This country is closing in on two weeks since outgoing President Donald Trump was defeated at the polls. President-elect Joe Biden has only widened his lead since then, amassing 5 million more votes than the incumbent. He has far surpassed Trump in electoral votes with 290 at this writing and is on track for 306.Trump still refuses to concede. But what is far worse are the actions he has taken in the aftermath of the election. Precious days are slipping away as Trump obstinately forbids his administration from cooperating with the Biden transition team.Biden has been blocked from the daily pre...
Prior to the end of the 2020 election, many conservatives started tossing around a provocative prediction: With Joe Biden's imminent and likely resounding win, Democrats may abruptly drop their objections to the Electoral College and learn to love it again. Among those putting their chips behind such a forecast was former Republican George Will.
"Joe Biden's victory, which will be decisive in the popular vote, will be even more so in electoral votes," he wrote in his column for the Washington Post on Oct. 30. "So, on Wednesday, many Democrats might have kindlier thoughts about the electoral college. Because Democratic candidates lost two of this century's first five presidential elections while winning the popular vote, many Democrats have called for abolishing the electoral-vote system and adopting election by direct popular vote. This year, the electoral-vote-inflation factor favoring Biden should have the wholesome effect of dampening Democrats' enthusiasm for abolition."
But while the predictions of Biden's victory have been vindicated, the Electoral College's reputation remains in tatters. In fact, it looks worse than ever before. It has brought us to the brink of catastrophe, and it urgently needs to be eradicated.
This point has become somewhat confused because of the order in which the media projected Trump and Biden as winners in each state and how the votes were tallied. Some have argued that, despite the disadvantage Biden faced because of the Electoral College's bizarre structure, the Democrat nevertheless achieved a decisive win.
Unfortunately, this is not so.
Here's how Josh Jordan put it, looking at the most recent margins in the key swing states (note: Biden's margin in Pennsylvania is still expected to grow significantly as outstanding ballots are counted, while the others are likely to be relatively stable):
Despite his claim, this genuinely was a very close race. At this time, Wisconsin appears to be the "tipping point state" — essentially, the state which gave Biden a decisive lead by the smallest margin. Biden only won there by about 20,000 votes, or a margin 0.3 points.
It's easy to imagine a scenario in which, for what ever reason, the shift of a several tens of thousands of votes — relatively few in the scale of the election and in terms of swings that the electorate experiences — in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona flipped the states into Trump's column. Amazingly, that scenario doesn't make Trump the clear victor. It turns the race into a 269-269 tie:
It's not clear why the framers of the Constitution left us with a system that allows for the possibility of an Electoral College tie (they figured out how to break ties in the Senate), but that's what we have. The consequence would be that all the states' results are essentially discarded, and the House of Representatives picks a president. But it doesn't simply give a vote to each member; each state votes in the House as a single delegation with one vote each. Because Republicans would control a majority of state delegations, they would likely give the election to Trump, though it's impossible to say how it would play out ahead of time.
In fact, it's even worse than that, because there's the possibility of faithless electors. While some states legally require electors to cast their ballots with the party that won the state, some are technically free to vote their consciences. This doesn't happen much because parties tend to pick loyalists who are committed partisans.
But history shows that there are electors who subvert expectations. In 2016, there were a total of seven faithless electors — five defecting from Hillary Clinton, and two defecting from Trump. That didn't make a difference in the final determination, of course, and faithless electors never have in U.S. history.
In a tight 269-269 split, however, it would literally take only one faithless elector to change history. Maybe that would be unlikely, but it would be awfully tempting. In 2020, it would mean that the race couldn't be called until the Electoral College actually met and cast its vote. Only once the votes were actually counted would we even know if the final decision for president would go before the House of Representatives, or if some random elector would decide the fate of the country on their own.
Under these circumstances, it's hard to be sure we could guarantee a peaceful transition of power.
But putting aside the mechanics and the risks of this case, it's important to dwell on how absurd and anti-democratic it is. According to FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver, Biden is likely to end up with a lead in the popular vote of 4.4 points:
This means that, assuming Wisconsin was indeed the tipping point state, the Electoral College essentially had a 4.1 point bias in Trump's favor (or, more accurately, in favor of a tie result that likely would have resulted in a Trump presidency.) This should be unacceptable to a country that cares about the will of the people, fairness, and democracy.
In typical elections, a 2-points lead is often seen as relatively formidable and decisive. It's not a landslide, but it's not a squeaker, and no one really doubts that the winner has a compelling reason to claim a clear victory, assuming no malfeasance.
But in the presidential race we just lived through, Democrats were required to win over a majority of the country by a margin of more than4 points — something they just barely managed to do. Another way of putting the point: Democratic votes simply count less than Republican votes under the current system when it comes to control of the presidency.
