His grip is loosening, but his cult is strong

The signs are few and far between. Republican members of an election board in Michigan that had divided on certifying results in Biden’s favor reversed itself and did so last night. Senator McConnell has criticized the Administration’s plan for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Other Republican senators are keeping quiet on the many court challenges and the validity of the election results. Rudy Giuliani, the President’s personal lawyer, embarrassed himself in a Pennsylvania courtroom when he was unable to cite specific examples of election fraud.

Trump himself is pulling out all the stops. He claimed in a tweet that more people voted in Milwaukee than were registered to vote there. That lie was easily debunked. He fired his own appointee in charge of election security, because that official contradicted the President’s claim that there was widespread fraud. Trump is spreading rumors of his intention to run again in 2024, a prospect belied both by his poor physical condition and the likelihood he’ll spend the next four years and more in court trying to fend off lawsuits and Internal Revenue Service charges. He continues to ignore the elephant in the room: an epidemic that has now killed more than 250,000 Americans on his watch and is accelerating rapidly. Another 50,000 or so will likely die before Trump leaves office.

Still, the fan base remains strong. His voters overwhelmingly believe Biden did not legitimately win and that Trump should not concede. They like his effort to contest the election results in court, an effort that has so far produced no significant change in the vote totals and more than two dozen judicial losses. While quite a few Republican governors and mayors are issuing orders to compel people to wear masks, Trump’s loyalists–even some in intensive care units infected with Covid-19–claim the virus doesn’t exist or isn’t worse than the flu. They remain intent on their freedom not to wear a mask. It’s almost as if there is an epidemic of self-delusion, which is carried not by a virus but by a adherence to the cult of a failed president.

Biden meanwhile is building up his administration, staying calm but clear about the virus as his first priority. He will be lucky: the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that have proven highly effective will be available in millions of doses about the time he takes office January 20. But it will still be six months or more before most of the population can be vaccinated. The Trumpians will resist and likely label the vaccines Biden hoaxes. The irony of course is that they are partly the result of Trump’s own early decision to pour government money into developing and producing them. He convinced people that the virus was a hoax but also spent billions to inoculate the country against it.

Contradiction and incoherence were never obstacles for Trump and his followers. They simply don’t care about consistency, logic, or science. Their main preoccupation is with their own identity as real Americans, by which they mean white Christians. Yes, there appear to have been some shifts in voting toward Trump among white women, Latinos and black males. But his cult remains overwhelmingly white and male. They are however in demographic decline and increasingly will, as Lindsay Graham has avowed openly, have trouble winning elections if everyone is allowed to vote. Still, there is no sign that the Republican Party is preparing to reconsider its white nationalist course. Trump’s cult remains strong, even if his grip on power is loosening.