Trump’s
New Brand Is Loser
His post-election
tantrum is forcing conservatives to affirm, again and again, that he lost the
election fair and square.
December 18, 2020
In the six weeks since
the Presidential election, various theories—many of them persuasive—have been
advanced to explain President Trump’s refusal to accept Joe
Biden’s victory. Trump’s decision to attack the legitimacy of the
election has been seen, correctly, as an attack on democracy itself, and as a
purposeful and brutally effective use of disinformation. And also as the
behavior of a would-be dictator who is dragging an entire political party into
a fever dream of denialism. Trump’s protracted post-election fit has been
analyzed as preparation for a comeback bid in 2024 and as a fund-raising scam
that has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars to support his post-White
House political efforts. Very likely, Trump’s continued rejection of his defeat
is some of all the above.
But
in politics, and especially with this President, the simplest explanation for
something is usually the best one. Whatever the other reasons are for his
ongoing post-election temper tantrum, it couldn’t be more clear that Trump is
also motivated by the simple psychological fact that he really, really hates
being called a “loser.” It’s one of his favorite insults, and a label he would
do anything to avoid having affixed to his own name. Just in the course of this
election year, he has called Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, “a
totally overrated loser,” and George Conway, the conservative lawyer who became
one of his sharpest critics, a “deranged loser of a husband” to his adviser
Kellyanne Conway. He said that Cory Booker, Chris Cuomo, John Kasich, and John
Kelly were losers, too. In September, The Atlantic reported that he had
called American soldiers who died fighting overseas “suckers” and “losers.”
When the Republican senator Mitt Romney has criticized Trump, the President has
responded by reminding the former Republican Presidential nominee of his defeat
in the 2012 election. “loser!” he
tweeted, after one such episode, taunting Romney by attaching a video of his
2012 concession alongside Trump’s 2016 victory speech. Since November 3rd,
however, the word has practically disappeared from his vocabulary.
“If
I lost, I’d be a very gracious loser,” the President told a rally, in Georgia,
on December 5th—more than a month after he did, in fact, lose. On Monday, the
Electoral College met in all fifty state capitals to ratify that loss. Trump was not only not
gracious; he continued to refuse to accept his defeat. A few weeks ago, in one
of his few post-election comments to the media, a very testy Trump insisted
that he would leave office if and when the Electoral College certified Biden’s
victory. “Certainly, I will. Certainly, I will,” Trump said. “And you know
that.” Now that the Electoral College has affirmed Biden’s win, however, Trump
is no longer acknowledging that he will leave office. CNN even reported, the
other day, that, in private, he has backed away from previous indications to
his aides that he accepts his defeat.
Perhaps
Trump believes that his continued rejection of the reality of his loss makes
him appear to be a fighter. Perhaps he really has convinced himself that the
outrageous claims he is making about an election conspiracy so vast that it
involves millions of fraudulent votes, a dead Venezuelan dictator, and
Republican officials in a half-dozen states are true. Many commentators—including me—have pointed with alarm to Trump’s
success at convincing millions of Republican voters to doubt the legitimacy of
Biden’s win, and the fact that two-thirds of the House Republican Conference
last week signed onto the quickly dismissed Texas lawsuit to throw
out the results in four key states—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Wisconsin—where Biden prevailed. If Trump’s goal was proving that the Party
remains loyal to him, he has succeeded extraordinarily. Who could have imagined
four years ago that a large part of the national G.O.P. leadership would be so
devoted to Donald Trump that it would follow him down the path of outright
rejection when the election did not go his way?
But
there is another way of looking at what Trump has been doing since November
3rd, and it does not suggest a strategy of political genius—or, really, much of
a strategy at all. In pushing back so insistently and filing so many baseless
lawsuits, Trump has forced dozens of conservatives at every level of American
society to attest to the integrity of the vote—and highlight Trump’s loss.
Republican governors in states such as Arizona and Georgia have affirmed that
he lost—not only their states but the election over all. Republican-appointed
judges have affirmed that he lost. So have many Republican officials who played
a role in certifying the results in the states that handed the Presidency to
Biden. “Voters, not lawyers, choose the President,” Stephanos Bibas, a federal
appeals-court judge appointed by Trump, wrote, in throwing out one of the
Pennsylvania cases. Trump, he noted, can’t just tweet his way to victory:
“Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.
Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court,
in a ruling by a conservative Republican justice, warned that Trump, in seeking
to “disenfranchise every Wisconsin voter,” was testing the “faith in our
system of free and fair elections.” The two cases that Trump sought to bring to
the U.S. Supreme Court were so weak that the nine Justices declined even to
hear arguments on their merits.
The
President’s extraordinary challenge to the electoral system has forced even
some of Trump’s staunchest loyalists here in Washington to finally push back
and defend the integrity of the vote. Attorney General William
Barr stated publicly that there was no evidence of widespread
fraud sufficient enough to overturn the election results, and, after Trump
became furious about that comment, announced his resignation, earlier this week. On
Tuesday, in the wake of the Electoral College’s decision, even Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell belatedly affirmed that Trump had lost, congratulated
Biden, and urged Republican senators not to go along with further efforts to
contest the result, because they risked forcing the Senate into a political
loser of a vote. A few hard-core Trump supporters in the House are now pushing
for a last stand on January 6th, when Congress must meet to receive the
Electoral College results. But that effort, too, is doomed to fail, and could
only result in McConnell’s Republicans having to vote against it in the
Senate—and showcasing, once again, that Trump was decisively and convincingly
defeated. “I don’t think it’s a good decision right now,” John Thune, the
Republican senator from South Dakota, who is McConnell’s deputy, told reporters,
on Thursday. “And I don’t think it’s good for the country.”
Is
any of this really serving Trump well? I know we’ve got used to thinking of
Trump as a genius in turning bad news on its head, in creating grievance out of
setbacks and then using those grievances to further cement his hold over his
Party. I’ve watched him run this play over and over again. I get it. But the
alternate way of looking at his post-election behavior is that he is cementing
his reputation as the sorest of sore losers. Not only that, but he is crying so
long and loudly about the unfairness of his loss that he is forcing officials
at every level of government, across the country, to take sides—against him.
His frenetic efforts to deny his defeat have simply underscored it. Trump really
is leaving office on January 20th, and he really will go out as an impeached
and defeated President, forevermore listed in the history books alongside
Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter and all the other one-termers he disdains. He
is now, and will always be, a loser.