This imbalance is compounded by the fact that Donald Trump is only president at all because in 2016, there was a similar bias in his favor. Clinton won the popular vote 2.1 points, but lost because of Trump's slim leads in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That was, many argued, unjust.
Trump is a dangerous man and an incompetent president. For this reason, he's unpopular with a majority of Americans, and pretty much always has been in his political career. If the popular will mattered enough, he would never have gotten the job. And if it mattered just slightly less than it does now, or if Democrats were slightly less effective at fighting him than they were, he would have been able to hold on to power despite majority outrage and and opposition.
The situation wouldn't have been quite as bad, however — from the perspective of democracy — if 2016 had just been a fluke. Of course, it wasn't just a fluke; Al Gore lost the presidency while winning the popular vote in 2000, too (let's put aside the Florida recount and Supreme Court intervention). And now, as Biden's slim room for error makes clear, Democrats are playing on a highly unfavorable playing field. And it may not get any better — indeed, it may get even worse. This isn't a fluke or a glitch; it's systematic, unjust, oppressive regime.
Some might say that, regardless, of the bias against Biden, he and critics of the Electoral College should just be happy he won. Perhaps, they'd say, there are technical objections to the Electoral College, but in the real world, it mostly works out fine (2000 and 2016 notwithstanding.) But this argument misses the fact that, in order to win, Biden had to be hyperaware of the fact that the deck was stacked against him. There was a protracted debate during the campaign about the regulation of fracking, an important industry in Pennsylvania, which was believed to be a key swing state. And the state's outsized importance due to the Electoral College likely played a role in how Biden hedged on the issue during the debate, hedging that may box him in as president — undermining the preferences of the majority.
What's more, the president himself has, as of this writing, refused to accept his loss in 2020. While it's impossible to say what he would have done if the president were determined by the popular vote winner, it would have been much harder for him to protest the result under such a system. It would have been clear on the night of Tuesday, Nov. 3, that Biden was going to win the popular vote and the presidency and that Trump was the loser. The counting would have continued, as it did, but we wouldn't have had endless days of rolling results before a clear winner could be projected.
And Trump wouldn't have, as he does now, potential paths to undermine the result of the election. Despite his clear loss, Trump and his allies have been exploring multiple paths to his maintaining power, including inducing Biden electors to become faithless, convincing state legislatures to appoint slates of electors at odds with the voters' choices, or using lawsuits and recounts to overturn the outcomes in key states.
These ideas are all likely to fail, and Biden will be inaugurated. But another presidential candidate and their party may be better positioned to exploit these anti-democratic tactics in the future. And even the prospect that they could work is doing serious damage to the United States in the present.
None of these ideas would be viable if the popular vote determined the winner. They're only on the table because of the destructive and Byzantine Electoral College. If the country's leaders had enough sense and decency, they'd abolish the antiquated institution as soon as possible.
The far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump's brownshirts.
In the weeks leading up to the election, excitement was rising among those Americans who convinced themselves that Trump would be the glorious leader in a national purge of their perceived enemies. QAnon fans buzzed with excitement that "the storm" — their term for their belief that the entire Democratic establishment, as well as many popular celebrities, would be rounded up into prison camps — was coming soon. The Proud Boys, a neofascist group that claim to defend "Western civilization," were also riled up after Trump told them to "stand by" during a presidential debate in September. The menagerie of white supremacists and militia groups were stepping up recruitment efforts, stoked about what they believed would soon be the eruption of a new civil war.
Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.
People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don't give them up just because they've been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.
Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.
For believers in QAnon, that belief manifested in a fantasy that Trump was going to round up all the members of the "deep state," their imaginary shadowy conspiracy of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and progressive activists that they believe both secretly runs the world and is also a network of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles. Trump, they told themselves, was secretly organizing "the storm" to round up and destroy this sinister global conspiracy.
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But since Trump's election, Q — a user account that started on 8chan and drifted over to 8kun after 8chan was disbanded — has fallen silent. QAnon faithful believe the account is run by a current or former U.S. intelligence agent and Trump loyalist. In fact, it's probably run by the father-and-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who are conspiracy theorists and definitely not U.S. intelligence agents. Without Q's guidance, the QAnon cult appears to be confused and angry.
"They were not expecting him to lose, and they were not expecting Fox News to call it," Fredrick Brennan, the founder of 8chan — who has spent the past few months giving interviews accusing the Watkinses of running Q's account — told the New York Times. "It was really psychologically damaging."
Q believers haven't given up the faith yet, of course. But without guidance from its leader, the QAnon community is adrift and very likely to fracture into competing and antagonistic splinter sects, as is common in these kinds of communities.
Witness, for instance, what's happening to the Proud Boys, which started off largely as a male chauvinist group but has morphed into what looks very much like a neofascist organization that purports to defend "Western civilization." The Proud Boys had their proudest moment in September, when Trump refused to denounce them during a debate and instead told them to "stand back and stand by," clearly implying that they should be at the ready to defend his grip on the White House if he felt it was under threat.
