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Opinionista

Trump raises the stakes and hammers another nail into the coffin of US democracy

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Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is the executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and the Padnos/Sarosik Endowed Professor of Civil Discourse at Grand Valley State University.

We all knew it was coming, and now it is here: an attempted coup. There is no other way to describe what US President Donald Trump did in the wee hours of the morning.

Standing in the East Room of the White House, the room where Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy lay in state, Donald Trump stood and uttered six words that constituted an unprecedented assault on the integrity of the US electoral system and the guts of our democracy.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” he said.

As is frequently, if not always, the case with Trump, he accompanied this continued move towards authoritarianism with lies about widespread voter fraud that he will go to the Supreme Court to stop.

Although one might think that we have lost our capacity to be shocked after five years of this kind of behaviour, this brazen attack on the more than 240 years of our democracy was striking for multiple reasons.

The first was its utter predictability.

Trump and his allies like Attorney General William Barr have been sowing doubt on the electoral process for months.

He has repeatedly declined to say he would accept defeat because, he said, his defeat would by definition mean that the election had been rigged.

The second, and perhaps even more disturbing reason, is the nation’s diminished capacity for outrage.

On one level, this may not be surprising.

The ceaseless lies and ongoing attack on the fabric of our democracy have become so routine that it can be hard to feel the latest one on a visceral level.

I would argue, though, that, while understandable, this by itself is a profound cause for concern.

The third is the comprehensive silence on the part of Republican leaders in the face of Trump’s actions.

As we saw during the impeachment proceedings, the Republican Party has long since given up on any semblance of independent thought or action.

Utah Senator Mitt Romney was the sole Republican to vote in favour of Trump’s conviction on abuse of power charges. 

Citing the challenges of Covid-19 and what they called outrageous media misrepresentation, the Republican National Committee made reasserting “the party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his administration” one of the central planks of the platform it highlighted at its August convention.

The same muted response was evident on Tuesday night after Trump’s victory declaration.

Sure, commentators like longtime Republican presidential ombudsman Benjamin Ginsberg and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie offered critical comments on television, asserting that all votes must be counted.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who used his victory speech to warn Democrats against pursuing “radical change”, was silent.

So, too, was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The fourth, and perhaps most important, is that Trump’s action reminds and reinforces perhaps his presidency’s central lesson: the future of our democracy lies with all of us.

We, the people. 

Democrats and Republicans.

Old, middle-aged and young. 

Black, white, Latino, Asian and Native-American.

Men, women and nonbinary folks.

Gay, straight, bisexual and questioning.

Able-bodied and disabled.

We must insist not only that each vote be counted, but that the results be honoured.

We must label plainly what is happening and speak out against it.

And we must fight in this moment for the integrity of our form of government, as countless others have done before us in the more than two centuries since our democratic experiment began.

The counting continues.

The fate and future health of our democracy, even after record levels of turnout in some states, is uncertain.

The responsibility for our fate remains with us. DM

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Comments - Please in order to comment.

  • Rodney Weidemann says:

    I love how US ‘democracy’ works, although it is quiet a complex concept to follow. My basic understanding is this:
    1) Use your control at domestic level to gerrymander and disenfranchise voters who are more likely to vote against you through Jim Crow-light legislation (and on voting day itself, through intimidation, by encouraging your armed supporters to ‘guard’ polling stations and ‘ensure’ voting takes place properly), creating the conditions for razor thin margins at state level.
    2) Stuff key departments (like the Dept of Justice) with toadies who will do whatever you say, while at the same time ignoring the precedent your own party set and rushing through the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice who will obviously be favourable to you, giving you a 6-3 conservative leaning.
    3) Spend a year completely undermining the most logical method of voting during a pandemic – even though you yourself use it to cast your vote – so that when you lose (and with over 4 million more people voting for your opponent, you have lost, regardless of what the electoral college eventually says) you have an avenue of attack.
    4) fight to prevent mail in ballots being counted before election day. then, on election day, launch a challenge saying they cannot be counted after the polls close. that way, your voters – who are quite happy queuing maskless for hours to cast a vote in person – will have their votes counted, but you can prevent all those sissies who believe in the disease (rather than something like QAnon!) and who thus prefer the mail-in option, from exercising their right to vote.
    5) Take your grievances to the Supreme Court, which is now stuffed with your conservativejudges beholden to you, the man who essentially gave them a lifelong tenure.
    6) Win the election via court battle and continue to turn the Arsenal of Democracy into the Fourth Reich!

    There, ain’t democracy grand?!!?

  • Cape Flats says:

    Hands up, anyone who is surprised by this state of affairs?
    Hands up, anyone who is surprised by the state of the polarised nation?
    Hands up, anyone who is surprised that the past four years are an unmitigated disaster?
    Hands up, anyone who is surprised that the US now has no foreign policy to speak of, except for sticking by the government of Israel at all costs, playing “last touch” with China, and trashing whatever global climate agreements are in the offing?
    Hands up, anyone who is surprised by the run-away numbers of COVID-19 cases in the USA?
    Hands up, anyone who is surprised that the GoP is making up the rules as they go?
    I give you, POTUS Donald J Trump.

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