Even as President Trump’s grotesque coup attempt splutters and stalls, moving from the realm of long-shot possibility to impossible fascistic dream, the country stands to amplify the damage done if we collectively downplay the reality of this failed attempt. Chief among this damage would be a failure not only to hold the president accountable for his attack on America, but much more importantly, to hold accountable the larger Republican Party for its role in encouraging and benefitting from his dead-ender claims that he has actually won the election.
The president has without a shred of evidence claimed massive fraud in swing states that he lost. In other words, the president is attacking the basic operations of our democracy, pretending that the election can’t be trusted. Beyond this, by asserting that he should be president while quite obviously being aware that what he says about vote fraud is a lie, the president is trying to seize the presidency illicitly.
Hence, a “coup” is the right term to describe this effort — yet many of us have felt for the past two weeks that the clearly authoritarian ends have been at odds with the incompetent means, perhaps exemplified by the infamous press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Many in the media have debated how to balance their coverage of Trump’s machinations so as not to give them too much credence and unnecessarily lend credibility to an attempt likely bound to fail (which, incidentally, reinforces the degree to which Trump’s hold on power has always depended so much on how the media chose to normalize his outrageous behavior). The Democrats, too, have struggled with a proper approach, largely opting to follow Joe Biden’s lead to laugh off the president’s attempt as something that would be overwhelmed by reality (i.e., the continued counting and certification of votes that Trump claimed to be fraudulent).
But this double quality of the attempt — half sinister, half Three Stooges — shouldn’t distract us from the crucial support Trump has received from the Republican Party and the great benefits the GOP has received from the attempt, even as it has fallen short of reversing the election. Nothing was ever going to stop Trump from decrying the election results, but his sustained project since November 3 to discredit them would not have been possible without GOP politicians giving cover for his lies and propaganda. Indeed, in some respects, such as the way that Pennsylvania Republicans ensured an appearance of Election Day fraud by not allowing the counting of mail-in ballots until November 3, larger GOP complicity in his plot to subvert the election results has existed since before the election.
At the federal level, even as elected officials like Mitch McConnell have seen that Donald Trump’s attempt to illicitly hold power was very likely not to succeed, the benefit from the president effectively undermining Joe Biden’s legitimacy in the eyes of Trump voters has been simply golden for them. And so McConnell and others in Congress simply had no objection to a president’s unprecedented attempt to undermine faith in voting, both to advance their war on Joe Biden and their larger war on a Democratic Party that has won the majority vote in 7 of the last 8 elections — a record of success, as Ronald Brownstein writes, that is historically unprecedented for an American political party.
Though cannier operators like McConnell have couched their support in pseudo-legalistic language like the president having every right to pursue his options, they are completely aware of the larger damage done to the public trust from the president’s false claims. McConnell and others could also have easily shut down the hopes of the president and some of his advisors that they might persuade state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan (meanwhile, some Republican politicians, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, are more actively encouraging such a strategy). Once again, the GOP is letting the president do the dirty work of sticking a shiv in democracy, providing them with plausible deniability while reaping all the benefits of further driving the Republican base into a frenzied belief that the GOP must be empowered to do literally anything to stop the corrupt Democrats from gaining power. As has been the case throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, the long-term beneficiary of his overt attacks on democracy has been the Republican Party.
A big part of why Trump’s lies about voter fraud are so powerful in riling up the GOP base is that they’re inseparable from the white supremacism that has been at the center of his appeal. As Jacob Weisberg put it in a Trumpcast podcast last week, there is a “racist subtext” to Trump’s accusations when the fraud is about heavily African-American cities like Detroit and Philadelphia — it is essentially saying “that black people voting is illegitimate or cheating.” The absence of any GOP criticism of this underlying racism is no surprise, given that the Republican Party has gone all in with placing white grievance politics at the center of its electoral appeal.
Of course, Trump himself also clearly stands to gain from the same polarization and discrediting of democracy that benefits the larger GOP. As The New York Times reports, the president himself seems to be giving up on hopes of reversing the election results:
There is no grand strategy at play, according to interviews with a half-dozen advisers and people close to the president. Mr. Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next, seeing how far he can push his case against his defeat and ensure the continued support of his Republican base.
There is also the crucial fact, as many have pointed out, that the president has a great interest in maximizing his ability to avoid the various legal actions coming at him once he leaves the presidency. To his addled mind, creating ambiguity about whether he might still be the president even after Joe Biden takes office might be viewed as a last-ditch strategy to protect himself.
But the fact of the matter is that President Trump has been defeated, while the GOP retains power in the Senate and in governor’s mansions and statehouses across the country. It is the ranks of GOP politicians, not Donald Trump, who have gerrymandered themselves into nearly-invincible minority rule in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin, who implement voter suppression policies in states like Texas and Georgia, and who clearly see that majority rule and democracy have become their enemy. These Republicans are the true, long-term beneficiaries of Trump’s attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote. Being able to “win” without majorities, by arguing that some people’s votes should not be counted, is the Republican Party’s path forward, a way of faking democratic legitimacy while destroying democracy in practice.
A few weeks back, I wrote that once the election was over, Democrats would be well-served by roasting Republicans for their pre-election efforts to subvert the outcome. The same recommendation applies to their post-election efforts, which are if anything even more transparently anti-democratic. But what’s now much clearer to me is the way in which Democrats need to consciously pull themselves away from keeping Donald Trump at the center of the political universe, and level these critiques at the Republicans who will be their opponents going forward. Trump has served as a distraction from the necessary broader indictment of anti-democratic intent that animates the current GOP, and this is all the truer today now that he’s lost re-election. The larger issue, though, and perhaps the most pressing question for our country, is how not simply to call out but to curb the GOP’s anti-democratic turn.
Last week, historian Sean Wilentz told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall that Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president-elect “would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.” But how is Wilentz’s bleak assessment any less true for a Republican Party that accedes to or abets the president’s attempts to hold power against the will of the voters? In the face of such treasonous impulses, critiques by Democrats will soon fall far short: for the sake of the survival of American democracy, they will need a concrete strategy to rally the public and roll back the Republicans’ increasing secession from democracy. Anything less would itself constitute a separate, unforgivable betrayal of the American people.