But even though Trump is half-heartedly still trying to steal the election, he has so far disappointed the Proud Boys by not calling on them to commit violence against his enemies in a glorious coup. (Mostly, Trump is hiding from public view, tweeting out articles from fringe right-wing sites and playing golf.) So, as often happens with marginal subcultures full of deeply unpleasant people, the Proud Boys are breaking apart, torn asunder by infighting.
At heart is a fight between two figureheads, Kyle Chapman and Enrique Tarrio, over whether the Proud Boys should stick by their dubious claim that there is nothing racist about the ideology of "Western chauvinism," or should openly embrace white nationalism and anti-Semitism. Chapman is representing the blatant-racism side, declaring himself the new president of the splinter group calling themselves, no kidding, the "Proud Goys." Tarrio is insisting that Chapman is a flunkey, failing to understand that the same can be said of anyone associated with the Proud Boys.
Other right wing militia and white nationalist groups, such as the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, spent the weeks before the election firing themselves up for what they believed was an upcoming civil war. Now that Trump's presidency is deflating like a day-after birthday balloon, they're not quite ready to give up the fantasy.
"We have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it," Rhodes declared, swearing that his forces are armed and "prepared to go in, if the president calls us up."
As with most of the threats made by far-right figures, this is both a fantasy and a dangerous one. It's just plain silly to imagine that a handful of middle-aged and badly organized conspiracy theorists, no matter how many guns they have, could manage the task of seizing the federal government in a paramilitary coup.
In reality, almost none of the groups who claim they plan to show up have even applied for a permit, suggesting that they know what's likely to happen: An underwhelming display by a handful of loudmouths with angry signs, whose demands are incoherent and who have no plan of action to achieve their goals anyway.
As I witnessed in Philadelphia, even when the far right had a solid target and goal — stopping election officials from counting ballots — they could barely muster up a handful of people. The ones who showed up were easily run off by a group of leftists armed with cardboard signs and a boombox. Washington, D.C., doesn't permit the open carry of weapons, taking away yet another incentive to show up for the deeply insecure men of this movement. There's nothing they can do to save Donald Trump. All they have left is impotent flailing.
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The difference between the fringe and the mainstream of the Republican Party now is less about belief and more about a willingness to take action. That fringe — the ones who've actually joined far-right groups and may actually show up at Saturday's "rally" — is scrambling now. But such people never really go away. They'll find some other cause to latch onto, some other justification for their fascist impulses. Some, unfortunately, will continue to seek violence or even to commit acts of terrorism.
But for now, Trump's defeat is a mighty blow to the far right. Their dreams of crushing the people they view as "the left" and of "reclaiming" the culture of America were always ludicrous, no matter how much tear gas Trump sprayed at Black Lives Matter demonstrators. But now, with Trump on his way to Palm Beach exile, they've lost their lodestar. The process of fracture and dispersal for these self-appointed warriors of the right has begun. We must hope they don't find another figurehead to rally around anytime soon.
Please pay less attention to the loser and more to what’s been accomplished. Joe Biden won the White House. He reclaimed the upper-Midwest. He flipped two red states. (Arizona was called this morning; Georgia is headed for a recount, but Biden is leading.) The Democrats held the House. The party netted one Senate seat. (They won two, lost one.) There’s a chance, a slim chance, but a still chance to take the Senate seats after a couple of Georgia run-offs in January. This is not a picture of failure.
True, it wasn’t the blue wave many hoped for. (I hoped for it.) Republican resilience in the House was a bit surprising. Maine reelecting Susan Collins was very disappointing. The Democrats did not take the Senate and with that go dreams of reforming the court system. More disappointing, perhaps, was the president winning 10 million more votes this year than he did four years ago. For those hoping the whole of the county would reject Donald Trump, that was the most painful fact of all. “Post-Racial America” was never a real thing, but it felt good to believe in it. It’s impossible to believe in it now.
Let’s not let failing to meet high expectations define political reality, though. Losing House seats is not and never was about the left versus the center, no matter how much that insufferable simp Chris Cillizza insists it is. Moderate Democrats lost swing districts because swing districts swing, not because progressive Democrats half way across the country take progressive positions for progressive constituents. This isn’t to say moderates should be progressive. It’s to say swing districts are hard to hold. That a Republican was at the top of the ticket probably explains GOP gains in the House.
Not taking the Senate can probably be explained by incumbency and “undervoting.” Undervoting is when people who rarely vote, or who have never voted, decide to vote for president but no one else. In the case of the Democrats, people came off the sidelines to vote against Trump but skipped everyone else down ballot. Incumbency was probably the countervailing force for the GOP. That wasn’t enough to save Martha McSally in Arizona and Cory Gardner in Colorado, but it was enough to save Collins in Maine, Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Thom Tillis in North Carolina.
