Conservative support for Trump as he continues to dispute election result is shameful and damaging

What has happened to the once intellectually powerful conservative movement, as so many on the conservative right still defend Trump? Picture: AFP

With the results now all in and finalised from the United States presidential election, the kick in the teeth for arrogant reactionaries extolling the virtues of Donald Trump is complete.

The President was comprehensively crushed. The claims from supposed conservatives that they understood the beating heart of America, not the Democrats nor anyone opposing Trump’s brand of doing business, is so laughable as to be embarrassing for such pundits.

Trump lost the electoral college 306 to 232. Joe Biden won in excess of seven million more of the popular vote than Trump, an astonishing number. That left Biden with 51.3 per cent of the vote compared to Trump’s mere 46.8 per cent. Biden flipped red states such as Arizona and Georgia. He won back all three mid west “blue wall” states Hillary Clinton lost four years ago.

Nobody underestimated the challenges ahead, especially in the wake of the way Trump continues to act. His downright dangerous refusal to accept the election results, claims of widespread fraud aimed at delegitimising the outcome are shameful. A nice reminder how shameful the support he received from supposed conservatives really was.

Conservatives are supposed to uphold institutions and culture, not throw their support behind someone who tears down such important democratic frameworks.

Then of course we have Trump’s abject failure at managing COVID-19. The US is an absolute basket case because of Trump’s hopeless response – which was ongoing as reactionary commentators continued to applaud the president.

But the size of Trump’s defeat, in mainstream America, now confirmed in the data, is a humiliation for all those on the hard right who claimed they and Trump understood the electorate in a way the rest of us could not.

No actually.

Funnier still was their early claims of victory – unable to read the electoral map nor understand the voting systems out of the US as the votes rolled in. Australian commentators on the hard right ignorant of such basic electoral comprehension got well ahead of their American equivalents on the day of the election, claiming victory too soon.

Yet so many on the conservative right still defend Trump. Even now, as his dummy spit drags on,

Damagingly so. What has happened to the once intellectually powerful conservative movement? It’s now led by populist laggards who probably haven’t even read the writings of the modern founder of conservatism, Edmund Burke.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.