Trump’s party is not planning on preventing him from disputing a loss
Republicans would still rather have Trump’s base mad at someone else.
Column by Philip Bump
November 4, 2024 at 12:06 p.m. EST
Speaking in front of a crowd of supporters in Pennsylvania
on Sunday, Donald Trump offered a
wistful assessment of the end of his presidency: What if it had never ended at
all?
“We had the best border. The safest border,” Trump told the
crowd. “I won’t pull down my world’s favorite chart because I don’t want to
waste a lot of your time. But my world’s favorite chart, done by the Border
Patrol, it said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day
that I left.”
The chart — Trump’s favorite because he credits it with
saving his life when he turned his head to look at it when he was shot in July
— was not done by the Border Patrol and
does not show that the border was at its safest when he left office. What it
shows, instead, is that apprehensions at the border plunged at the outset of
the pandemic, a drop that someone on Trump’s team decided to label as the day
Trump left office, even though it occurred in early 2020.
But that wasn’t really what Trump was getting at.
“I shouldn’t have left,” he continued. “I mean, honestly,
because we did so — we did so well.”
The American public offered its opinion of how Trump did as
president on Nov. 3, 2020. He lost the popular vote by more than 7 million
votes and lost five states he had won in 2016. Trump very obviously didn’t want
to leave, even in the moment, stoking false claims about election fraud and
ultimately triggering the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Somewhat
sheepishly, he left the White House on Jan. 20 of that year as required by law.
Obviously, though, he didn’t want to.
Should he lose on Tuesday, there’s little reason to assume
that he won’t once again attempt to stoke the idea that such a loss is invalid.
It is possible that he will win or that Vice President Kamala Harris will win
by a wide enough margin that
claims about fraud will be more obviously ridiculous. If he loses relatively
narrowly, though, we can assume that he will once again suggest that the
election was stolen from him, despite the extent to which his party is oriented around combating
this imaginary threat.
The good news for American democracy is that Trump doesn’t
have control over the levers of power he attempted to pull to his benefit four
years ago. But it’s clear that a renewed effort to dishonestly cast the will of
the public as false or illegal may nonetheless trigger negative outcomes. At a
minimum, confidence in democracy among Republicans, already wobbly thanks to
Trump’s 2020 rhetoric, would erode further. At worst, we could again see
incidents of violence that threaten the transfer of power.
What’s striking is the extent to which Trump’s party is
willing to go along with his explicit efforts to stoke doubt about the election
outcome. Not just the party organization itself, now co-chaired by Trump’s
daughter-in-law. But elected Republicans continue to divert the threat posed by
Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric to election officials and the Biden
administration by refusing to push back on Trump’s rhetoric. They aim to avoid
stoking animosity from Trump’s base toward them personally to the detriment of
others.
Consider Sen. Tim Scott (R-South
Carolina), who appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” where he was
interviewed by host Dana Bash.
Bash noted that former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon
had encouraged Trump to
simply declare victory on election night. She asked if Scott would urge Trump
to instead allow the process to play out.
Scott deflected, saying (among other things) that “the good
news is, we will have a fair election, and Donald Trump will be our next
president.”
This was not Bash’s first interview of a politician. So she
noted his optimism and pressed him further: What if he doesn’t win?
“He’s setting the stage for his supporters not to believe
the results if he loses,” Bash said, pointing to false claims Trump has made
about Pennsylvania. “Do you want him to stop doing that?”
Scott replied by saying he would “never tell any candidate
on the ballot to talk about what happens if they lose.”
After a bit of back-and-forth, Bash tried again.
“You think it’s okay to spread false rumors about fraud and
undermine the integrity of the election regardless of what happens?” she asked.
“Dana,” the senator replied, “the liberal media has done a
better job of spreading misinformation than any candidate I have seen so far.”
The tennis match continued from there.
BASH: Oh, come on, Senator.
SCOTT: That’s true.
Listen, here’s the fact. We’re not seeing the coverage of
two assassination attempts on CNN against Donald Trump.
BASH: We did wall-to-wall coverage.
SCOTT: We’re not seeing the comments about Kamala Harris
talking about fascists, calling Donald Trump a fascist.
BASH: John Kelly called him a fascist, his former chief of
staff.
In fairness, Harris did also say she believed Trump was a
fascist — when she was asked during a town hall that aired on CNN.
Scott’s play here, redirecting the criticism from Trump
back to the mainstream media, is a familiar one. It allows him to abdicate
responsibility for holding Trump to account and, by extension, avoid having
Trump or Trump’s base excoriate him now or during any eventual reelection or
presidential bid.
It’s not as though Scott is acting unusually for a
Republican elected official. Despite what unfolded in 2020 and early 2021,
there’s been no pressure from the right for Trump to take a different approach
to the 2024 election. That’s
because there is pressure — if only tacit or potential — from the Republican
base not to side with democracy against Trump.
Again, this may not be an issue after Tuesday. He may win
clearly or lose so clearly that even he decides it’s not worth putting up a
fight. But if it is close, as polling suggests it very well may be, his party
and his allies have offered no indication that they would object to a renewed
effort to subvert the election. And even if there’s little chance that it would
be successful, such an effort could inflict a lot of pain (literal or
metaphoric) in a lot of places outside Washington.
Never mind what happens if Trump actually wins. Come Jan.
20, 2029 — knowing what he knows now and presumably seeing ongoing fealty from
his party — would he at that point decide to try to just stay in office, as he
says he wished he had done four years ago?