US election 2020: Donald Trump can’t risk tarnishing his legacy

If Americans remember Trump only for his final act, he’ll be damned alongside Richard Nixon as one of the nation’s worst post-war leaders.

Lou Holtz waits to be awarded the Medial of Freedom by Donald Trump during a ceremony in the Oval Office. Picture: AFP.

“When you are in public life, people remember the last thing you do,” Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said when asked about Donald Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss.

Trump had better hope that Alexander is wrong because Trump’s last act is turning into the saddest moment of his presidency.

Trump is behaving in a manner which is not just unpresidential but is tarnishing his legacy.

In the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has fired off more than 35 tweets about alleged election fraud and posted a 45 minute rant about it on Facebook.

pic.twitter.com/DVDyvbGIKz

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2020

During that period the president did not say a single word about the fact that a record 3,157 Americans died of the coronavirus on Thursday (AEDT) – more than died in the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Nor did he express any sympathy or offer advice or guidance for a country where the pandemic has spun out of control in what Trump’s chief health officers says is the greatest public health crisis the nation has faced.

A record 100,000 people are now in hospital as daily infections soar above 200,000 a day – more than four times the level of only a month ago.

The trajectory is such that CDC chief Robert Redfield says deaths in the US could jump from 273,000 to 450,000 by the time Joe Biden assumes office in late January.

The president has not said a single word about the fact that a record 3,157 Americans died of the coronavirus on Thursday. Picture: AFP.

Living here in Washington you can see the human cost of this close up. More and more neighbours, friends and workmates are becoming infected; the queues at testing sites now wind around several blocks; the sirens of passing ambulances are constant and the obituary sections of local papers are bloated with the stories of the dead. Yet much of the country, especially the midwest, is far worse off with hospitals overflowing and trailers being used to store bodies.

By any objective measure, America is in a country in crisis right now and yet it is all but leaderless.

Trump is a president who is lost by choice in a dark world of conspiracy theories, spreading clear mistruths about massive election fraud which every court in the country has rejected, if not ridiculed.

His lawyer Rudy Giuliani is running a circus sideshow of meetings and court appearances which are mostly screened only by fringe far-right media and then retweeted by the president to create a fools-only echo chamber of false claims.

The WINNING Legal Theory

Rudy Giuliani’s breaks it down here: https://t.co/2oIADaG3UY pic.twitter.com/OA1Ddx3j4s

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) November 28, 2020

Rather than accept the inevitable truth that Joe Biden defeated him comfortably in last month’s election, Trump has doubled down in recent days to promote his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him.

Along the way, he is losing so much credibility that he – a sitting president – is struggling to get airtime.

Trump delivered his address this week to Facebook rather than to a news network because he knew that no network would carry his 45 minute fact-free speech on electoral fraud.

The extraordinary address, which Trump touted as maybe the most important he had ever made, got only passing mention across the American media. It is embarrassing for a sitting US president to be largely ignored by his own country’s media but this is the situation Trump has now created for himself.

Trump’s Attorney-General Bill Barr – a close Trump ally until this week – showed the courage which has deserted the Republican leadership by pointing out the simple fact that his investigators have not uncovered any electoral fraud which would change the election result.

A furious Trump, when asked if he still had confidence in Barr, responded by saying “ask me that in a number of weeks.”

An editorial in the Wall St Journal – which is far more pro-Trump than the liberal Washington Post and New York Times – gave a devastating blow-by-blow account this week of how Trump’s claims of fraud were unsustainable.

“As the election timetable closes, Mr Trump should focus on preserving his legacy rather than diminishing it by alleging fraud he can’t prove,’ the paper said.

This is where American conservatives – including senior Republicans – should be pushing Trump harder.

His one-term presidency was riddled with faults but it did nonetheless strike some important and notable achievements, especially in his first two years.

During that time Trump fulfilled many of his election promises, from turbocharging the economy through tax cuts and slashing red-tape regulations to rewriting trade deals, challenging China, Iran and NATO, engaging with Kim Jong-un, securing borders, putting conservative justices into the Supreme Court and protecting the freedoms were important to his supporters, from guns to religion.

But these are getting lost in the debate over his legacy as Americans increasingly view Trump as a sore loser rather than a wronged martyr.

Trump’s doomed quest is not only undermining faith in American Democracy amongst his supporters. It is revealing himself as a leader who either does not care, or is unable to respond, to a human tragedy which his own health experts say is of historic proportions.

If Alexander is right, and Americans remember Trump only for his final act, then he will be damned alongside Richard Nixon as one of the nation’s worst post-war leaders. Trump is running out of time to change the way history remembers him.

(Cameron Stewart is also US Contributor for Sky News Australia)