November 13, 2020

Trump and GOP risk American democracy

topic:	Democracy
located:	USA
editor:	Yair Oded

On Saturday, 7 November, Democratic candidate Joseph R. Biden was declared the winner of the US presidential race. Alas, in the days since the announcement, president Trump and his allies have been attempting to undermine the election results by touting baseless allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities. As of this reporting, the president has yet to concede. 

It’s becoming clear that what had initially seemed to be an anticipated tantrum by Trump is in fact an illegal coup attempt that threatens the survival of American democracy. 

As his rout in key swing states became imminent, Trump, along with Republican allies across the country, has launched a slew of lawsuits seeking to stop the counting of ballots and discard hundreds of thousands of others on the unsubstantiated assertion that they had been compromised. Other lawsuits allege that Trump campaign observers were blocked from overseeing ballot counting in Pennsylvania and Michigan and that workers at tabulation sites were instructed to back-date ballots that were submitted after election day. 

While the vast majority of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign have no teeth and are unlikely to reverse the election results (many have already been dismissed for lack of evidence or merit), the legal battle waged by the president is dragging out the election process, delaying the certification of results by states, sowing widespread confusion, and is entrenching in conservatives’ psyche the bogus narrative that Biden isn’t the rightful winner of the race. 

Trump’s lies about widespread fraud and his campaign’s undermining of the election results has now become the official stance of the White House, with Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany blaring mistruths about voting malpractices without a shred of certified evidence and US Attorney General William Barr directing the Justice Department to launch legal investigations into “credible” allegations of voting irregularities. When asked by a reporter if he could guarantee a smooth transition of power, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calmly responded that “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

Trump’s disinformation campaign and brazen refusal to accept the election results is drummed up by conservative media outlets and news networks. Fox News nighttime hosts, Newsmax, and One America News are among the main media sources promulgating conspiracy theories about election fraud and presenting them as hard facts. On Facebook and Twitter, videos undermining the election results have gained millions of views and have been shared hundreds of thousands of times. Statements by experts and state officials attesting to the integrity of the election, including a recent announcement by Trump's own Department of Homeland Security stating that the 3 November election was in fact the “most secure” in US history, have fallen on deaf ears in conservative spheres. 

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the Republican Party establishment has thrown its support behind Trump and legitimised his fraud allegations. This includes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who claimed that the president is well “within his rights” to pursue legal challenges, and went as far as to portray Trump’s blunt attack on the electoral process as commensurate with American democratic practices. "Our institutions are actually built for this,” McConnell stated. 

Trump’s disinformation blitz and the GOP’s unabashed undermining of the election results have successfully molded an alternative reality for many millions of Americans. According to a recent poll, 70 per cent of Republicans do not believe the recent election was fair and free. Such widespread rejection of Biden’s victory may exacerbate as the planned Trump rallies will resume in cities across the US. 

As the false narrative of an illegitimate election is being cemented as truth among conservatives, the Trump administration is taking steps to stymie the transition to a Biden presidency by withholding millions of dollars in federal funds from the latter’s transition team and denying them access to crucial security clearances. Over the past few days, Trump has also fired top civilian officials in the Pentagon and replaced them with staunch loyalists – a move some experts are regarding as a dangerous attempt by a president refusing to admit defeat and politicising the defense department. 

A top official at the defense department labeled Trump’s Pentagon purge as “dictator moves,” while former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator William Cohen stated that such behaviour is “more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy.” Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist covering authoritarian regimes, described Trump’s moves as a “terrifying” attempt at an “autocratic breakthrough,” and has delineated the correlation between the GOP’s conduct and that of autocratic regimes in countries like Turkey and Hungary. 

What we witness unfolding before our eyes is a deliberate attempt by the current administration and one of the two major political parties to undermine election results and, effectively, steal the presidency; a move that is unprecedented in its scope and severity, and is posing a grave threat to American democracy.

But the writing has been on the wall. The president’s conspicuous push for authoritarianism is fully in line with what this administration has been all about since day one: cementing the identity and structure of the Republican Party as an autocratic entity.  

A Biden era, should it arrive, must herald a genuine reckoning with the fact that America is not immune to the spread of authoritarianism, and that, as the past four years indicate, it may very well be on the verge of succumbing to it. 

Image by F. Muhammad