Republican incumbency explains, to a degree, why Trump got 10 million more votes this year than he did four years ago. Reagan got more votes the second time in 1984. So did George W. Bush in 2004. Incumbency is an advantage to all presidents, but it’s a titanic advantage for GOP presidents. That Biden knock one off is underappreciated. That he did it by winning (so far) more than 5 million more votes, besting every candidate in the history of candidates, is doubly underappreciated. To be sure, Trump is bad and 72 million people voted for bad, but let’s maintain some perspective please.
If you really want to understand why so many voted for Trump, find a person who grew up in Trump Country but who now lives in or around a city. That person will tell you, I have zero doubt, that the reason 72 million voters chose Trump is rooted in the reason they no longer live in Trump Country. Intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, a sense of adventure—these are not recognized, valued or celebrated there. They are discouraged, even punished. Individualism isn’t honored. It’s despised. Power is top down. It is not shared. This person didn’t flee. This person was driven out. This person lives in or around a city, because cities are where one goes to be free. “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers,” said Gene Wilder’s character in Blazing Saddles. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know, morons.”
People who grew up in Trump Country but who now live in and around cities know something else: that the people they live, work and play with really don’t understand Trump voters and that that’s OK. It’s OK not to understand people who not only don’t make sense but insist that not making sense makes sense. It’s OK not to understand people who deny the authority of facts, knowledge and reason; who refuse the reality of climate change; who liken differences of opinion to treachery; who see diversity as oppression; who believe only they are the “real Americans”; who equate minor personal inconvenience with tyranny; who feel equality is theft; who sacrifice themselves to the covid pandemic to score political points; and who betray their country by refusing to recognize the legitimacy of lawful democratic outcomes.
It’s OK. If people living in Trump Country desire a king to rule them, let them. In the end, there are more of us than there are of them. This year’s election made that very clear. Trump punched the cities. Cities punched back. And cities won. As long as people who live in and around cities understand this, we have nothing to fear.
John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of the Editorial Board, a newsletter about politics in plain English for normal people and the common good. He’s a visiting assistant professor of public policy at Wesleyan University, a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative, a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly, and a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches.
One of the many overlooked stories during the run-up to this election was the New York Times series based upon Trump's tax documents. Sure, we heard about it, but I don't think the full scope of it sunk in. Trump didn't pay federal income taxes for years, he got a multi-million dollar lifeline from "The Apprentice," he owes vast sums to banks — which he has personally guaranteed — and he played fast and loose with tax write-offs for his alleged philanthropy, which don't always add up. It was an unprecedented indictment of a sitting president.That series was a sequel to the Times' earlier award-winning series on Fred Trump's tax fraud scheme which set Trump and his siblings up for life and cheated the taxpayers of millions of dollars. It showed how Donald went on to waste his inheritance on failed business ventures and kept coming back to the trough for more each time he got into trouble. He even cheated members of his own family out of their rightful inheritances — his niece Mary Trump, the psychologist and author of a bestselling family memoir, recently filed a lawsuit based on some of the information revealed in those reports.
Although we've known for many years that Donald Trump was a failed businessman and con artist, these two series provided a fuller picture of his finances and business practices than we'd seen before. What becomes obvious when you review the whole story from the beginning is that Trump has been dancing as fast as he can for many years, always on the verge of total collapse and somehow surviving by getting through life one day at a time.
The most recent Times report disappeared almost immediately because it came in the last two weeks before the election and there just wasn't any bandwidth available for it. It was the story of Trump Tower Chicago and how Trump mismanaged the entire development, as usual. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, he found himself on the hook to Deutsche Bank and a hedge fund for hundreds of millions of dollars. The creditors tried to work with him but finally hit their limit, at which point Trump went into his usual "fight back" mode and sued the bank for allegedly causing the financial crisis, which he claimed was force majeure, meaning he didn't have to pay back the loans. He became such a pain in the ass, with bad-faith negotiations and lawsuits, that the institutions ended up writing down the loans just to get him off their backs. That's how he works, whether with a small vendor who sold him some carpeting or a major multinational bank.
The Chicago tower was just one of many examples of Trump's ability to escape responsibility throughout his life. He's run that game going all the way back to the 1970s when the Trumps were sued for discrimination against potential Black and Hispanic tenants and Trump took the audacious step of suing the government for defamation. Rather than deal with him, regulators chose to settle the case.
He's lied to banks for years about how wealthy he is, while telling the government in virtually the same breath that he was nearly broke. Banks kept lending to him and kept losing money, until he was finally left with only Deutsche Bank. According to a Reuters report last week, that relationship may finally have reached the end of the line as well:
Deutsche Bank AG is looking for ways to end its relationship with President Donald Trump after the U.S. elections, as it tires of the negative publicity stemming from the ties, according to three senior bank officials with direct knowledge of the matter. Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization.
