The Republican party has spent four years enabling Donald Trump: backing up his lies, defending his most egregious misbehaviors, shattering longstanding democratic norms to keep his, and by extension their, iron grip on power. But by refusing to push him to concede an election he clearly lost, they’re truly following him off a cliff – and threatening to take America with them.
Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 5 million. He was handily trounced in the electoral college, too. There is no real question that he lost the election and Joe Biden won.
And yet, predictably, the president who has spent his entire time in office denying the facts that are in front of his face is insisting that the clear results of this election must be the result of malfeasance. We know that to assuage his own ego and maintain his position, he will say and do just about anything. We know that he is not a statesman or a person who cares about anything beyond himself; we know he is happy to tear the nation apart at the seams if it means he gets what he wants. And we know that many members of the Republican party have thus far aided and abetted him.
But there was some question of when enough would be enough. Surely there was some line the president could cross that would directly imperil America itself and make Republicans finally say: enough. Now, the president is mounting what in any developing country would be called an attempted coup. He is spreading outright lies about America’s system of free and fair elections, claiming he won when he didn’t. His sycophantic legal team is pulling issues out of thin air to undermine the American system of voting. He is wielding his power to try to install himself as an unelected leader. He is refusing to concede so that he might find some way to illegally grab power. And Republicans are letting him.
The president is “100% within his rights” to challenge the clear election results in court, said the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, before scolding Democrats for demanding the president concede. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”
But these election results are not “preliminary”; they are clear and decisive. And Democrats did not refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election. Democrats did insist on looking into foreign interference into the election, and asked necessary questions about the president’s interactions with foreign adversaries. But Democrats did not refuse to concede. They did not undermine the democratic process and American confidence in a free and fair vote.
This isn’t about letting the president have his temper tantrum or, as one GOP official put it, “humoring him for a bit”. This is about whether Americans can trust in our system, and whether Americans will trust in our system. America will, hopefully, outlast Donald Trump, and hopefully it will outlast every person alive today. But America is as much an idea as it is a land mass; our democracy is an agreed-upon set of rules and norms, many of them written, but many of them customary. Americans have always sought to make the rules fairer, and to extend more rights and privileges to a wider swath of people: that’s what the civil rights movement did, and the women’s movement, too. But the goal was to get in on the system, not to undermine its legitimacy.
What Trump and his Republican enablers are doing is a wholly different thing. They aren’t saying that the system is unfair because it excludes some people who deserve to be a part of it. They aren’t even saying that they lost because the rules were unfair. They are saying that one side cheated, that the system is rigged. Once that cat is out of the bag – once you sow widespread distrust in the entire concept of free and fair American elections – it’s awfully hard to put it back in.
When the president refuses to concede, it also has a real, tangible impact on the nation’s future. The incoming president needs to be fully briefed; he needs to be able to staff up and start to put his team in place so that he can hit the ground running. It’s bad for the country if we slow that process down. And it’s especially dangerous during an escalating pandemic: Joe Biden is facing a huge public health emergency that experts predict will worsen this winter, and he needs to be able to manage it as efficiently as possible.
It’s sad and stunning that it has even come to this: that the integrity of the American electoral process is at stake, and many of the most powerful and prominent members of Republican party still declare fealty to their Dear Leader, even at the expense of the nation. This isn’t just about one party acting unscrupulously because they’re sore losers. This is how democracy itself comes undone.