Trump
Is the Election Crisis He Is Warning About
When a sitting President
threatens to delay a sacrosanct American ritual, you’d better listen.
July 31, 2020
On Thursday morning,
minutes after the worst U.S. economic data in seventy years were released and
barely two hours before an American hero who risked his life for the right to
vote was laid to rest, the President of the United States proposed delaying
this fall’s election. Amid the coronavirus
pandemic and widespread remote voting, Donald
Trump said that it would be the most “INACCURATE &
FRAUDULENT Election in history.” Why shouldn’t the U.S. “Delay the Election,”
he asked, “until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”
It was not the first
time that the President has raised this particular canard—and a canard it is, a
radical move that is not within his power to make happen—but it was by far his
most inflammatory, destabilizing, and provocative attempt yet to call into
question the legitimacy of the November election, in which he is trailing the
Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, in virtually every poll. Has there ever been a
President who has done more to undermine American democracy? Trump himself has
become the crisis of confidence in our political system that he warns about. He
is his own self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don’t be sucked in,
Trump’s critics immediately warned. He is trolling us. He is distracting us. Of
course, they had a point. It was no accident that the tweet came at 8:46 a.m., sixteen minutes after the
government reported that the U.S. economy had contracted by nearly ten per cent
in the second quarter, the biggest drop in quarterly G.D.P. ever. There is so
very much for Trump to distract us from. Trump’s tweet came just a day after a
grievous milestone was reached: a hundred and fifty thousand Americans dead
from covid-19. And it was
only a couple of hours before John Lewis, the longtime congressman and
civil-rights leader, was laid to rest in what amounted to a state funeral—minus
the decidedly unwelcome head of state.
But this was not merely
one of Trump’s transitory diversions, in a week already full of them. (Remember
the demon-sperm-doctor controversy? The transparently racist appeal to those
living the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” free of low-income interlopers?) In fact,
Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of the upcoming election has been intensifying
for months, as his poll standing has sunk. Trump’s “Twitter Richter scale,” as
the Democratic lawyer Norm Eisen put it to me the other day, was already
registering “off the charts” on the subject. Indeed, when I asked Bill
Frischling, who runs the Factbase Web site, which tracks Trump’s public
statements and tweets, to look at how often the President had questioned voting
or suggested that an election would be rigged, unfair, or otherwise
compromised, he came up with seven hundred and thirteen references by Trump
since 2012, the vast majority occurring in clusters as the elections of 2016,
2018, and 2020 neared. Already, Factbase has recorded ninety-one instances of
such rhetoric from Trump this year, a number which is all but sure to escalate.
So, sorry, we cannot
just ignore it when the President threatens to cancel an election. This is the
kind of statement that should haunt your dreams. It is wannabe-dictator talk.
It is dangerous even if it is not attached to any actions. And those who think
that some actions will not follow have not been paying attention. My alarm
stems from having covered Russia when Vladimir
Putin was dismantling the fragile, flawed democratic
institutions that the country had established after the fall of the Soviet
Union. It stems from reading history. It stems from having watched the past
four years in America, where, day by day, the unthinkable has happened and been
justified, rationalized, and explained away.
Some of Trump’s
supporters are already normalizing his attacks on the foundations of American
democracy; he has succeeded in getting us used to the idea, to having a
conversation that should never be happening. In April, Biden warned, at a
fund-raiser, that Trump might attempt to “kick back the election” if he was
losing. At the time, Steve Guest, the director of rapid response for the
Republican National Committee, responded, “Joe Biden is off his rocker to make
such an irresponsible allegation without any evidence.” Well, now we have the
evidence. And what did Steve Guest have to say on Thursday? When I e-mailed
him, he did not respond. His Twitter feed was silent. “Those are the incoherent,
conspiracy-theory ramblings of a lost candidate who is out of touch with
reality,” the Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said, about Biden, back in
April. “President Trump has been clear that the election will happen on
November 3rd.” So what are we supposed to think now?
Trump’s most senior
Cabinet officials have shown that they, too, are willing to follow their leader
down even this most dubious of paths. Attorney General William
Barr, asked during congressional testimony earlier this week, before
Trump’s tweet, about the possibility of a delayed election, refused to rule it
out, dismissively saying that he had “never looked into it.” On Thursday,
shortly after Trump’s tweet, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo refused to answer
the question, as well. “I’m not going to enter a legal judgment on that on the
fly,” Pompeo, a Harvard Law School graduate who is likely quite familiar with
the Constitution, said. He nonetheless added, “In the end, the Department of
Justice and others will make that legal determination,” which is not at all how
it will work.
Just as problematic were
the lukewarm-at-best defenses of American democracy offered by some of the
Republicans who did comment on Thursday. “We’ve had elections every November
since about 1788, and I expect that will be the case again this year,” the
Senate Majority Whip, John Thune, of South Dakota, said. “I don’t think it’s a
particularly good idea,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump’s golfing buddy and confidant
from South Carolina, said. “Expect”? “Particularly”? Not exactly a rousing case
for voting. Perhaps most astonishing was this comment from Senator Kevin
Cramer, of North Dakota: “I think that, if you guys take the bait, he’ll be the
happiest guy in town. I read it. I laughed. I thought, My gosh, this is going
to consume a lot of people, except real people. And it was clever.”