These loans are coming due within two years and are personally guaranteed by Trump. The bank would apparently like to sell the loans on the secondary market — but it's likely no one will want to buy them. And that the $340 million is just a portion of the enormous debt he reportedly owes to entities we still can't identify.
The fact that Trump was a terrible businessman and worse dealmaker was something once kept on the QT among the financial elite (probably to cover their own ineptitude in repeatedly lending him money) but everyone knows what he is now. They know what his family is. His "brand" is no longer something anyone can sell as luxury. (Remember, he was dropped by a whole bunch of his sponsors during the first campaign.) Everything Trump has done as president has only made his name more toxic.
Meanwhile, his political game has been run in similar fashion. Trump paid off his porn-star mistress and evaded the lawsuits brought by various players both professional and personal, not the least of which are the women who have sued him for defamation and assault. His henchmen in the Republican Party have covered for his corruption and incompetence every step of the way.
But now the American people have finally held him accountable and his presidential immunity from prosecution is about to come to an end. That is why we're all watching this unprecedented spectacle of a president who lost re-election wildly flailing about in hopes of fending off the reckoning he's avoided his whole life. He's still dancing.
Back in 2018 just before the midterm election, Trump was at one of his rallies musing about the fact that Republicans might lose. He told his adoring crowd, "And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? 'Don't worry about it, I'll just figure it out.'"
But there is no way out of this defeat. He has been repudiated by a clear majority of the electorate and there's nothing he can do about it. He can't sue his way out of it or renege on his promises. But he can certainly lie about it, say he was cheated and reinvent himself as a martyr to the MAGA movement. He's got about 70 million people ready to believe him.
This is yet another reason why I believe Trump will announce he's running for president again in 2024, and will find ways to monetize that possibly-fictional campaign and keep GOP donors and others spending money to remain in his favor. Maybe he'll get some sucker to pay for him to start a media company of some sort.
Trump may not be able to sell condos anymore, or a perfume called "Success." But he's got a new brand anyway, and millions of deluded customers. I suspect he'll be out there selling that for quite some time.
The broad contours of the next two years of American politics are pretty clear. They're going to suck for the left. And things could get worse after that. But there is hope.
The GOP's nonsensical claims that widespread voter fraud denied Trump a second term represent Birtherism 2.0. They can't claim that a white guy from Scranton who's been a prominent figure in DC for the past 40 years was born in Kenya, but for the 86 percent of Trump voters who believe that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, the effect is the same. This belief will animate the next, more extreme iteration of the tea party movement. In fact, some of the Republican operatives organizing these "stop the steal" protests are veterans of that Astroturf campaign.
If Democrats manage the difficult task of sweeping runoff elections for two Georgia Senate seats in January, they will be constrained by the filibuster. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has already signaled that he would not support eliminating it. Others would no doubt join him if they weren't the deciding vote.
If, as is likely, Republicans hold onto the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will follow the playbook he developed during the Obama years, refusing to bring bills with bipartisan support to the floor and blockading Biden's judicial nominees. Either way, requiring 60 votes to pass legislature will be the norm.
Given that the pandemic is now completely out of control, McConnell would probably have no choice but to negotiate a bipartisan Covid relief and economic stimulus package, assuming one doesn't pass before the inauguration. Aside from that, Democrats would only be able to make progress through executive actions and during "fiscal cliff" negotiations over must-pass bills to keep the government operating or avoid a debt default. If Dems manage to win control of the Senate, they would also be able to do certain things--like rolling back the Trump tax cuts--through budget reconciliation, which can't be filibustered.
The executive branch wields a lot of power, and with control of the House, Democrats would be able to achieve smaller parts of their agenda. And competent government will be like a breath of fresh air after the past four years. But the party's base wants them to govern. They want a new voting rights act and an expansion of public healthcare and aggressive climate legislation, among other priorities. None of that will be possible, and Democrats--especially progressives--will find themselves frustrated.
This is the formula Republicans developed during Obama's presidency: Demoralize the Democratic base while firing theirs up with a steady stream of disinformation about the administration. With the Democrats' typical decline in turnout for the midterms, the GOP will try to deliver the kind of electoral shellacking in 2022 that they achieved in 2010.
Because they did well in state legislative races this year, Republicans will also have an opportunity to redraw congressional maps in a bunch of states and strengthen the gerrymanders they put in place after the 2010 Census. If the GOP can hold the Senate and claw back control of the House, 2023 and 2024 will be even more disheartening.
But that bleak outcome isn't a foregone conclusion. Dems could govern if they start organizing now, keep their base engaged and break that cycle of turning out for presidential elections and then sitting out the midterms. They have a good Senate map in 2022, and if they ended up with 52 or 53 Senate seats, after two more years of relentless Republican obstruction, they would almost certainly have the votes to kill the filibuster.
