First Republicans in Congress gave Donald Trump a week to admit he lost the presidential election. Then they called for the lame duck president to have his day in court, where the Trump campaign amassed a 1-51 win-loss record in challenging Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
Next Republicans pointed to the so-called “safe harbor” deadline of 8 December, when states would certify their respective results, as the date when Trump would surely be forced to admit his loss. But that deadline came and went on Tuesday, seemingly unnoticed by the White House.
Now, it is beginning to dawn on some members of the Republican leadership that Trump is working on a calendar all his own, and that the political limbo they now inhabit – unable to take the basic step, as elected officials in the United States of America, of recognizing the rightful winner of a free and fair election – might never end, assuming they will not summon the courage to contradict Trump.
“I don’t know that he’s ever gonna concede,” John Thune, the Senate majority whip, told Politico on Wednesday. More than 200 Republicans in Congress – about 90% of the total – will not say publicly who won the presidential election, the Washington Post found.
The Republican silence has given Trump a window to expand his attacks on US democracy. The president’s tweeted lies about fake election fraud have escalated in the last month to include the simple message on Twitter “#OVERTURN”.
The majority of Republican voters who think the election was fraudulent, despite findings to the contrary by Trump’s own administration and no supporting evidence, is still growing.
The high stakes are plain. As Trump himself put it on Wednesday: “How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?”
Some Republicans cling to hopes that upcoming events in the transfer of power – future dates on the election calendar – will cause Trump to change course, and relax the pressure on them. Next Monday, 14 December, the electoral college meets to cast votes based on state certifications of the result.
On 6 January, Vice-President Mike Pence, in his capacity as president of the US Senate, is to preside over a ceremonial meeting of a joint session of Congress at which the electoral votes are added up and Joe Biden is formally declared the next president.
Representative Alex Mooney, a Republican from West Virginia who introduced a House resolution on Tuesday that encourages neither Trump nor Biden to concede until all the investigations are completed, expressed faith that the congressional count would convince Trump and end the silence of his colleagues.
“The end is when the roll call is put up here,” Mooney told the Associated Press.
But the five weeks since the election are littered with flawed speculation by Republicans about the supposedly imminent moment when Trump would admit reality and they could safely follow suit.
“I think the goal here is to give the president and his campaign team some space to demonstrate there is real evidence to support any claims of voter fraud,” one senior Senate Republican aide told Reuters on 10 November. “If there is, then they will be litigated quickly. If not, we’ll all move on.”
“At some point this has to give,” a second aide told Reuters at the time. “And I give it a week or two.”
The result is a risky standoff like none other in US history. The refusal to agree upon the facts of the election – which was called for Biden by the leading media decision desks, including the Associated Press and, thereby, the Guardian, on 7 November, threatens to undermine voter confidence, chisel away at the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency and re-stack civic norms.
Trump sent his party down this unprecedented path by claiming the election was “rigged”, but Republican leadership has enabled doubts to swell through their past four weeks of silence.
The president has personally called on some local elected officials to reconsider the results. Now, the disputed election has taken on a political life of its own that the party’s leadership may not be able to squash, even as Trump’s legal challenges crumble and state and national level officials declared it the most secure election in US history.
Republicans say it makes little political sense at this point for them to counter Trump’s views lest they risk a backlash from his supporters – their own constituents – back home.
They are relying on Trump voters to power the Georgia runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the Senate. And while some GOP lawmakers have acknowledged Biden’s victory, most prefer to keep quiet, letting the process play out “organically”, as one aide put it, into January.
But election experts warn of long-term damage to the long-cherished American system.
“It clearly hurts confidence in the elections,” said Trey Grayson, the Republican former secretary of state for Kentucky and a past president of the National Association of Secretaries of State.
“My hope,” he said, is by 14 December “there will be some more voices, but my gut is it won’t be until the 6th” (of January).
Edward Foley, an elections expert and constitutional law professor at Ohio State University, said it was true that the election winner is not officially the president-elect until the Congress declares it so with its vote on 6 January to accept the electoral college results.
“I’m less concerned about the timing, but that it happens,” he said.
For Americans to “have faith” in the elections, the losing side has to accept defeat. “It’s very, very dangerous if the losing side can’t get to that,” he said.
“It’s essential for the parties to play by that ethos – even if one individual, Mr Trump, can’t do it, the party has to do it,” he said.
“What’s so disturbing about the dynamic that has developed since election day is that the party has been incapable of conveying that message because they’re taking their cues from Trump.”
