US election 2020: Trump apologists turn their backs on true conservative values
Destroying faith in democracy is the first act of a tyrant but Trump was more hypnotist than Hitler. Now he’s just a sad clown.
With Donald Trump’s presidency coming to an end at the hands of the American people, I’m genuinely curious what new and inventive ways Trump apologists will find to lecture the rest of us about how they are the ones in touch with the mainstream. Their attempts at virtue signalling are off the charts.
The Trump apologists will contort their way collectively to dismissing the highest vote for a presidential candidate in the history of the republic.
Joe Biden didn’t just out-poll Trump, he set new records when doing so. The final tally is likely to reveal a popular vote advantage for Biden over Trump of more than six million. That’s a landslide. Are there no mainstream voters among that lot?
You can point out the majority drubbing Trump received at the same time as accepting the electoral college voting system, which is set to deliver Biden the presidency anyway. With states such as Georgia and Arizona hanging in the balance, it is still possible Biden doesn’t just win the 270 electoral college votes he needs to become the 46th US president. He could push past 300 votes if everything goes his way.
Either way, were it not for the slow count courtesy of the high number of postal ballots cast because of the coronavirus pandemic, the magnitude of the win for Biden wouldn’t be in question. I’d rather it took a few days or even weeks for democracy to do its duty than to know the result of an election before a ballot had been cast. That’s what happens in countries such as Russia and North Korea — the homes of the two world leaders Trump has claimed to admire most.
Trump looks set to become only the fourth sitting president in nearly 250 years of American democracy to be turfed out of office after only one term, and the first in 28 years. The last was George HW Bush in 1992. He wrote a supportive letter of welcome to Bill Clinton and left it on the Oval Office desk for the new president to read on inauguration day. It was how a true conservative leader should act, and showed a level of grace and respect Trump is simply incapable of. He’s more likely to leave the toilet unflushed.
Trump continues to fire barbs on Twitter (with caps lock on), claiming fraud and calling for votes to stop being counted. How can true conservatives support such a man? Even if we put aside his derogatory comments about and treatment of women (which I do not), how can conservatives continue to defend a president so willing to undermine democracy, due process and the rule of law? Conservatives are supposed to defend such institutions. Doing so should be in their collective DNA.
They don’t because the right of politics has been transformed into a populist reality television show. Uneducated in the rich history of conservatism in the US and abroad, unaware, most likely, of its founding tenets and philosophical roots. But when you dig a little deeper, Trump’s brand of politics isn’t even the popular choice, as Biden has now illustrated.
Defeating incumbents is difficult, especially in the US. It should be even more difficult in the middle of a pandemic, if not for the fact Trump has comprehensively mishandled it. Yet Biden looks set to do just that, having batted away claims he is everything from demented to corrupt, beholden to the radical left or just too old for the job. But it is Trump who is acting as if he has lost his mind since election day, if not long before that. Biden’s speech the day after the election was presidential in tone and content.
Biden looks set to rebuild the blue wall lost by Hillary Clinton four years ago, winning back Michigan, Wisconsin and most likely Pennsylvania — white working-class chunks of Middle America where Biden grew up, in fact. But those who sympathise with Trump are the ones in touch with the mainstream, not Biden and his supporters. Not independents who simply couldn’t tolerate Trump for a minute longer.
Demography is destiny and that destiny is coming for the Republican Party if it continues to preach the populism it has under Trump, deliberately stoking divisions. We wouldn’t even be debating whether Trump’s brand of politics is popular if the electoral college votes were clearer, more representative of the national vote that puts Trump a long way behind. In time that will happen in the US as demographic changes across states such as Texas turn them blue again. When that happens the Republicans won’t be able to fall back on a distorted electoral college; its framework will come closer into line with the national popular vote.
In the meantime, expect a difficult four years with Biden as president. Although he will lift the tone of debate and has a track record of building consensus in Washington, Republicans will try to make his life as difficult as possible. The abject mess he’ll inherit from Trump — a divided country, a coronavirus-riddled population, lost authority internationally — won’t be easy to clean up.
It is startling how many reactionary right-wing commentators have echoed Trump’s crass and ridiculous suggestion that only votes tallied on the day of the election should be included in the count. Even if you give Trump the benefit of the doubt and refine his loose rhetoric to mean only mailed votes received after election day shouldn’t be counted, Australian commentators supporting that proposition might be surprised to learn the law permits doing so in many parts of the US.
Postal votes in Australia can be received after election day — 13 days after, in fact. And guess what? The commentators who fall over each other to spruik for the conservative side of politics should know those postal votes disproportionately favour the Coalition, not Labor — the reverse of what we are seeing in the US. I don’t recall hearing too many complaints about that process in the past.
Destroying faith in democracy is often the first act of a tyrant. Equally, plenty of dictators start out being elected legitimately. I’m not suggesting Trump is a tyrant or a dictator; he’s more crass buffoon than barbarian. More hypnotist than Hitler. At Friday’s media conference he became a sad clown. The point is that defending what Trump does (undermining democratic systems) just because he has popular support doesn’t make what he represents more legitimate. If anything it makes it more dangerous.
Peter van Onselen is the political editor at the Ten Network and a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
