The Morning of the Fourth - Issue #7
Trump's early-morning declaration of victory should have disgusted the electorate. Most of America shrugged.
Okay, so it’s Friday morning and Biden is gaining ground in Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, and it looks like he will win. Meanwhile, that Thursday night press conference was, well, it was something. But let’s go back for a moment to that bizarre middle-of-election-night declaration of victory, the call for vote-counting to stop, and the vow to get the SCOTUS involved. Jason can’t quite get past the singularly grotesque nature of that moment. Here, he explores two questions: (1) Why was that performance one of the most irresponsible yet predictable acts of Trump’s entire presidency, and (2) who did Trump have in mind as his audience (perhaps it was not, as one might expect, the hardcore MAGA crowd) in that moment?
Date: 11/4/20
Time: 10:11 AM
I don’t know why I ever thought, even for a moment, that it might be otherwise, but one thing is clear: It was simply not reasonable to expect the current president, just this once, to display some sliver of integrity or grace.
Throughout late summer and fall, a cottage industry within the Hot Take-osphere sprung up to offer predictions about how Trump would react to a loss. The conventional wisdom that he would stamp his feet and refuse to accept that even one single American could legitimately vote against him gradually gave way to scenarios in which he slinks away quietly (it’s hardly a secret, after all, that he dislikes doing the actual, non-campaign-oriented work of the presidency), throws himself into a political media venture that would make One America News look like The Economist, or flees to another country to avoid the world of legal hurt that would be waiting for him post-presidency.
It seems comical now that anyone ever sincerely expected anything other than what we got: a deeply unconstitutional tirade that continued upon Trump’s signature delusion in which reality bends to his fumbling, unprecedentedly-malevolent rhetoric. His declaration of victory, even as he lagged in Electoral votes, his call to put a stop to the counting, and his inevitable declaration that he would make sure the Supreme Court gets involved were all easily foreseeable. The Los Angeles Times called it precisely back in September:
[Democratic lawyers] worry that Trump will hold an election-night lead in a crucial state, declare victory before the bulk of the mail ballots are counted, and send his lawyers to court to try to stop a complete count.
Yet, somehow, seeing this actually unfold felt, at least to some of us, unspeakably jarring.
I have to imagine that not even Trump believes such a gambit will be successful. He is poisoning the well, and thrilling his die-hard supporters in the process.
But they’re not hard to thrill. The actual goal, I am guessing, is to plant a seed in the kind of citizen who, to one extent or another, reluctantly voted for him. The voters who do not love him, but think Biden is even worse. The voters who will be sure to tell you they don’t much care for Trump’s Twitter habits or boorishness, but, well, you know. Or who were persuaded that Biden is in the thrall of a legislative “radical left” that in reality barely exists. Or who think Trump is a basically-decent guy who is mistreated and over-criticized by the very press that he vilifies as Enemies of the People, and wonder why you don’t appreciate that he “donates his entire salary.” Or whose vote was intended primarily as a middle finger in the face of the left.
The real purpose of that norm-obliterating speech was to engrain within a substantial percentage of these largely-apolitical, self-styled “moderates” the idea that a Biden presidency is illegitimate. There would be no greater victory-in-loss for Trump than to have that sentiment dog Biden’s presidency in the same way that his nakedly-bigoted birtherism dogged Obama’s, and to be able to leave the White House as the self-proclaimed victim of a corrupt election rather than, among many other things, as the hapless COVID-19 President.
What this means, of course, is that Trump must perpetuate the widespread mistrust and jagged ideological divisions that already characterize his presidency. This is a man whose wealth and influence would allow him to do quite literally anything he desires once his presidency ends, whether that means being a prominent voice amongst the cacophonous anger of right-wing media or retiring to a private island. With the legal means at his disposal, he can almost certainly avoid spending much time in court. And as for prison, well, my fellow liberals who fantasize about him ending up there are deluding themselves. And yet, despite this universe of possibilities, his behavior suggests that he won’t enjoy a moment of retirement if he can’t also watch American civic life continue to burn.
Unsurprisingly, everyone from dispassionate centrist to hardline Trump supporter seems to be relentlessly both-sidesing the issue. In the early hours of November 4, I made the rookie social media mistake of engaging with a friend of a friend. This poster, whose specific politics I know nothing about, but who did not seem over-the-top enthusiastic about the president, gamely argued that the media was blowing his declaration out of proportion, that Biden’s own statement — that he was “optimistic” and that he’s “going to win this election” — was entirely comparable.
To suggest that a challenger expressing confidence and stating (in future tense, crucially) that he will win is no different from a sitting president trying to shut down the election process on fabricated pretenses, and declaring victory as he trails by millions of individual votes, is to lose all touch with the reality of political norms, campaign rhetoric, and basic principles of comparing and contrasting.