There is one reason to think this may be possible: Donald J. Trump. First, because Trump has driven huge Democratic turnout in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 election and in off-year contests in 2017 and 2019. Voting tends to be habit-forming. And whether or not Trump is serious about declaring that he intends to run in 2024, he will remain a loud, obnoxious presence in American politics. It's possible that by remaining the clear leader of the Republican Party, he will help Democrats remain engaged, while at least some of the irregular Republican voters he turned out will stay home if he isn't on the ballot himself. There is reason to be hopeful.
But while the feeling of relief that most Americans are feeling after delivering a defeat to Donald Trump was nice, it will be short-lived. It was a major battle in a longer war. The next engagement will be in Georgia, and then the (broad) left must start organizing for 2022. Thanks to the many veto-points built into our system, progress is never easy.
It says something about our politics when the loser gets more attention than the winner. It’s been nine days since Election Day. It’s been five since learning Joe Biden won. For all that time, most of our focus has been on whether Donald Trump will concede instead of what election results mean to the future of the United States. Something none of us has had time to talk about while wondering if the president were mounting a coup was this plain fact: Trump won the white vote, and lost.
Again, with feeling—he won the white vote, and he still lost. It wasn’t close either. The president won 58 percent of white voters, a demographic that constituted 67 percent ofall voters, according to Edison Research exit polling for the Times and other news outlets. Yet the president-elect flipped states in the upper-Midwest. He flipped two red states (Arizona and Georgia). He won more votes than any challenger since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. He won 5 million more than Trump. (I think he’ll double that.) The counting continues. Bottom line: Trump bet everything on racism, and he lost.
Virtually no one is talking about this. All of our attention, mine included, is on Trump. It’s understandable! None of us has experienced what’s now happening. No president has refused to concede. No political party, to my knowledge, has gotten behind a president’s refusal to admit defeat. No one has had to imagine the dread of witnessing two people claiming the title of president of the United States. And yet here we are.
That dread, thank God, seems to be waning by the minute. The president knows he lost. The Republicans know he lost. Trump knows the Republicans know he lost. All that remains, it seems, is figuring out a way to save face amid 72 million Americans who voted for him. (That’s the highest ever vote share behind Biden’s). Saving face, for Trump, means never ever—ever—admitting defeat but leaving in a loud huff anyway. Will he run again in 2024? No one knows. More certain is the Republican Party has no incentive to reform itself. Victory requires even more stoking of even more white rage against the slow muddle of American modernity toward greater equality and justice.
Which is why we should appreciate this moment for what it is. As a reminder of where we started, allow me to quote at length from Jamelle Bouie. He’s at the Times now, but in 2016, he was at Slate. In a post-election piece called “White Won,” Bouie wrote:
More than anything, Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a black president—after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and blacks declared that their lives mattered—millions of white Americans said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one back (my italics here). And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites—he won the college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites. Seventeen months after he announced his candidacy, millions of white Americans flocked to the ballot box to put Trump into the White House. And they did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.
Bouie put 2016 in the stream of history. He thought, as I thought, the major parties agreed there was no going back to the politics of explicit white supremacy. Racism didn’t go away, of course, after the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s. It didn’t go away after the triumph of 2008. There was a sense, however, that a multiracial democratic republic had become a permanent fixture. “I thought this meant we had a consensus,” Bouie wrote, with a heavy heart. “It appears, instead, that we had a detente.”
Perhaps it was, but the results of the 2020 election give us reason to reconsider. It’s true the president won the lion’s share of the white vote. But the other 41 percent of the white vote teamed up with huge majorities of Black voters and voters of color, overwhelming polling places, running up the popular vote to heights never before seen, making a statement that no one is seeing but should. Cosmopolitan America did assert its power and its influence in 2008. Having gotten its fill of the old weird racism, it did it again. It decided nothing was going to stop it from taking back the country. You don’t need a detente when you’ve demonstrated the power to continue winning.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) was shredded online after attacking the election count because there were thousands of votes that haven't yet been counted in Puerto Rico.
As an elected official Cornyn should probably know that since it isn't a state, Puerto Rico doesn't get a say in the U.S. presidential election.
"Another example of why it is prudent to let the process run its course: Thousands of Uncounted Votes Found a Week After Election in Puerto Rico," tweeted Cornyn including a report from the New York Times about 200 boxes of votes remaining.
Cornyn was ridiculed for not knowing the rules for the territory, something typically taught in middle school civics classes around the country. The Republican-run Lincoln Project issued a fact check:
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Others mocked Cornyn with questions about the electoral votes for the non-state and suggestions to move all of Puerto Rico's electoral votes over to Trump's column.
