Opinion

The Washington Post released the transcript Sunday of the president's Saturday phone call with Georgia's secretary of state. The document is a thicket of conspiracy theory, threats and lies. We'll be talking about it for some time. For now, however, I think it's important to focus on one big thing, which is this: Donald Trump broke the law.

I'm not an attorney. I'm not a judge. I'm not a professor of law. But any commonsense yet critical reading of this transcript, done in good faith, should come to the same conclusion. There's one reason and one reason only for a president who lost Georgia to be hounding that state's top election official. There's one reason and one reason only for the president to insist he won the state only to have Brad Raffensperger, the official in question, politely but firmly correct him each and every time. There's one reason and one reason only: to vandalize the supreme sovereignty of the American people.

When a recording of President Donald Trump's call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday, it was greeted, appropriately, with intense alarm. Even typically subdued political commentators and measured legal analysts were outraged. Trump's demand that Raffensperger "find 11,780 votes," thus theoretically flipping Georgia's 16 Electoral College votes against President-elect Joe Biden, was clearly outrageous and, many argued, a violation of multiple criminal laws. It was in line with the behavior he was impeached for and could clearly be considered a high crime on its own. Paired with Trump's implicit threat that Raffensperger may be prosecuted if he doesn't comply, the whole hour-long recording featured as perhaps the most disturbing installment yet in the Republican Party's embrace of authoritarianism.

But there is an element of the call that seems to be largely escaping notice: its pure pathos.

President Donald Trump, like Richard Nixon before him, has gotten himself into the biggest trouble of his presidency because of his big mouth. Nixon was ultimately driven from office because he was caught on tape ordering his henchmen to commit crimes. Trump was impeached — less than a year ago — over a phone call he made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he tried to convince him to publicly announce a bogus corruption investigation into political rival Joe Biden and threatened to hold up vital military aid unless Zelensky did his bidding.

This article was originally published at Salon

If every cloud has a silver lining, Donald Trump's destructiveness offers this one: He has forced us to a point of reckoning about America. If we think all this chaos is just about him, we've missed the whole point. On that point, there's wide agreement. Beyond that, however, there's considerable disagreement, if not confusion. The vast majority of elite discourse sees this in terms of a challenge to liberal democracy — a challenge that's been unfolding worldwide over the past decade or so, sometimes characterized as a "third wave of autocratization."

There's a large body of knowledge and experience behind this point of view (see groups such as Varieties of Democracy for a global perspective, or Bright Lines Watch in the U.S.). But such an idealized view of American democracy has always been challenged by African Americans, for instance: See Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" or Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again.") Trump's election, in obvious response to Barack Obama's, has had the effect of pushing the longstanding Black critique of American democracy to the very center of our politics.

Everyone knows Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be sworn in January 20. Donald Trump will leave by that day, one way or another.

Before that happens, however, a sizeable number of Republicans will challenge the integrity of U.S. elections to curry favor with Trump's angry political base. It is perhaps the most ironic of Trump's legacies that the subject of election reform will long outlast his tenure. It indeed cries out for attention, just not for the bogus reasons he claims. Voter suppression and the need to make the franchise more accessible to more Americans do require immediate attention.

Americans can now hear with their own ears just how far President Donald Trump is willing to go to steal the election from President-elect Joe Biden.

About a year ago, however, Republicans in the Senate refused to even hear evidence of Trump doing exactly the same thing, using the power of his office to attempt to influence someone into interfering with his election so he can win.