And the thing is, Trump could have spent Tuesday night and Wednesday morning crowing about perfectly legitimate things: Yet again, the polls got it wrong, vastly underestimating Americans’ support for a man who — let’s just name one repellent policy for the time being — oversaw and approved of the psychological torture of separated migrant parents and children. That such a significantly-sized slice of the citizenry continues to throw their support behind such an administration may be an indictment of American morality, but it’s also, more simply, a stark repudiation of the conventional wisdom of 2020 that voters would turn on him in droves. He took Florida by a sizable margin. He held onto Ohio. It looks as though the Senate will remain in Mitch McConnell’s hands, meaning that a Biden presidency will be severely handcuffed by the Legislative branch.
But, unsurprisingly, Trump was incapable of limiting his after-hours remarks to his actual modest-to-impressive accomplishments. Like a lot of people, I put far too much trust in the polls. My rationale was that 2016 was a fluke, that polling is an industry like any other and that, having been ruthlessly humiliated four years ago, its practitioners would take stock, regroup, and figure out how to do it better. Clearly, a lot of other commentators had similar confidence, as evidenced just by the taunting-the-gods headline of this article, not to mention this one and this one. The election’s too-close-to-call status may seem to liberals like a sobering commentary on American values; but it’s even more clearly a sign that the polling industry is egregiously flawed, that it has not been properly calibrated to deal with the chaotic and, at times, politically fearsome force of Trumpism.
But instead of just reminding us that those who underestimate him do so at their own peril, or that he snagged states that Biden had high hopes for — as any candidate in his position might — Trump turned the self-aggrandizement and baseless claims of fraud up to eleven. He doesn’t even bother to make up plausible examples of such fraud. There’s no reason to, when the endgame is rooted in optics, rather than in the genuine hope for judicial triumph.
The final blight of Trump’s first term is that his declaration of victory and his demand that ballot-counting stop — a demand that, thanks to the states’ sovereignty over their election processes, he is currently in no position to enforce short of dubious threats of litigation — are being treated as normal simply because they were predictable. The two should not be conflated. A sitting president declared victory with only slightly more than 200 Electoral votes and demanded that ballot-counting stop; this is a story that ought to be explosive. Yet, the majority of the country seems to be taking it as just one more predictable, on-brand example of Trump being Trump: It’s irksome, sure, but what can you do?
A second Trump term would reaffirm the festering acceptability of white nationalism, vindicate a horrific immigration policy, give right-wing militias carte blanche to act as paramilitary constabularies in the streets, lend validity to the idea that autocratic minority rule is sustainable, bolster the fantasy that conservatism is the will of the majority, solidify an Executive Branch-sanctified rejection of social justice education, validate the conspiracy theorists who think Democrats are operating secret pedophile rings, perpetuate the spectacle in which professional journalism is dismissed as "fake news” while Trumpian content producers working for outlets like Western Journal and Daily Caller are granted White House press passes, and enable another four years of name-calling and rage-Tweeting and indifference to democratic norms, law, and basic decency. It would be the election of a man who couldn't even pretend to care when COVID was killing the same number of Americans who died on 9/11 every two days.
We can now add to that list: It would set a precedent in which an incumbent president may declare himself the winner of a second term not because he appealed to and won the approval of voters, but just because he says so. A lot of people in the past several months have speculated about what kind of post-election outcome would result in “the end of America as we know it.” I’m generally wary of apocalyptic hyperbole, but this scenario, this possibility of a disastrous electoral precedent, is my humble contribution.
The ideas expressed above are solely those of the author.
What We’re Listening To:
Fitz: Okay, bear with me…Have you seen the 2001 film Vanilla Sky, written and directed by Cameron Crowe and based on the 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes? It’s a good movie; not great, but good. But what is great is the film’s soundtrack, which features: REM, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Paul McCartney, The Monkees, Mark Kozelek, Peter Gabriel, Josh Rouse, Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan, The Chemical Brothers, and Afrika Bambaataa. Also it was produced by Crowe’s then-wife Nancy Wilson (of Heart). Wilson also contributes an original song, which is sung by Cameron Diaz in the film and on the soundtrack (it’s a low point, sure, but surprisingly not that low). Anyway, I rediscovered it this week, I think, because the film’s eeriness is reflected on the soundtrack and real life has felt pretty eery this week as well. Unfortunately, I can’t find a digital version of the full album, but this is enough to get you started…
Jason: Podcasts, NPR, soothing ambient music. This is a pretty good one, if you’re looking for an auditory sedative:
What We’re Reading:
Fitz: Steph and I joined a book club with some other parents from our kids’ school. The book the group chose was not either of our first choice, but now that I’ve started it, I’m digging it. It’s called We Ride Upon Sticks, and it’s by Danvers, MA native Quan Barry. The novel tells the story of the 1989 Danvers High School Falcons field hockey team who make a kind of deal with the Devil in order to play better. It harkens back to the Salem Witch Trials (Danvers was part of Salem in the 1600s) and it features a lot of local references, including a hand-drawn map of the North Shore of Boston inside the front cover. I’ll let you know how it is when I get further in.
Jason: New York Times, The Atlantic, Twitter