On Tuesday, the US supreme court delivered a devastating blow to Donald Trump’s dreams. A terse one-sentence order left the president even more desperate than he was at the start of the day: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”
The three justices whom the president appointed to the highest court failed to rescue him from the voters’ verdict. When he needed them the most, the persons that Trump called “my judges” were not his.
Instead, the electoral college will convene next Monday and a decisive majority of them will cast their votes for Joe Biden. At that point, Trump and his minions will be left to relitigate reality on Twitter, Parler and cable television. Their perorations may bring them comfort but will not alter America’s judgment.
Trump will leave office as a rejected one-term president who never won a majority in two tries. Instead of seeking to broaden his appeal, he chose to play the bile-filled victim even as nearly 300,000 Americans were dying.
Asked by the Guardian what the White House’s strategy was over the past four-plus weeks, a Trump campaign adviser could only say he “wasn’t sure”. Actually there may be something to that. Just hours before the supreme court shut down the challenge to Pennsylvania’s results, Texas commenced a nakedly performative lawsuit in the same forum against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Ken Paxton, the Lone Star state’s attorney general, accused those four electoral battlegrounds of having “destroyed” the public’s “trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election”. As fate would have it, Paxton is the reported subject of an ongoing FBI criminal investigation.
Late Tuesday, Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt, announced that he too would be joining this latest lost cause. In a tweet, Schmitt proclaimed, “Election integrity is central to our republic” and “Missouri is in the fight”. Whatever.
Regardless of whether Trump has a strategy, his post-election antics have left the US looking more like a banana republic and less like the “land of the free and home of the brave”. As for the Republican party, it appears hostile to two-party democracy.
Faced with the task of preparing for the Biden inaugural, the Republican congressional leadership on Tuesday voted against acknowledging that Biden was now the president-elect. Roy Blunt, another Missourian and the chairman of the Senate’s rules committee, intoned that it was not “the job” of Congress “to get ahead of the electoral process and decide who we are inaugurating”.
Meanwhile, House Republican firebrands are urging the president not to concede and to instead wage a futile floor fight against the election’s results when the new Congress convenes in January. Fortunately, some have refused to drink the Kool-Aid.
“This is madness,” in the words of Senator Mitt Romney. As framed by the 2012 Republican nominee, “We have a process, recounts are appropriate, going to the court is appropriate and pursuing every legal avenue is appropriate, but trying to get electors not to do what the people voted to do is madness.”
Said differently, “this is how civil societies unwind”, according to Stuart Stevens of the Lincoln Project and a former Romney strategist. He added, “The reasonable go along with the unreasonable thinking it benefits them & they can control the unreasonable. They can’t and soon the unreasonable are destroying what it took generations to build.”
In that vein, we are witnessing a GOP that has difficulty coming to terms with modernity, the country’s changing demographics, and its own failure to win the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Even before Monica Lewinsky, the party faithful questioned Bill Clinton’s legitimacy because he was a child of the 60s.
Similarly, Barack Obama laboured under a racism-fueled cloud of birtherism led by Trump. As for Biden, his disqualifying sin is simply that he is a Democrat.
Indeed, for some on the right politics is about relegating the civil war and its aftermath to the realm of fiction. According to an amicus brief filed by a Wisconsin NAACP affiliate in federal court: “It is no accident that Plaintiff’s focus in this case is on the voters of Milwaukee County, home to Wisconsin’s largest city and Black population.”
True to form, “the Trump Campaign and its allies have singled out alleged ‘corruption’ in other cities with large Black populations.” Against this backdrop, the supreme court’s order is best viewed as merely marking the end of a chapter. America’s underlying tectonics will continue to loudly grind. A Biden presidency should expect no let-up.
