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.
Yes, thankfully, Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall (but he very nearly fell on us). Your analysis of the undemocratic nature of our electoral process was spot on. It needs constitutional reform, but I’m not expecting that to occur in my lifetime. One of the other undemocratic features of our system, bequeathed by the racist slave state founders, is the Senate, which by its very existence disenfranchises voters in every high- and medium-population state. For example, each of California’s two Democratic senators represents 19,756,112 people; each of Wyoming’s two Republican senators represents 289,380 people (July 2019 U.S. Census estimates), meaning that every Wyoming resident has 68 times more Senate representation than every California resident. That simple fact will offset the demographic advances of the Democratic Party for years, maybe decades, to come.
Excellent point on the unbalanced Senate demographics, Tom. We could really really use another constitutional convention to update our democracy. But I agree with you, nothing of the sort will happen in our lifetime.
I just reread my recent comment and realized that seven of its words don’t make sense. I should have left well enough alone and omitted the phrase “bequeathed by the racist slave state founders.” The compromise favoring slave states was the grotesquely racist three-fifths-of-a-person definition of enslaved people, which gave slave states a big, undeserved boost in the House and the Electoral College (by treating one, and only one, type of “property” as “three-fifths human”). The two-senators-regardless-of-state-population compromise didn’t have much, if anything, to do with slavery per se; there were small northern states, too, and even small population slave states expected to grow substantially over time. I should sleep on these comments before sending them!
With and without those seven words, Tom, you, as always made tremendous sense.
Hey, Bruce.
You are spot on.
I was amazed by how smoothly the voting process and the counting of the ballots went. Kudos to all who made that happen from both parties.
I was also amazed at how many people voted for Trump. They moved from a group who may have been duped in 2016 to part of the problem of America in 2020. We need to restore Civics beginning in grade school (and many other things). America cannot have nearly 50% of the population brainwashed, deluded, ignorant, and living in a false version of reality.
I was amazed at how incompetent their plan was carried out. Good for the judicial system!
And, I am deeply relieved that Biden won. It buys us some time to undo much damage and to do things that will, hopefully, prevent the election of the next autocrat and to take preventative measures to our system.
I always appreciate your posts.
Thanks, Tom. Biden’s victory seems to be about the only thing that went right in 2020, but it was a big thing. It mitigates a level of pain that is nearly impossible to contemplate.