November 5, 2020
And still, we wait.
Ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election continues, although it sure looks like Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are going to win.
What has stood out today is the degree to which Trump and his team have governed by creating their own reality. Now that that image is being challenged, they are flailing.
Knowing he would lose the popular vote, Trump intended to win by arguing that Democrats had “stolen” his victory. Before the election, he talked about the dangers of mail-in ballots, setting up the idea that they would somehow be fraudulent, although there is no evidence of that. He expected—correctly, as it turned out—that mail-in ballots would be heavily Democratic while Republicans would vote in person on Election Day. That set up a scenario in which the election results on November 3 would give an advantage to him, but as the hours wore on and the mail-in ballots got counted, the Democrats would gain ground. So he talked repeatedly of ending the count on the night of November 3, although ballot counting has always taken days.
He planned to challenge the counting of the mail-in ballots in the courts, all the while telling his supporters that Democrats were stealing his victory. If he could gin up enough chaos, he could buy time to throw the results into doubt and, perhaps, get the Supreme Court to enter the fight. There, he hoped for victory with the help of the three justices who owed him their seats.
He planned to subvert the election, staying in power thanks to his extraordinary ability to control the narrative, making people believe things that are not true.
The only thing that could stymie that narrative was overwhelming turnout from Democrats. To make that impossible, Trump’s team arranged to keep voters from the polls in places like Florida, and Texas, and enlisted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to delay the mails so ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted.
But, in the end, their plans could not completely suppress those Americans fed up with the Trump administration. As I write tonight, Biden and Harris are winning the popular vote by more than 4 million votes, and the numbers are rising. If it weren’t for our antiquated Electoral College system, this election would already be over, decisively.
Instead, we are still waiting on the outcomes in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Alaska.
The unraveling of Trump’s plan to claim victory has been mesmerizing.
Until Tuesday night, everything seemed to be going according to plan. In the evening, Trump won Florida by about 375,000 votes, a victory certainly helped by the disfranchisement of 1.5 million ex-felons, whose voting rights Floridians had voted overwhelmingly in 2018 to restore. Florida’s 29 electoral votes made it look like Trump was on track to win, opening up room for him to declare victory even though many of the states he would need to win for real were still counting. If he could claim victory early on, any later correction would look like the election was being “stolen.”
But before he could take a victory lap, the Fox News Channel called Arizona for Biden long before anyone else did. Arizona had been a Trump state in 2016, so this meant a flip and undercut Trump’s claim to a commanding lead. Trump was furious. He and his aides worked Twitter and the phones, trying unsuccessfully to get FNC to retract the call and, when that failed, to discredit it.
As Trump fumed, the Biden campaign was watching its candidate's numbers tick upward—again, as expected—and Biden gave a short statement Tuesday night saying the campaign felt good about where it was, and encouraging patience as election officials counted all ballots.
Trump then made a statement at 2:30 am Wednesday morning, claiming victory, demanding that officials stop counting mail-in ballots, and promising to take the election to the Supreme Court to decide. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win the election.”
But key Republican leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, noted that a number of Republican Senate candidates ran more strongly than Trump did, meaning they no longer need him. They have clearly decided that Trump is no longer useful to them, and they went before television cameras in the morning to contradict him. They said that all ballots should be counted.
Since then, the president has been flailing. His legal team has been filing lawsuits to challenge ballot counting, but the suits are frivolous and keep getting thrown out. They are designed not to win legal points, but rather to do what Trump has always done politically: create a narrative that makes his supporters believe something that is not true. So, for example, his team has sued to have Republican observers in ballot counting areas, only to have to admit to a judge that they already have observers there. They are not righting a wrong; they are trying to set Trump’s supporters up to believe a lie.
Remember when, during the impeachment hearings, the Republicans dramatically stormed a hearing to demand they have access… when, in fact, members of the committees already had access and had been attending? Then, as now, it is all about creating a narrative.
By Thursday, Trump’s surrogates were escalating their attacks on the election process. The usual suspects—the Trump children, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and so on—have tried to cast doubt on the election, insisting that election officials should not be counting mail-in ballots that were cast on or before November 3… except in Arizona.
Some were even more explicit about overturning our democratic process. Trump legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon told Lou Dobbs on the Fox News Channel: “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court- of which the president has nominated three justices- to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.” Former White House chief strategist Steven Bannon went further, calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded “as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone.” Twitter banned Bannon permanently.
Tonight, Trump addressed his sliding fortunes with a statement that will go down in the annals of the American presidency alongside Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” speech trying to regain control of the runaway Watergate story. In front of a wall of flags, speaking a low voice and tripping over his words at times, he rambled through a wild attack on the election, claiming it was being stolen from him. MSNBC cut away from his remarks almost immediately, noting they were lies; ABC News made it about five minutes. Fact-checker Daniel Dale tweeted: “I’ve read or watched all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he’s ever given.”
It felt Shakespearean, like the desperate attempt of a man who has lost control of the narrative to try to claw it back, even as we all know it’s gone beyond all recovery. As CNN’s Anderson Cooper said, it was “sad and truly pathetic…. That is the most powerful person in the world, and we see him like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over. But he just hasn’t accepted it, and he wants to take everybody down with him, including this country.”
