Trump is an expert in making money off losing. Now
he’s doing it again.
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 1, 2020 at 2:46 p.m. EST
The end
of the coronavirus pandemic is in sight, but the last stage is turning out to
be the most virulent. The same might be said of the Trump presidency.
All six battleground states that President
Trump was contesting have certified their election results. The results of the
electoral college vote on Dec. 14 are a foregone conclusion. Even Attorney
General William P. Barr says: “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have
affected a different outcome.” But instead of graciously conceding, Trump and
his cultists are becoming more venomous and unhinged as the end draws near.
Trump’s
Twitter feed remains devoted to promoting outlandish conspiracy theories about
how the election was supposedly stolen; he even retweeted a user named “Catturd” to make his
case. His former lawyer Sidney Powell retweeted a demand that the president
“use the Insurrection Act, Suspend the December Electoral College Vote, and set
up Military Tribunals immediately.” One of his current lawyers, Joe diGenova,
says that former cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, who was fired by
Trump for rebutting his claims of fraud, “should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.”
The
Trump revolution is now devouring its own children. The president is attacking supporters such as Gov. Doug
Ducey of Arizona and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia because they will not toss out
the election results in their states. Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger, another loyal Republican, needs bodyguards because of all the
death threats he and his family are getting. Even Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler
and David Perdue — both of whom disgraced themselves by demanding that
Raffensperger resign — haven’t gone far enough for some of the faithful. They
are being accused of being “liberal DemoRats.”
Republicans
are worried that some of their voters will not turn
out in the Jan. 5 Georgia runoffs, which will determine control of the U.S.
Senate, because they have been fed paranoid fantasies about ballot machines
controlled by the ghost of Hugo Chávez. If so, it would serve the Republican Party
right. This would be poetic justice for a party that has indulged its leader’s
mad whims for so long.
“If
Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really
complicit in it,” Raffensperger told The Post.
“It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for
righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand
for the wild mob?”
Raffensperger’s
naivete is touching. Where has he been the past four years? Most Republicans
are too terrified of the mob that Trump has mobilized to challenge anything
that he does — even when he is mounting an unprecedented assault on the
integrity of our electoral system.
The
good news is that Trump will soon leave office. The bad news is that he will
never admit that he lost to Biden by more than 6 million votes, and neither will his
millions of devoted followers. (A new poll finds that less than a third of Trump
voters express confidence in the election results.) He will continue claiming
until the day he dies that he is a victim of a vast conspiracy encompassing
both Republican and Democratic officials — a plot so fiendishly effective that
no evidence of its machinations can be found.
Given
that Trump cares nothing about the public weal, why should he ever admit
defeat? Keeping the long con going not only offers a salve for his wounded ego
but also possible salvation for his debt-riddled balance sheet. (Forbes reports that he owes at least $1 billion.)
Trump’s
political operation has raised more than $150 million since Election Day with fraudulent
claims of fraud. The campaign wasted $3 million on a recount in Wisconsin that
expanded Biden’s lead in that state by 87 votes. It might as well have used donors’ money to
light Donald Trump Jr.’s cigars — and it still might. As my colleague Philip Bump notes, contributions to Trump’s
political action committee, Save America PAC, can be used “to fund basically
anything,” including “memberships at golf clubs,” “travel,” “rallies,” “even
payments directly to Trump himself, as long as he declares it as income.”
Trump
claims to be an expert on winning. His actual area of expertise is how to
profit from losing. He survived the bankruptcy of six of his businesses, and he will survive the
moral bankruptcy of his presidency. He has now figured out how to monetize
assaults on our democracy. He will keep going at least until 2024, and then
either regain the Republican nomination for himself or hand it off to a favored
sycophant.
A
new McLaughlin/Newsmax poll of the 2024
Republican primary without Trump has Donald Trump Jr. tied for the lead with
Vice President Pence at 20 percent. Ivanka Trump is at 4 percent. This isn’t
the Republican Party. It’s the Trumplican Party. Support for the supreme leader
trumps, so to speak, any devotion to democracy.