The fact that putting
off an election is outside the power of the Presidency, that the Constitution
clearly prescribes a transition of power on January 20th, 2021, and that it
would take an act of Congress to do anything about changing the time, place,
and manner of the election is certainly relevant. But there are many ways to
cancel elections, and not all of them involve literally failing to hold the
balloting. Denying access to the polls, questioning the legitimacy of the
results, throwing up legal challenges, forcing voters to stand in long lines:
these have all happened, in our lifetimes, in the United States—we don’t have to
look to foreign tyrannies for examples of how to influence elections. So was it
really reassuring when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to put the
matter to rest by calling the November election date “set in stone”? When House
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “We should go forward with our
election. . . . No way should we ever not hold an election on
the day that we have it”?
The President did not
back off his words. He did not delete his tweet; instead, he pinned it to the
top of his feed for part of the day. After hours of criticism, including from a
founder of the Federalist Society, who said that it was ground for his
impeachment and removal, Trump’s unconvincing effort at spin was to suggest
that it was all a brilliant ploy to get “the very dishonest LameStream Media to
finally start talking about the Risks to our Democracy from dangerous Universal
Mail-in Voting.” But, in fact, the risk to American democracy is Trump himself.
Later, at a news conference, Trump yammered and
stammered his way through questions about whether he really favored a delay.
“Do I want to see a day changed? No. But I don’t want to see a crooked
election,” he said. He again suggested that the election could be “fraudulent,”
“fake,” and “rigged.” It was not a denial. He never disavowed what he had said
earlier. On Thursday, Trump careened over a cliff, and the question is, whom is
he going to take with him?
After Trump’s tweet, I
spent much of the day listening to the funeral of the late Representative
Lewis, who was mourned as an American saint, a hero who staked his life on the
premise that voting in elections was the truest expression of our democracy.
Trump’s three predecessors were in attendance, their presence a visible rebuke
to the current President and a reminder of his absence. Trump’s name was never
spoken out loud. It did not have to be.
The drill is sadly
familiar by now. These funerals of public figures in the Trump era have become
the mark of our divided and splintered politics, the gathering spaces at which
we are forced to take stock of the widening gap between our current President
and the state of his party and what the leaders of both parties once believed.
When John McCain, the Trump-resisting Republican senator from Arizona and a
Vietnam War hero, died, in 2018, we saw it. And, again, a few months later, for George H. W. Bush, the Republican
avatar of a vanishing East Coast-conservative establishment, whose last vote
for President was against Trump, in 2016.
Lewis’s sendoff was
always going to be a grand one. He was one of the last of the civil-rights
greats still with us. He had long ago guaranteed his place in the American
pantheon with that march in Selma, as a young man—and with the decades that
followed of irrepressible service and indefatigable activism for social justice
and equality under law. During the service, he was hailed as Martin Luther
King, Jr.,’s disciple, the heir of Gandhi and Mandela, a great-great-grandson
of slaves whose moral audacity and sheer bravery transformed him into “Saint
Lewis,” a would-be preacher who became the sermon himself.
But Trump’s tweet
provided the urgency of the moment, the infuriating and clarifying framing for
a funeral that took place when the rights for which Lewis fought—not the least
of which is the right for all eligible voters to cast their ballot this
fall—are under threat as never before. Bill Campbell, the former mayor of
Atlanta, told the mourners at Atlanta’s storied Ebenezer Baptist Church that
Lewis had conveyed to him a final wish when they last met. “He pulled me closer
and he whispered, ‘Everyone has to vote in November. It is the most important
election ever,’ ” Campbell said. “I promised him that with every fibre in
my body. . . . If you truly want to honor this American hero,
make sure that you vote.”
At McCain’s funeral,
Barack Obama delivered a eulogy in which he rebuked the “small and mean and
petty” politics of the moment, and the “trafficking in bombast, in insult, in
phony controversies and manufactured outrage.” This was back in the late summer
of 2018, when it still seemed as though Trump’s hateful words and tweets were
the threat, and when it was still news when the former President obliquely
criticized the current one.
But Lewis died at a time
when Trump, facing reëlection he fears he may lose, has made his threats more
explicit, and Obama’s response this time was more direct, too. In his eulogy
for Lewis, the former President brought the church to its feet by denouncing
modern-day Bull Connors and George Wallaces and by making explicit references
to the police who killed George Floyd in Minneapolis and to the federal
law-enforcement agents that Trump has ordered to violently suppress peaceful
protests. “Democracy isn’t automatic,” he warned. “It has to be nurtured, it
has to be tended to.”
Most of all, Obama’s
eulogy was an extended love letter not just to Lewis but to the voting rights
that he had been willing to sacrifice his life for. Obama demanded action, and
he was specific: renewing the Voting Rights Act provisions that have been
gutted by the Supreme Court in recent years and blocked by Republicans in
Congress, and eliminating the Senate filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow
relic.”
So often, Donald Trump
looks to the worst of the past in making a hash of America’s present. He is,
bizarrely, even now running as a defender of the Confederacy, the toxic legacy
of which Lewis spent his life trying to undo. Obama, in contrast, is the
perpetual conjurer of a better American future, and there are few who heard his
soaring peroration who could not have been inspired by its vision of a vibrant,
free, inclusive democracy.
But perhaps the fierce urgency of the day was best
summed up by a scene that caught my eye as the funeral was ending. It was a
glimpse of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who came up short in her run for Georgia
governor, two years ago. Like all the other mourners, she was wearing a face
mask because of the pandemic. On it was written a single word: “Vote.”
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer, was the
founding editor of Politico Magazine. In September, she will publish, with
Peter Baker, “The Man Who Ran Washington.”
