Trump’s assault on democracy

Donald Trump’s behaviour since he lost the election has been far worse than anything he did as president.

Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as they push barricades to storm the US Capitol in Washington on Thursday. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump finishes his astonishing term as president in utter ignominy. His behaviour since he lost the presidential election on November 3 has been far worse than anything he did as president. He has constantly claimed that there was massive voter fraud and that the election was stolen from him when there is no evidence for this at all.

He has searched for ways to frustrate the clear will of a clear majority of the American people that he should leave office. He has enraged a core part of his base — the nutty conspiracy part that believes in QAnon, the lizard illuminati, that Vladimir Putin is a defender of Western civilisation, that Hillary Clinton runs a paedophile ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant, and the more mundane but equally crazy deranged idea that all state governors, including conservative Republicans, and election counting authorities, and the courts, including the Supreme Court of whom three justices were chosen by Trump, and all the courts in states like Georgia with judges chosen overwhelmingly by Republican administrations — that these people are all in a giant co-ordinated conspiracy to steal the election from Donald Trump.

As a result of this, American democracy has been humiliated as clowns, thugs and street-fighting fascists claimed the Senate president’s chair and made merry in the seat of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, while order was overthrown and, for a moment, the mob ruled where the institutions of democracy should rule.

Trump did not lose narrowly to Joe Biden. Some 81 million Americans voted for Biden, while 74 million voted for Trump. On percen­tages Biden won by 51.4 per cent to 46.9 per cent, a margin of 4.5 per cent. Trump did lose several states narrowly, which if he had won would have meant retaining the presidency. But what would have been a fluke like 2016 did not come about, not for reasons of fraud but for reasons of democracy.

Is Trump truly responsible for the sickening attack on the US Senate and House of Representatives this week?

Yes, he is, 100 per cent responsible. Trump has spent every day since November 3 fraudulently claiming American voters were robbed. On the day congress was attacked, with five people dead as a result, Trump told a Save America Rally in Washington: “We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, to the Capitol and cheer on our Republican senators and congressmen … You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong” and “our election victory stolen by a bold and radical left Democrats … We will never give up … we will never concede … we will stop the steal” and later “we have to get our people to fight”.

Trump’s lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, called for “trial by combat”. Several Trump family members gave similarly incendiary speeches.

It is important to note that Trump did also say: “I know that everyone here will be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” But this was a transparent Trump self-protection clause. He tells his supporters congress is conniving in stealing the election, enrages them, demands they march on congress and fight, show strength, you can’t win through weakness, but then adds a line somewhere about supporting peaceful protest.

Then, after the Capitol had been stormed in the most shocking scenes of vandalism of democracy in modern American history, Trump, never wanting to alienate anyone who is prepared to go out on the street for him, made another statement to and about the rioters: “We love you, you’re very special people” but you have to go home now and not be violent.

Next day, after Trump had been condemned by countless leaders who had previously supported him, including Republican senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, Republican House leaders like Liz Cheney, and media commentators who had once recognised the positives in his presidency, and he had faced a slew of resignations even from diehards among senior officials and cabinet officers in his administration, Trump made another statement, this time condemning the “heinous attack” on democracy, saying he was “outraged by the lawlessness and mayhem” and that the rioters did not represent America. As with so many episodes of Trump, it was grotesque.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump do not support violence and lawlessness. But this was an attempt at street-fighting fascism. At its worst, America recently resembles Weimar Germany with rival violent street gangs more than willing to fight each other.

The fact that the rioters who trashed American democracy did not have a plan for seizing and holding government does not mean they were just overenthusiastic folks who got carried away. Trump had a plan. He wanted to mobilise maximum ground demonstrations around America to intimidate Republican congress-men and senators, and above all, Vice-President Mike Pence, and even if possible some courts, to go along with his demand that they reject state-certified election results. Trump wanted those results sent back to states so they could recount after presumably declaring tens of thousands of Biden votes invalid, or he wanted the election thrown to the house on the basis that the electoral college could not finalise a tally.

Two things stopped this from happening. First, despite the carnage in Washington this week, there is a limit to the size of crowds Trump can put on the streets for this kind of action.

And second, all the institutions of the American state — the courts, the congress, the admirable Pence, defied Trump. The military would not have followed unconstitutional orders from Trump. No court at any level has given credence to his demented allegations.

The storming of congress, nonetheless, was an appalling and historic tragedy for the US. If there is any silver lining, it can only be that Trump may have been at least partly de-authorised as a force within the Republican Party.

Vice-President Mike Pence and House speaker Nancy Pelosi oversee a joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden’s victory. Picture: AFP

The Republican Party is gravely damaged. It is one thing for Republican politicians to hold their tongues about Trump’s frequently contemptible language and personal behaviour, even his erratic unreliability, in exchange for prosecuting the substantial parts of his agenda that were good for America. That was perfectly defensible, especially because as president he has never behaved so badly as since November 3.