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You can see the rest of the mockery in the tweets below:
One of President Donald Trump's senior legal advisers demanded that Joe Biden "prove" he won the election, and she was subjected to mockery and disdain.
Jenna Ellis, who's been advising the president's campaign on legal matters, tweeted out a suggestion that Biden was uncertain whether the election had been legitimately decided, as Trump's attorneys file various lawsuits challenging the legality of the vote counts.
"If Joe Biden is really confident he won legally and legitimately," Ellis tweeted, "why is he so afraid of proving it?"
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Other Twitter users pointed out that courts were currently in the process of deciding the validity of Trump's fraud claims, and that vote counts conducted by the states showed Biden would win enough Electoral College votes to be declared the winner.
Just when you thought the world could not get any weirder, with American politics having been reduced to a giant meme of cats chasing dogs, comes this:
A bunch of truckers are threatening a wildcat strike to protest President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. It seems they are convinced that Biden and “his” Green New Deal-- which he doesn’t support -- have officially ushered in End Times.
A private Facebook page called “STOP THE TIRES” has formed overnight with 62,000 members and counting (it was 61,500 when I began writing this). Its stated purpose is to mobilize a nationwide trucking shutdown during the holiday season, apparently embracing that not-altogether-Republican tradition of workers striking in the name of social justice.
At the website www.radio.com, Detroit radio station WWJ-950 reported this on November 11:
“The creator of the group, Jeremy Rewoldt, said in a Nov. 7 post, “We will not participate in the leftist, Biden/Harris Green New Deal.” He added, “We do not support the banning of fracking ... The United States of America operates as a capitalistic economy and OIL is the fuel she survives on.” On the page, a woman named Cara Carroll is named as co-founder of the movement, and she says the strike is meant to “protect 19 million jobs.”
The direct connection between fracking and oil is not as clear as the direct connection between fracking and, say, earthquakes. But it’s pretty clear that the Facebook page for oppressed truckers isn’t limited to trucking.
The radio station also reported the following:
“Beyond that, admins on the Facebook page say that drivers face "domestic terrorism" in cities run by Democrats. “Let us make this extremely clear: While we are a huge group of Republicans and conservatives, our focus in this movement is our blue-collar workers of America,” co-founder Carroll wrote, adding, "We are extremely grateful for what Donald Trump has done for the American people.”
So the self-described "banded group of brothers and sisters" who want "to show America who runs the country" is threatening to shut it down, presumably beginning around Thanksgiving.
For their part, less whacked-out folks in the trucking industry sound a bit like Republican politicians trying to explain away why it’s cool that Trump has gone mad. Here’s how the story was reported at the website (bookmarked by so many RawStory.com readers) www.thetrucker.com:
“Larry Fuentes, the manager of a large logistics company in metro Detroit told WWJ his truckers have not joined it, but "I can have some understanding of what they're coming for. Their livelihoods are at stake." He added that a strike would devastate the industry.
“Samuel Ford, a truck driver from Brownstown, Mich., added that he hasn't joined it, but the drivers in the strike group have a point. "Truckers are very often overlooked ... But they do have a very significant say-so over how this country is run," he said.
“So far, the call for a one-day strike seems to be all talk, as the trucking industry is humming along.”
In fairness, even “STOP THE TIRES” movement hasn’t become quite as unhinged as a president reduced to tweeting “DO SOMETHING!!!” as recently as this morning.
In any event, nothing says patriotism quite like ruining the holiday season in a pandemic for hundreds of millions of people suffering through the worst collective nine months of their lives. Those children not receiving their holiday gifts will certainly understand.
Perhaps the Trump truckers can be persuaded by this argument: If Joe Biden and his evil Green New Deal are really about to wreak oppression on America as we have always known Her, somebody’s got to long-haul beds of last straws to the patriots of this country.
A New York City councilman announced he would flout Gov. Andrew Cuomo's new guidelines limiting indoor gatherings to 10 people or fewer, and social media users were appalled at his carelessness.
Councilman Joe Borelli (R-South Shore), who served as one of President Donald Trump's honorary state campaign chairs, boasted that his family would violate the guidelines, which cover gatherings at private residences, to host a traditional Thanksgiving meal with relatives despite the resurgence of the highly contagious coronavirus.
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Other Twitter users called him out for acting irresponsibly during a pandemic.
Shortly after the 2016 election, a funny thing happened. Rather than celebrate the victory of their candidate, Trump supporters took on the position of aggrieved victims. When they should have been happy, they were angry. When they should have been confident, they were insecure. When their votes showed that they had power, they felt marginalized. And, even though they won, they felt that the process had been unfair.Their mood was vengeful and their attitude was combative. And that was when they won.
