Month: November 2020

INSTEAD OF MAKING AMERICA GREAT, TRUMP DAMN NEAR BLEW IT UP

The Grand Trump Finale is playing out like the massive close of a fireworks display, an insipid amalgam of his greatest hits, along with new explosions guaranteed to shake the rafters of our democracy.  As if he had to prove himself, The Donald’s pyrotechnic departure show reinforces the incontrovertible: When it comes to blowing stuff up, nobody does it better than 45.

Joe Biden delivered on his signature campaign promise, to “beat Trump like a drum.” He won a higher percentage of the popular vote than any challenger to a sitting president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. His electoral college margin was the same as Trump’s in 2016, a victory Trump characterized as a “landslide.” 

But, but, but, says the lame duck president, insisting with a straight face that he actually won this election by a huge margin.  The magnitude of his overwhelming victory will be seen, he promises, once all those Biden votes from Black people in places like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta are thrown out. Those ballots, Team Trump argues, were fraudulently cast through a system designed by living and dead leftist dictators in Venezuela and Cuba.

As much as this sounds like a farfetched, over-the-top Saturday Night Live sketch, it’s not. Instead, Trump’s latest (un)reality show poses the greatest threat to democracy in our lifetime. His brazen attempt to strong arm himself into four more years of chaotic autocracy by subverting the will of the voters appears almost certain to fail.  Yet, by so openly smashing the norms and values of our voting traditions, and by stomping on the weary fault lines of this 244-year-old democracy, Trump has left a blueprint for a less clumsy autocrat to skillfully execute in the years to come.

As every reputable news organization reports numerous times a day, there is simply no evidence of rampant voter fraud (here, here and here).  Consistent with what we have come to know as Trumpian Theater, the moving force is noise, not facts.  The noise in this case – the president’s constant talk about Democrats stealing the election – was designed as a predicate for Trump to actually steal the election.  He came frighteningly close to pulling it off.

Americans have long viewed the ballot box as the fulcrum of our democracy, an almost sacred form of governance personified by the motto, “Let The People Decide.”  Unfortunately, that sentiment was not shared by our founders.  They were, in fact, adamantly opposed to having the president elected by a direct vote of the citizenry.  Lacking cable news, social media and Nate Silver in the 18th century, their concern was that “the people” wouldn’t know enough to decide. 

As a result, we have a constitution that is not only silent on the popular vote, but actually sets up a system in which state legislatures determine the method of selecting electors, who in turn elect the president.  That means the only votes that count under the Constitution are those cast by 538 electors.  As the country evolved – in size and democratic values – the concept of involving the people in this process took off in a big way.  Presidential campaigns now run close to two years, all in search of the peoples’ votes. 

The Constitution, however, remains unchanged. The president is chosen by the electors designated in each state.  The fix, over time, was for states to pass legislation requiring its electors to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in their state. For the most part, this has worked, although not without hiccups.  On five occasions, most recently in 2000 and 2016, the candidate who won the popular vote lost the election based on the electoral college count.

As undemocratic as those results were, Donald Trump’s post-election machinations took things to a whole different level.  He and his deleterious legal team hatched a plot in a handful of swing states to override Biden’s popular vote victory there by trying to get Republican legislatures to send Trump-friendly electors off to the electoral college. This election nullification would ultimately need a handful of state legislatures to rescind their laws requiring electors to vote for the state’s popular vote winner. 

The false “massive election fraud” narrative that Trump introduced months before the polls opened was never going to work, in and of itself.  There were zero facts to back it up. Trump’s hope was that his fog of falsehoods would be widely accepted, providing cover for Republican leaders in states like Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania to, in effect, demolish Biden’s victory and instruct electors to vote for Trump. Fortunately, Republican leaders in those states did not have the appetite for such skullduggery. If they had, Trump’s electoral vote count would have gone from 232 to 284, and Biden’s would have dropped from 306 to 254.  

Sure, the whole con job would have ended up before the Supreme Court. Given the majority’s rapture with originalism – the notion that language should be interpreted in the context of its original intent – it is hardly farfetched to suggest that Trump would have prevailed, despite his 7 million vote deficit. After all, the founders had zero interest in a popular vote and gave the states the power to pick a president with electors of their choosing.  To originalist justices, the matter would have boiled down to this simple question: Were the electors selecting the president duly chosen by the state legislatures?  It wouldn’t matter that Trump lied about election fraud and pressured state lawmakers to pack the electoral college with his supporters.  

Although it appears that this second term heist has failed, our democracy will not be easily healed. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election.  A number of GOP congressional candidates who lost their races by overwhelming margins are following their leader by claiming fraud and refusing to concede. What happens next time when a more skillful Trumpian candidate loses the election by a thin margin, and needs only one state legislature to hand him an electoral college victory by rescinding the popular vote mandate?

