Day: November 20, 2020
Sore loser sets himself up for more losses
Donald Trump is resisting the inevitable: the end of his term as President and his return to private life, where he no doubt anticipates financial and legal troubles galore. The American legal system provides him with ample opportunities to protest and delay while he and his minions claim with no factual basis whatsoever that the result of the November 3 election was fraudulent. He has already lost more than two dozen law suits and withdrawn a few more.
So now he is doing something unprecedented. He is trying to prevent certification of the election results in order to make it possible for Republican-controlled state legislatures to decide who won in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. In the first three of these, there are Democratic governors who can themselves endorse a winner; their choice prevails in Washington if two slates of electors arrive from the state capital when the Electoral College meets on December 14.
So the odds are long on this plot to negate the votes of millions of Americans, many of them Black and Latinx. Trump and the Republicans don’t care. They are essentially trying to turn the clock back to the original constitution, which counted each slave as 3/5* of a person for purposes of Electoral College votes but of course did not allow them (or women, or men who didn’t own property) to vote. Trump is a racist who doesn’t want Black and Latinx votes to count as much as a white person’s. Lindsey Graham was explicit about his concern in discussing mailed ballots:
If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.
I’m pretty sure what some people are calling a “coup” (note the Trumpian locution) won’t work, not least because of those Democratic governors. There may still be some uncertainty as to how this will all shake out, but it won’t likely be in Trump’s favor. Nor will he be remembered well for attempting it. While his “base” remains mostly loyal for now, the passage of time has a way of giving people with even a modicum of brains and conscience pause for reflection. I know there is a wildly optimistic premise in that remark.
From another angle, I am rather enjoying the repeated failures of Trump’s expensive and mendacious team of supposed lawyers, led by Rudy Giuliani. They have disgraced themselves both in court and in public. Disbarring might be too good for them. People who in public allege malfeasance and offer no substantial evidence for it merit universal shunning. May they never find another sucker client.
That’s what Trump is. A sucker and a loser, one who is compounding his losses with every passing day. He hopes to get lucky in one court or another, but so far at least it isn’t happening. His consolation prize will be continued control over the remnants of the Republican party and a base too small to win an election. Let him run again in 2024, if he isn’t in prison, so he can lose again.
*I originally wrote 2/3 here. Apologies.
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Stevenson’s army, November 20
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My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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