As Salon's Amanda Marcotte has pointed out, even if Trump had won, we knew we would need to be prepared for the inevitable crybaby response of his supporters. As she puts it, the key word to describe Trump's base is "bitter":
Turn on Fox News any random night, and it's a full blown whine-fest about how alleged "elites" are trying to control them and ruin their lives. The fact that their party controls most state governments, the White House, the Senate and the federal courts never factors in. The narrative is one of perpetual victimhood.
And let's face it. Trump didn't just lose; he flamed out. For a man who has consistently avoided being held accountable for his failures, this loss will sting hard. Trump lost to epic proportions. As Eve Fairbanks writes for the Washington Post, Trump did far worse than anyone expected, and that's considering his poor poll numbers before Election Day. Given his status as an incumbent, Trump's "reelection campaign was a historic failure."
The failure registers even more so for the fact that in Trump's universe he simply always wins. As he once put it, "I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win, whether it's in golf, whether it's in tennis, whether it's in life, I just always win. I tell people I always win, because I do."
But here's the thing. Even with all the winning, Trump has been obsessed with the notion that he has been treated unfairly. "No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly." This was Trump in a 2018 commencement address to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, yet again using a moment when he should have been paying attention to others to narcissistically talk about himself.
And that's one of the uncanny hypocrisies of the sore winner. Because actually the sore winner is always already a loser. You can't be a victim and a winner. You can't claim that you have been mistreated, discriminated against and maligned if you always get everything your way.
Or can you?
If you think back on the days immediately following the 2016 election, what stands out is the overwhelming sense of anger and the ongoing desire for retribution over a system in which Trump had always, only been — according to himself — successful.
And lest we think that this sort of contradiction was uniquely Trumpian, recall that his supporters have long followed suit. The same people who whine that they are being forced to give up their guns only manage to stockpile more. The same people who hysterically claim that the Black Lives Matter movement is racist have only become more openly white supremacist. The same people who moan about biased media have only picked up even more media power.
The same people who claim that the liberal left is a bunch of sniffling snowflakes never seem to be able to stop whining themselves. Their identities are locked into an endless screeching over the various ways that they believe the system is rigged against them at the same time that they continue to reap successes from that very same system.
We've spent so much time parsing the faulty logic, delusional rhetoric and twisted thinking of Trump and his supporters that it is now no longer news to claim that what he and his base think makes absolutely no sense.
So now that the sore winners are losers, you might wonder if that will somehow shift things — if the sore winners will change in the face of their losses.
The quick answer is no. There is no reason whatsoever to think that anything about the right-wing identity of the privileged victim is going to change other than to become more agitated and more aggressive. Going back as far as the presidency of Richard Nixon, the right has been casting itself as a victim of U.S. society. What's more, this idea that they are strong, powerful, morally superior, highly patriotic, successful victims is only likely to take on greater urgency during a Biden-Harris administration.
The problem that we have to confront is the fact that this "successful loser" mentality actually does win, and that despite Trump's humiliating loss, the GOP overall did pretty well in the 2020 election. At the core of this mindset is a sense of justified outrage. It is centered on a deep conviction that the right is the aggrieved party and deserves to be angry about it. It is equally centered around a sense of confidence that their views are right and their ideas are not just better, but the very best.
The fundamental hypocrisy of the winning victim might be mind-melting, but you have to admit it sells well. It offers its proponents a chance to take absolutely no responsibility for themselves while also occupying a position of self-righteous superiority. You get to take no blame, bully and harass, spew hate-filled bile and still cry about how everything is unfair and everyone is out to get you.
Much will be said in the days to follow about how to reach across the aisle and build a unified nation. We will watch the left twist itself up in its characteristic capitulating fashion, finding ways to actually blame a divided nation on the left's own failings to engage in dialogue.
But that's the wrong model. This is not a scenario where we envision two equal parties that need mediation to move forward. This, instead, is a case of a nationwide right-wing temper tantrum. And just in the same way we learn to treat a misbehaving child, the only way to handle these sore losers is to ignore them.
As the famous pediatrician Dr. Spock once taught us, just because children get angry doesn't mean we should give them free rein to express themselves. And angry children should not be allowed to bully or intimidate. Our response to them should not be to back down or to give up. "Occasional fits of anger are normal," Spock explained, "but if a child is frequently or easily enraged, she may be sending a signal for help." Maybe it's time for us to help Trump supporters grow up by giving them all a time-out.
This is the latest in my ongoing series of TrumPoems chronicling the presidency of Donald Trump, based, as always, on his words and actions.LOSER———I WON I WON I WON I WON!I won I won I won!I won I won I won I won!This race is far from done..I WON I WON I WON I WON!I’ll tweet it like a screamAnd if I tweet it very loudI’ll wake from this bad dream..Sniffle..Remember, folks, not long ago?My rallies proud and large?The swarm of fans who risked their livesSo I could stay in charge?.They cheered me like a deityNo masks to block their criesThey clapped and roared and loved meAs I superspread my lie...