Until now, no one in either party ever attempted to subvert the will of the voters through this kind of electoral college jujitsu.  Although Donald Trump didn’t succeed in blowing our democracy up, he caused it to take a great fall. 

 May our recovery and healing begin, so that our better angels can eventually put America back together again.

HOW DONALD TRUMP SOLD ME ON PATRIOTISM

Here’s a sentence you may never have expected to see in this space: Donald Trump has done more than any other president to instill a visceral sense of patriotism in me.

It’s taken me a while to figure this out, so let me explain.

A week ago, I sat in front of a blank computer screen, fully intending to compose a pre-election piece.  Bits and pieces of the past four years came back to me: the lies, the hate, the overt racism, the gratuitous cruelty, the abject meanness of this president. Some of it seemed unreal. Did he really put children in cages? Did he really coddle white supremacists? Did he really call the news media the “enemy of the people?” Of course he did. And so much more. 

I wanted to write about what a second Trump term might look like, should the pollsters and prognosticators blow it again.  An hour later, my screen was still blank, my brain a jumble of horrifying thoughts.

 I was, in the words of the late military strategist Herman Kahn, “thinking about the unthinkable.” As Kahn applied that phrase to nuclear war, he defined “unthinkable” as a mind-numbing sense of raw fear and terror that transcends language.  That’s what I felt, there at my desk, days before the election.  I couldn’t formulate a single sentence. Not only did I turn the computer off, I went cold turkey on what had become a steady diet of political podcasts, news and polling sites.

Anxiety does not come naturally to me, and the last place I expected to encounter it was in the political arena. In another lifetime, I was a newspaper reporter. I covered elections. Somebody won, somebody lost; I’d write the story and life went on.  Then I became an advocate, but even with a horse in the race – one that lost more times than I can count – I  never missed a minute of sleep.  Life still went on.  And so did the country.

This time was different.  You know that feeling you get when your kids, or another loved one, are MIA way after they said they would be home?  And you can’t reach them by phone?  You begin to imagine the worst, and then try to push those thoughts away because  . . . well, because they are just too terrifying – too unthinkable – to contemplate.  That’s what I, and I suspect many of us – were feeling during the days leading to this election.  This vote went way beyond the political. It was deeply personal.

Now trace those feelings to their roots. That’s where you will find patriotism.  Sitting before that blank screen and thinking the unthinkable was my aha moment. I learned how much I love this country only by arriving at the precipice of losing it.     

I came of age during the Vietnam War. I wrote obituaries for my hometown newspaper of boys I sat next to in high school, kids who, like me, had never heard of Vietnam and didn’t have the slightest idea what it was all about.  Patriotism in those tumultuous times was expressed in a  bumper sticker that read, “America: Love it or Leave it.”  It was a simple, jingoistic false dichotomy that deliberately omitted the third-party candidacy of “Change it.” 

Needless to say, those experiences did not turn me into a flag-waving, America-right-or-wrong kind of guy. There are many aspects of this country to greatly admire:  our exuberance for democracy, our international leadership in human rights, the freedoms of speech, religion, assembly and the press.  There are also a host of deep impediments blocking the pursuit of happiness for far too many Americans: people of color, those living in poverty, women, LGBTQ folks.  

Yet, the bottom line has always been that the institutions of our democracy – the  very architecture of our government – are equipped to solve those problems. The political cliché, “there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America,” contains more than just a kernel of truth. 

At least it used to.  The revelation that hit me, as I sat staring at the blank screen, was that I had been taking “all that is right with America” for granted.  Many previous presidents made policy decisions I vehemently disagreed with.  But they all, with the notable Nixon/Watergate exception, respected and upheld the norms, rules, laws and institutions that provide our very structure of governance. 

During these past four years, however, we’ve had a president who was guided by none of the above, a deeply troubled man whose only operating principle was to feed his voracious appetite of self-interest, regardless of the consequences.  The further he got into his term, the more brazen and reckless he became.  Weeks before the election, Trump was insisting that the Justice Department indict Barack Obama and Joe Biden on some phony, unspecified charge.  On election night, with tens of millions of ballots still to be tabulated, the president of the United States declared a totally fictitious victory and demanded that the counting cease. 

Just thinking about the extrapolation of this behavior over an additional four years, was enough to jar me out of my complacency. Although far from fragile, our democracy is by no means bullet proof.  With a second Trump term, it could well have been unrecognizable by 2024. Thankfully, in this year of cascading calamities, we finally caught a break: the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The Trump presidency changed me.  It forced me to see America in a new light.  Our democratic way of life should never be taken for granted. One man came perilously close to replacing it with his own brand of authoritarian selfishness.  The contemplation of that loss connected deeply with a love for this country that I never knew I had. 

My new bumper sticker?  AMERICA: LOVE IT SO YOU DON’T LOSE IT!