If the 2020 presidential election were an athletic contest, Joe Biden's apparent conquest of Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes would signal its definitive end.
A buzzer would sound. Spectators would cheer (or head dejectedly for the parking lot) as the game clock ticked down to 0:00. A referee would hoist the victorious prizefighter's arm aloft as his defeated opponent was helped back to the locker room.
But that's not how presidential elections end in the United States.
Since 1796, when Vice President John Adams beat former Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in the first contested one, the losing candidate has brought the curtain down by formally conceding the election, thereby signaling to partisans on both sides the need to stop campaigning and start governing, or at least preparing for the next election.
Donald Trump has been telling Americans for the better part of the last year that he will never do this. Thursday night, as a riptide of absentee ballots swept his last hopes of reelection out to sea, he made good on his promise, doubling down on victory claims that brought gasps of incredulity from even his closest advisers.
Trump's groundless boasts have made his critics apoplectic for decades, but this outburst was different. This was embarrassing, like watching an aging relative soil himself in public.
The president's words were combative, but his reasoning was deranged, his body language a pale shadow of his campaign trail brio. Republican surrogates looked at their hands, and many news outlets cut their live feeds.
Saturday, as absentee ballot returns from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia padded Biden's prohibitive lead in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign released a statement declaring the election "far from over" and said the president's lawyers would resume their attack on the legitimacy of the voters' verdict on Monday.
RESCUING THEMSELVES
Addressing Trump's PTSD is a challenge for his doctors and family members. Achieving closure and assuring continuity of government in the absence of any concession is a practical imperative to which elected leaders in both parties must now devote their full energy.
To Michigan's Republican congressional and legislative leaders — the GOP's ranking elected officials after an election that left Michigan's levers of executive power, its state Supreme Court and its two U.S. Senate seats in Democratic hands — I offer this lesson from the life-saving course I took at a long-ago Boy Scout campout.
"A drowning person is a panicking person," our grizzled instructor warned us. "You're trying to save his life, but he just wants to climb onto your shoulders, onto your head, onto anything that's not water.
"Your first challenge," the instructor said, "is to make sure he doesn't drown you, too."
Trump is drowning, and there is no saving his dream of four more years in the Oval Office. The question is whether he will drag public confidence in the legitimacy of government, and the integrity of everyone from President-elect Joe Biden to newly designated Michigan House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, down with him.
Elected leaders who indulge Trump's baseless claims that Michigan's mail-in vote was fraudulent are undermining the legitimacy of their own elections, too. If the president succeeds in convincing a substantial number of Americans that local election officials, secretaries of state in both parties, and judges across the country have engaged in a vast conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process, every elected leader's authority will be suspect.
Sustaining Michigan's ongoing experiment in self-government depends on elected Republicans courageous enough to defend the results of the election against unfounded allegations of dead voters and rampant ballot tampering.
Sitting GOP lawmakers will likely keep their powder dry while courts scrutinize any voting irregularities the president's lawyers surface. As of Friday evening, only retiring U.S. Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Dryden, had called Trump to account for his bizarre claims, pointing out in a tweet that "a legally cast vote does not become 'illegal' simply because a candidate does not like the vote " Mitchell's GOP colleague, Rep. Fred Upton, R- St. Joseph, was more circumspect, allowing only that he had heard of no irregularities in his own district and that "the voices of the American people must be respected."
But within the next week, Upton and his GOP colleagues will have to either reject the president's unfounded claims of a massive, coordinated conspiracy or embrace responsibility for whatever chaos ensues.
A FRESH START? OR OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES?
Peter Meijer and Lisa McClain, two Republican newcomers who won seats in the U.S. House Tuesday, have a golden opportunity to establish themselves as leaders of a post-Trump GOP that prioritizes traditional Republican values such as fiscal responsibility and respect for the rule of law over delusional conspiracy theories.
No one expects Meijer or McClain to welcome Biden's victory or embrace his legislative agenda. But by recognizing the legitimacy of Biden's election, Michigan's newest congressional members can distinguish their brand of Republicanism from their vanquished president's self-aggrandizing version.
Scott Walker, who tirelessly championed Trump's legislative agenda and conduct throughout his tenure as Wisconsin's GOP governor, set a prudent example for Michigan Republicans when he vigorously defended the integrity of his state's electoral process against the president's vague and unfounded allegations of corruption.
Another Republican, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, rejected the president's assertion that Biden's come-from-behind victory was proof that Pennsylvanians had conspired to steal his reelection.
Walker and Toomey know Republicans can ill afford to squander any more of their own credibility in support of Trump's paranoiac delusions.
There is still a nation to be governed, still a pandemic to be corralled, still an economy to revive, still a Republican Party to rebuild.
And for all the incumbent president's determined efforts to undermine it, there is still a stubborn faith in the possibility of self-government that enhances every American's security and opportunity.
Now is the time for Michigan's Republican elected leaders to prove they share that faith.