However, it is unsupportable cowardice for these same politicians — eight Republican senators and more than 100 members of the House of Representatives — to connive in Trump’s lies that the election was stolen and to support efforts in congress to over turn individual states’ election declarations. The Republicans involved knew they would fail in this, so they no doubt felt they weren’t really hurting democracy because Biden would be confirmed in office whatever they did. And in the meantime they could keep onside with the Trump base and with Trump himself, and not become victims in future Republican primaries of his attacks.

But this was cowardice of a bridge too far. It involved conscious lying. It genuinely imperilled democracy.

Let’s try to disentangle the results of this week. Trump has hurt America, hurt the West, helped China, helped Russia, hurt Republicans, hurt conservatives, helped the left and helped the Biden presidency.

Take them one by one. Since November 3, Trump has behaved much, much worse than he ever did as president. This will tarnish his genuine legacy of positive achievements. Trump was always a contemptible and unworthy character. For any serious conservative, voting for him was always a 51-49 decision. He had bad character but a lot of good policies, and was opposed, in Clinton and then Biden, by candidates much less offensive than Trump but still extremely underwhelming on the character score, and with very bad policies. It was perfectly reasonable on balance to vote for Trump in those circumstances.

And, pre-COVID, he had a defensible record: deregulation and tax cuts had turbocharged the economy, reducing poverty and unemployment, especially black and Latino unemployment, and increasing wages, especially for the low paid; he hugely increased the defence budget; he appointed uniformly good judges; he gave pro-life arguments their best hearing; he called out China’s trade misbehaviour more clearly than any previous president; and he achieved a series of historic Middle East peace agreements between Israel and its neighbours.

Of course he got a lot of things wrong too, but it will now be almost impossible for anyone to make a serious defence of the Trump record, which will be forever dominated by his using the authority of the presidency to incite a violent attack on the legislature. In calling for his resignation, The Wall Street Journal argued that he had crossed a constitutional line that he had never crossed before.

In the process of all this, Trump has gravely damaged the Republican Party and conservatives. The Republicans lost the two Senate seats in Georgia because of Trump. On November 3 the American people produced a sophisticated and calibrated result. They clearly voted for Trump to lose the presidency. But they did not vote for Democrats in the congress, the Senate or any state legislatures, in most of which Democrats went backwards. Millions of Americans voted for Biden as president and Republicans in congress and the Senate.

That was as near as you could possibly get to an electorate saying, we want Trump gone but we are not embracing the radical leftism of the contemporary Democratic Party. On November 3, Republican David Purdue soundly led Jon Ossoff but just failed to get the 50 per cent plus one he needed under Georgia’s electoral rules. This week, Purdue was soundly beaten by Ossoff in Georgia. Trump’s months of self-centred lies about the election process convinced enough voters that Republicans were a bigger danger than Democrats.

Thus Trump also helped the incoming Biden presidency in two ways. It now controls the Senate (though the numbers are still very narrow), which makes it much likelier it can get its agenda passed. And this week’s shocking events also invest Biden with huge if unearned moral authority because they validate the worst interpretation of Trump and the Trump years, and therefore cast Biden as the nation’s rescuer.

More generally, Trump hurt conservatives all over the world, for if conservatives do not stand for the rule of law they stand for nothing at all. Trump’s actions since November 3, and worst of all this week, validate the most extreme left caricatures of conservatives. Trump damaged democracy itself, for the central idea of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power after an election. Even Trump, in the most deranged reaches of his narcissism, cannot believe that he truly won the election.

Therefore his real belief is exposed as being that the rules of democracy do not apply to him. He also injects enormous hatred and bitterness into politics.

Conservatives have mounted powerful and well-justified critiques of left-wing extremism, identity politics and cancel culture, that much of it is based on hatred and intolerance. This critique is valid. Left-wing extremism has driven most of the recent dysfunction in Western politics. But those conservatives who won’t condemn Trump’s assault on democracy, and the shocking scenes in the US congress, expose themselves as utter hypocrites. They connive with the left in reducing politics to a brutal war of tribes, with no considerations of ethics, decency or higher principles allowed to moderate the ruthlessness of tribal warfare. That portends a dangerous future.

Finally, Trump has done enormous damage geo-strategically to the US, to its allies and to the West generally.

The COVID-19 crisis has exposed many Western governments as facing a basic crisis of competence and capability, in contrast to most East Asian governments. Trump has now added to the COVID failures a partial American failure at the very mechanics of democracy. The Chinese Communist Party tells its people, and would-be friendly governments in the Third World, that the Western model is clapped out, doesn’t work any more, if it ever did, and that the US is irreversibly trapped in decline and stagnation.

Many of Trump’s policies contested that dishonest caricature of America quite effectively. But his assault on American democracy validates Beijing’s critique. It also reinforces the message of autocracies in Beijing, Moscow and elsewhere that at least they provide their citizens with stability.

Many things the left says about Trump are untrue. And many things they say about his record over the past four years are untrue. They have contributed more than their fair share to the poison running through American democracy today. But since November 3, Trump has fully lived down to the worst expectations of his critics.

He has as a result damaged everything he claims to care about, even himself.