In the wake of Trump’s statement, more Republican officials condemned his attack on democracy. Then, tonight, 19 former U.S. Attorneys, all of whom served under Republican presidents, released a statement condemning Trump’s “premature, baseless and reckless” attacks on the election process. “We hereby call upon the president to patiently and respectfully allow the lawful vote-counting process to continue, in accordance with applicable federal and state laws, and to avoid any further comments or other actions which can serve only to undermine our democracy,” they wrote. Perhaps more significant is the fact that Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier told his audience that “We have not seen the hard evidence” of the fraud Trump’s campaign claims.
Tonight, the Secret Service sent reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware, to surround Biden in a protective bubble, in anticipation of what many expect to be a victory speech some time tomorrow.
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/politics/trump-fox-news-arizona.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/05/us/election-results
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/11/05/us/election-results
https://www.democracydocket.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/trump-tv.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/donald-trump-white-house-statement-criticism
Thank you for having the stomach for Trump's antics. I have barely been able to listen to a Republican president since Reagan openly expressed his disdain for those dying of AIDS by blaming them for the situation in which they found themselves: often alone, abandoned by judgmental families and scared friends, with only medical staff accompanying them on their death beds.
There is so much about our situation that reminds me of the beginning of the AIDS crisis, despite the fact that the virus that causes COVID is affecting even "decent men and women", to recall one of Reagan's favorite phrases for voicing a deeply exclusionary vision for this country. That this vision has become narrower and narrower, to the point where only those who can be pulled into the cruel alternative reality of a sadistic con man, does not surprise me nearly as much as it does many other white folks my age.
But in Trump I see and hear only a repetition and intensification of a dominant culture that has been brutal and self-aggrandizing from the time it set foot on this continent, assuming that divine providence had given it the power and authority to brush aside the claims of those who already lived here. The "empty wilderness", just waiting for the hand of European men to bring it under civilized order, is no less a fanciful narrative than any that Trump has cooked up: it was a cruel fiction into which many well-intentioned people enthusiastically threw themselves and took up their parts as tamers of wild lands and peoples. The ruthlessness of the ensuing drama is the other half of our original sin as a country, and the necessary counterpart of slavery in nation-building.
And now we who descend from colonialists and settlers are finally beginning to understand what it means to live under this kind of arrogance and arbitrary rejection of the complexity of life on earth. It occurred to me last week that Trump's aptitude for twisting reality to the point that many of us are left nearly paralyzed with anxiety about what might happen next is just another echo of the interpersonal abuse that is rampant in our culture, and that the only way to neutralize this kind of violence is to step out of the narrative and find a way not to be pulled into its immobilizing spell of extreme uncertainty.
Which is no easy feat for anyone who is living under domestic violence or familial abuse, but is at least somewhat easier if the person who would control our reality is on the opposite coast and has no access to us that we do not ourselves grant him. And so I decided to kick him out of my head and let the events tell me how I needed to respond as they unfolded.
Which is why one reason why I thank you for taking on the task of reassembling the narrative for your readers. I know I am not the only survivor of abuse watching in horror as this man attempts to pull an entire nation into his psychodrama; we have been rehearsing this moment all our lives. And I am certainly not alone in belonging to a number of groups that he and many other conservatives have repeatedly targeted as being deserving of quite nearly nothing that sustains life, but plenty that beats it out of us, sometimes quickly (as though merciful!), and sometimes as one tiny slice of flesh, over and over and over and over.
I have begun to think a bit more about the possible cultural links between a deniable--and usually denied--proclivity for private, familial abuse and a potential for publicly embraced fascism. I have often wondered what it would take for the US to begin to understand what Europe was forced to come to grips with after World War II: that white culture is not exceptional, that it is capable of and has already committed grotesque violence in a number of founding political and even philosophical gestures, and that it will destroy itself if it does not recognize the realities underwriting its current existence.
If this seems a rather dark vision and a sobering way of registering my gratitude, it is only because I see this moment as a moment in which we may have begun to turn around, but it seems glaringly clear to me that we must keep walking in some other direction than the one that brought us here. Otherwise we will be back much sooner than many might expect. That the vote has been closer than many of us were hoping seems to me a good thing, for even if we are able to get this one example of USian fascist domination out of the executive office, it seems clear that we have much more work to do to cure ourselves of ills that allowed him to gain that office to begin with.
Perhaps later on I can say more about what it seems to me we have to do. It is far from simple or even all that clear to me, but certain parts of Euro-American culture have long been placed into critical questioning by those of us who think about such things. One difficult part is disappointing the faith of so many who still think of the US as the shining city on the hill. And there are many and much deeper faiths that I doubt will be even as easy to address as that one.
But later for that. As a disabled academic, I am in fact deeply grateful to you for doing this work that I myself only wish I had the energy for. When this is over (will we know when it is over..? Maybe when there is a lull?), please do take a nice long refreshing rest. One thing we USians often forget is that caretaking is essential: for ourselves, yes, but also as a service to each other.
Heather - You encapsulated so well this morning the pitiful President we have endured for the last four years. As a licensed clinical psychologist in Massachusetts for 40 years now, I regret that our media does not call Trump out for what he is – a mentally ill person who continues to show us how utterly delusional and dangerous his rants have become. Last night, he went to a whole new level that approached a full blown psychosis.
But even more striking to me in this election has been to face the reality that over 69 million Americans voted for him. As Nicholas Kristof in the NYT yesterday said, "How is it that so many millions of Americans watched Trump for four years, suffered the pain of his bungling of Covid-19, listened to his stream of lies, observed his attacks on American institutions — and then voted for him in greater numbers than before?"
What has taken place in this country with Trump and Trumpism has so stained America's Experiment in Democracy, that I find myself feeling hopeless and traumatized about our future and recovery . . . .