Republicans, Now Is the Time to Step Up
It’s
not too late to end up on the right side of history.
Opinion
columnist
- Nov. 6, 2020
Speaking from the White House briefing
room on Thursday night,
President Trump tried to delegitimize the 2020 election. This attempt may have
been shuddersome, disgraceful and dangerous. But there’s one thing it was not:
a surprise.
On the contrary. It was tediously
predictable, exactly what you’d expect of a man who has spent four years
lumbering through Washington, crushing custom after custom and norm after norm.
As Trump faltered on the brink of losing a presidential election — the first
incumbent to do so in 28 years — he declared, baselessly, that absentee votes
legitimately cast were fraudulent; that the diligent workers paid to count
those votes were doing something nefarious; and that the “election apparatus”
in the still-unresolved states were controlled by Democrats. (They are not.
Georgia’s secretary of state, for one, is a Republican.)
“They are trying to steal an
election,” Trump said, speaking
(I think) of ballot counters in Detroit and Philadelphia. “They are trying to
rig an election. We can’t let that happen.”
But here’s my
question for Republicans: Are they going to let this happen? Allow
the head of their party to challenge the integrity of an election with
record-breaking participation rates — in the midst of a pandemic, no less —
just because he despises the result?
They’ve allowed just about everything
else and given this demagogue a rather comfortable home; perhaps Trump’s words
right now will hardly shock them. Faced with the prospect of losing an
election, he’s now doing what demagogues do. We just haven’t seen the likes of
it in the United States.
What Trump said on Thursday night was
historic, and not in a good way. These past four years, the president has done
his best to weaken the foundations of democracy. But on the evening of Nov. 5,
he seemed hellbent on breaking the 244-year-old thing itself. Telling your
nation that the free election it just had is a sham — that’s taking aim at the
head and heart.
Back in June, I wrote that you could see Trump trying, already,
to make an autocratic lunge for power. He had replaced the last of his
honorable civil servants and cabinet officials with a gallery of dupes, dopes
and devotees. He had dispatched Attorney General William Barr to do his bidding
at the Department of Justice. He had gotten rid of five inspectors general. He
had used the military to clear a public square of protesters. He had found an
ally to purge the heads of Radio Free Europe and its three cousins, in what
seemed like a spooky bid to make his own version of state-run TV.
As the election approached, he and his
allies did everything they could to disenfranchise Democratic
voters. Their efforts do not appear to have been sufficient. As I
write, Joe Biden is poised to win enough Electoral College votes to win the
2020 election.
And so Trump is now
doing what any aspiring strongman would: making a mad grab for power, the
people’s choices be damned. He’ll use his lawyers, certainly. But just as
important, he’ll use disinformation. From his Twitter feed. From the podium in
the White House briefing room. From his own children — essential accessories in
any banana republic — who are currently throwing Molotov cocktails on Twitter.
The company had to remove a tweet by Don
Jr. on Thursday, who called on his father to “go to total war over the election
to expose all of the fraud, cheating, dead/no longer in state voters, that has
been going on for far too long.” (And perhaps this goes without saying,
but: Sic.)
More than ever, these falsehoods have
consequences. Those who simply shrug them off don’t seem to care about their
reach, their power, their ability to foment unrest. A Facebook group called “Stop the Steal” started on Wednesday and was shut down
within the space of 22 hours, after the company learned that members were
trying to incite violence. At that point, it had acquired over 320,000
followers, becoming one of the fastest-growing groups Facebook had ever seen.
Those who’ve supported Trump have one
last chance to make a choice that history won’t hold in contempt.
A couple already
have. And I’m betting more will join them, though it may be for the wrong
reasons. On Thursday, after the president’s news conference, the New York Post
ran a story about it under the headline “Downcast
Trump makes baseless election fraud claims in White House address.” I do not
think the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, had a sudden flash of conscience. I
suspect that he likes winners, and he suddenly senses that Trump isn’t one. If
the president is a cult leader, now is the moment he’s demanding that his
followers drink the Kool-Aid. Rupert decided he wasn’t all that thirsty.
Let’s see how many other Republicans
decide they aren’t that thirsty either. Let’s see how many of them finally put
country before party, deciding it’s more important — no, imperative — for
American democracy to live.
Jennifer Senior has been an Op-Ed
columnist since September 2018. She had been a daily book critic for The Times;
before that, she spent many years as a staff writer for New York
magazine. Her best-selling book, "All Joy and No Fun: The
Paradox of Modern Parenthood," has been translated into 12
languages. @JenSeniorNY
