Donald Trump’s Day of
Reckoning
November 7, 2020
The Constitution does not include a provision
for sore losers: whether or not Donald Trump concedes, Joe Biden has won.
For Donald Trump,
the reckoning began before dawn on Friday, in Clayton County, Georgia, where
poll workers in face masks finished counting votes that gave Joe Biden a
lead in the state, putting him on course to become the first Democrat to win
Georgia since 1992. By just before 9 a.m.,
the final outcome seemed increasingly inevitable with the announcement that
Biden had finally overtaken Trump in Pennsylvania, thanks to the latest results from
Philadelphia, a city that Trump maligned hours earlier as one of “the most
corrupt political places anywhere in our country.” In Washington, D.C., it was
a sunny, beautiful fall day, and hundreds gathered in front of the White House to
cheer the imminent end of the long, strange reign of the most unlikely American
President of our time.
For four years—and,
really, for his whole life—Trump had managed to avoid this moment. In the three
days since Election Night, with the race still uncalled but leaning Biden’s
way, the President had raged on Twitter, fumed in private, and publicly claimed
victory, even as the race was slipping away from him. “STOP THE COUNT!” he
insisted, on Thursday. But they didn’t. And, by the end of Friday, not only were
the votes still being counted, but they pointed to a result, a decisive,
declarative, inarguable result: the 2020 Presidential election was over, and
Donald Trump had lost.
The official end did not
come for a few more agonizing hours, until just before eleven-thirty on
Saturday morning, when the Associated Press and the television networks finally
made the call. In a fitting coda to four years of his trollish rule, Trump had
tweeted less than an hour earlier, “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” Then he went
golfing. But the Constitution does not include a provision for sore losers. It
does not matter whether Trump concedes: Biden has won. A decent man who
campaigned on the premise of making America America again, the former
Vice-President has spent the past few days showing in word and in deed what it
will be like to have a Presidential President again. “I am honored and humbled
by the trust the American people have placed in me,” he said in a statement
issued immediately after his victory was announced. He spoke of unity and
democracy. He will have a mandate from the American people that Trump, in his
four years of capricious, norm-shattering maladministration, never did.
Indeed, it looked like
Biden might well end up with exactly the three hundred and six Electoral
College votes that Trump had won four years earlier, in addition to a
popular-vote lead of as much as five million—a majority and an imprimatur of
democratic legitimacy that eluded Trump in 2016. “306. Landslide. Blowout.
Historic”: that was what Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, tweeted
four years ago, when his victory became clear. It was also what Democrats
thought about Biden’s win—a major difference this time being that Trump has so
far refused to do what Hillary Clinton had done more or less graciously, which
is to acknowledge defeat and congratulate the winner.
Soon after Biden took
the lead in Pennsylvania, a statement from the Trump campaign arrived in my
in-box: “This election is not over,” the campaign’s general counsel, Matt Morgan,
said. But it effectively was, and the question was no longer about the
election’s outcome; it was what Trump would do about that outcome—the same
question that has loomed over the race since Trump first told the American
public that he would not accept any result except his own victory.
Power ebbs away quickly
in Washington. When a downcast Trump went to the White House briefing room, on
Thursday evening, to insist that the election was being stolen from him, he did
so alone. His two sons and campaign adviser Brad Parscale complained on Twitter
that Republican Party leaders were absent from the fight—and threatened
retribution. “Where is the GOP?! Our voters will never forget,” Eric Trump
tweeted. A few Republicans, eager to claim Trump’s huge following in the Party,
responded to the Trumps’ call for public reinforcement. But, for every Ted Cruz
and Lindsey Graham offering public displays of sycophancy, there were some
Republicans who took their first hesitant, overdue steps away from the
President. Pat Toomey, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, defended his
state and said what many other Republicans were thinking, even if they did not
yet have the guts to say it publicly: that Trump’s allegations of large-scale
election fraud and vote-stealing were “just not substantiated.” Chris Christie,
who had been a close Trump adviser until he caught a bad case of the coronavirus—after attending Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination
ceremony and helping Trump with debate preparation—called on the President
either to reveal his evidence or shut up about it. This time, it wasn’t just
Mitt Romney sitting alone with his conscience, as he did during Trump’s impeachment
trial in the Senate. Even on Fox News, Republicans, for once, did not go along
with Trump in lockstep. The treachery that Trump had always suspected in others
might finally be coming for him.
Inside the White House,
it was hard to know what was happening. Beat reporters quoted various sources
who said that Trump was angry, defiant, unmoved, and holed up watching
television. His advisers, as always, were said to be divided, demoralized, and,
at least in some ways, already looking for new work. Trump made no public
statement during the long day of waiting on Friday, aside from a few errant
tweets about “missing military ballots in Georgia” and “the attack by the
Radical Left Dems on the Republican Senate.” His campaign, meanwhile, announced
that it would hire the political operative David Bossie, a longtime Trump
loyalist, to oversee the various state-level fights over the election results.
He was far from the “James Baker-like” figure that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, was reportedly in search of, earlier in the week, but perhaps the best
that Trump could do. By Friday evening, in a plot twist that surprised no one,
the news that leaked out of the White House was about a new coronavirus outbreak,
involving the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and several other aides. Meadows
had sought to cover it up, perfectly summing up the Administration’s attitude
toward the pandemic: pretend it does not exist.
There is still great
risk in a President defeated but not yet gone. Trump will remain in the White
House until January 20th, in command of a vast executive branch and a wounded
ego in need of validation and searching for justification. He is reportedly
still considering firing senior officials in his government whom he considers
insufficiently loyal, including the head of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, and
the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Who knows what investigations he could
order up, what last-minute executive orders he could issue? In the meantime,
the pandemic rages on, and as the nation was consumed this week by the drama of
the unresolved election, the number of covid-19
cases escalated to dangerous new levels. The two months between now and the
Inauguration could prove to be a volatile, dangerous moment in Washington, and
not just because Trump is likely to pursue spurious legal cases and refuse to
concede.
Trump, as always, has succeeded in making it all
about him. Will he leave the White House peacefully or will he have to be
dragged out? Is he detached from reality or simply proceeding despite it? With
his willingness to attack the very foundation of American democracy in order to
save himself, one could almost be forgiven for seeing the endgame of the 2020
election as a contest between Donald Trump and himself. There has been
remarkably little discussion of the actual winner.
On Tuesday night,
Democrats had hoped for a Biden landslide. When that did not materialize, there
were days of recriminations. Where was the repudiation of Trump that they
craved? They had lost seats in the House; they had not won the Senate. Trump
might lose, but tens of millions of Americans had supported him throughout the
chaos and craziness—a number greater than what he gained four years ago.
Saturday, however, is
different. Saturday is Joe Biden’s day. It is a day for celebrating. It is the
Death Star being blown up. It is, finally, the end of the horror movie. The
fact that there is always another Death Star, always another sequel in which
the bad guy reappears, is a worry for another time. There will be many weeks
and months and years to argue over what happened in America that made Donald
Trump the President, and why. For now, it is enough to know that he is going,
and soon. Donald Trump is a loser, and America, even if it was a very close
call, has won.
Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where
she writes a weekly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She co-wrote, with Peter
Baker, “The Man Who Ran Washington.”
