 avoided the question.
I’m only surprised that Trump’s tactics are failing so miserably. His campaign is 1-48 so far in court and the election results have already been certified by all of the battleground states. It seems a foregone conclusion that on Jan. 20 Biden will be inaugurated as president.
In June, I took part in post-election “war games” organized by the nonpartisan Transition Integrity Project. We foresaw Trump’s attempts to steal the election and even the mechanisms that he would use to do so. What we didn’t expect was that his power grab would fall so flat. As Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown Law, who was one of the organizers of this project, wrote in The Post, most of the exercises “reached the brink of catastrophe, with massive disinformation campaigns, violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
What did we miss? How have we avoided catastrophe so far?
There have been some happy surprises that we did not anticipate. Take, for example, William Barr. Barr mangled the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller, appointed a special counsel to investigate the FBI and forced prosecutors to go easy on Trump cronies Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Yet even he refuses to lend the Justice Department imprimatur to Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud.
Most local Republican officials have also been surprisingly resistant to Trump’s pressure. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, has stood up for the integrity of his state’s vote. Another hero has been Aaron Van Langevelde, one of two Republican members of the four-person Michigan board of state canvassers. The other Republican on the board abstained, but Van Langevelde voted to certify the Michigan election results (Biden won by more than 154,000 votes) and delivered a “Mr. Smith Goes to Lansing” oration to explain why: “As John Adams once said, we are a government of laws, not men. This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.”
Republican judges at both the state and federal level have been surprisingly staunch in refusing to intervene to save Trump from defeat. Even jurists appointed by Trump have ruled against him, and the Supreme Court so far hasn’t come to his rescue as he expected.
So was the Transition Integrity Project overly alarmist? I don’t think so. If Biden hadn’t won with 306 electoral votes and more than 81 million popular votes, the odds are that the crisis we foresaw would have happened.
Imagine if, as Bill Kristol has speculated, 6,000 votes had flipped in Arizona and Georgia and 11,000 in Wisconsin. Trump would have been at 269 electoral votes — one short of victory — and the pressure would have been ratcheted up to the red zone on Republican officials and judges to deliver just one more state for the maximum leader. I suspect that more GOP officials would be willing to sacrifice their reputations and our democracy in a winning cause than in a losing one.
There is no room for complacency about our post-election crisis. Democracy has almost certainly survived, but it was, as the Duke of Wellington said of the battle of Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw.”
Next time we may not be so lucky. And given how closely our country remains divided politically, and how readily so much of the GOP has embraced authoritarianism (some Trump supporters are even calling for him to impose martial law), the odds are that there will be another election crisis in our future.