When a President Sabotages His Own Country
Donald
Trump may hug and kiss the flag, but he is undermining our election’s
legitimacy and our government.
Opinion
Columnist
- Nov. 4, 2020, 1:36 p.m. ET
In the end, the biggest interference in
America’s elections didn’t come from Russia, or China, or Iran or North Korea.
It came from the president of the United States.
As I write this, we still don’t know
for certain who won the election, although Joe Biden seems in a
strong position to
win the White House and Republicans to retain the Senate.
But we do know for certain that
President Trump lied to the public early Wednesday morning when
he claimed victory and
sought a judicial rescue from voters. His brazenness undermines our election
system and the very idea of a peaceful transition of power.
It’s hard to imagine
that the Supreme Court, however politicized it may have become, would go along
with such a charade. I don’t believe that Trump, if he loses in a clear-cut
way, will be able to remain in office; if he tries to barricade himself in the
Oval Office, he’ll be escorted out on Jan. 20.
Yet what Trump has already done is what
the Russians have always tried to do: cast doubt on American elections and
destabilize the United States. The 2018 federal
indictment of
Russian election hackers alleged that they were engaged in “information warfare
against the United States of America,” by fostering confusion and distrust that
impair the integrity of elections and damage the legitimacy of the government
that emerges. That’s precisely what Trump is now doing. He may hug
and kiss American flags and pretend to be a great patriot, but this is a
betrayal of our country.
If Biden wins after this poisoning of
the chalice, he will inherit a badly divided country after an election that
many will deem illegitimate, and it will be harder to govern and more difficult
for the United States to exert influence around the world. It’s one thing for
Russian hackers in St. Petersburg to sabotage our government; it’s far more
tragic when the president does the same from the White House.
Vice President Mike Pence spoke right
after Trump and did not repeat the president’s claim of victory or his call for
the courts to intervene. But Pence let his boss’s lies stand, and most leading
Republicans have also kept quiet.
Trump’s latest attack
on the integrity of America’s electoral system and on the peaceful transfer of
power — the litmus test for any democracy — comes after years of other lies and
efforts to discredit the electoral system. And yes, it’s true that it is an
electoral system that has obvious undemocratic elements, but these aren’t what
Trump has been talking about.
Biden will easily win the popular vote
by millions of ballots, and yet the outcome is in doubt only because of the
Electoral College. Between 2000 and 2016, in two of the three times when
Republicans won the presidency, it was while losing the popular vote. And if
the Supreme Court does weigh in on this election, one-third of the justices
were appointed by Trump after he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.
The Senate has similar issues. The
current Democrat senators represent 14 million more voters than the Senate Republicans, but it’s the
Democrats who are in the minority because of the outsize influence of
low-population states.
Senator Mike Lee, a Republican from
Utah, has bluntly
said,
“we’re not a democracy” but a republic (actually, we’re both). Lee, along with Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, even
recommended repealing the 17th Amendment, which provides for direct election of
senators. If senators were again chosen by state legislatures, Republicans
would gain a few seats.
More broadly, much of the Republican
Party seems
to fear voters and
believes that its best path to victory is to suppress voting or even, in the
case of Harris County, Texas, discard
ballots.
We no longer have poll taxes and grandfather clauses to disenfranchise Black
voters, but G.O.P. officials modernized the barriers to voting by people of
color. One careful study published in Scientific American last year found that voters in
predominantly Black neighborhoods are 74 percent more likely to have to wait
more than 30 minutes to vote than residents of white neighborhoods.
Trump himself said in
March that he opposed efforts to encourage more voting because “if you agreed
to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Yet here’s another thought: Perhaps
Republicans and Democrats alike have been too quick to assume that higher
turnouts are inevitably bad for G.O.P. prospects.
This election appears
to have had the highest turnout in 120 years, and Biden and Trump
may end up as the No. 1 and No. 2 winners of the popular vote in American
history. Trump had the support of millions more voters in this election than
four years ago.
According to exit
polls,
Trump won votes from 18 percent of Black men and 36 percent of Latino men,
along with those of 58 percent of white men.
The Democrats had a great deal going
for them in this election: a nominee viewed as soothing and electable, streams
of new outrages from Trump, frequent revelations of corruption or improprieties
involving him, denunciations of him from family members and former aides, and
above all a mismanaged pandemic that killed 230,000 Americans and devastated the economy.
Yet many voters saw all this and were
unfazed. Dr. Irwin Redlener, an expert in managing health disasters, says that
Trump won nine of the 10 states with the highest prevalence of coronavirus.
So as I fret about
Trump’s efforts to do Russia’s work and delegitimize this election, I also keep
wrestling with this question: How is it that so many millions of Americans
watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of Covid-19,
listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions —
and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?
More on the 2020 election
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The
Times since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and
of the genocide in Darfur. You can sign up for his free,
twice-weekly email newsletter and follow him on Instagram. His latest book is "Tightrope: Americans Reaching
for Hope." @NickKristof • Facebook