Donald Trump is exactly what kept George Washington up at night.

"Men make their own history,” Karl Marx wrote in his historical treatise about Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, “But they do not make it as they please.” Nor do they get to choose how they will be remembered. Triggered by deep-seated fears that he will be labeled a “loser” for all of eternity, Donald Trump is working diligently to make certain that, whatever accomplishments he might want to be remembered for – a strong stock market and economy, taking on China, peace in the Middle East – his legacy will be defined by his continuing efforts to destroy the democracy he was elected to lead.

Bull markets come and go, as do pandemics, but liberal democracy was supposed to be forever: the highest and best achievement of human society. And for more than two centuries, America has been a beacon of democratic promise – as Barack Obama describes so eloquently in his new book – not because of the circumstances of life on the ground at any given moment, but for what it aspires to be. The notion that he is the caretaker of that long history has never occurred to Donald Trump, as he has taken a sledgehammer to our core democratic institutions whenever it served his purposes. But nothing he has done to date has been more destructive – and looms to be more irreparable – than his continuing efforts to undermine public faith in elections themselves.

Louis-Napoléon might well have been a role model for Donald Trump. Elected President of France in 1848, Louis-Napoléon chafed at the notion that his legal term as president was coming to an end, and led a coup in 1851 against the government he had been elected to lead. Like Trump, the aristocratic Bonaparte fashioned himself a working class hero. He was successful in leveraging his support among the working class and – unlike Trump (as yet) – proclaimed himself Emperor in 1851. 

Europeans understand the fragility of democracy in a manner that eludes Americans. Louis-Napoléon reigned as Emperor Napoléon III for twenty years, before France took its next stab at fulfilling the dreams of the French Revolution and continued down its own halting path toward democracy with the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870. Most Americans know Adolf Hitler as the dictator who killed millions of Jews, gypsies, and others in extermination camps, until he was defeated by the US and our allies in the Second World War. But fewer realize that Hitler was democratically elected at a time when Germany, like France, was struggling to build a democracy, and once in office used legal means – along with the rage and resentments of his supporters – to transform Germany into a dictatorship. 

Despite the long history of democracies being overthrown or migrating into illiberalism – often with the support of a large share of the population – most Americans never really imagine that such a thing could happen here. Yet the parallel with Louis-Napoléon looms large. As the world watched Rudy Giuliani’s deranged news conference a few weeks ago – Rudy with his hair dye streaming down his face, Sidney Powell with her QAnon-tinged rants – many concluded that the end of the Trump presidency had finally arrived in the form of a vaudeville routine disguised as a press conference. Trump’s cadre of national law firms had jumped ship on his efforts to overturn the vote of the people – having apparently decided that being co-conspirators in a latter-day anti-democratic putsch would not be good for business – leaving Trump to be represented by Rudy and his gang of legal misfits. Axios reporter Jonathan Swan summed up the absurdity of it all in a tweet: “The publicly-stated position of President Trump's legal team is that the reason Trump lost Georgia is because Georgia's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has been bribed by a Venezuelan front company in cahoots with the CIA to throw elections to Communists.”  

Yet, even as the widespread presumption was that Giuliani and Powell had gone rogue, and the Trump team officially cut ties with Powell, the President doubled down, insisting that a wide-spread conspiracy along the lines that Powell and Swan described did indeed deprive him of a massive electoral landslide. Far from being new, the rigged-election conspiracy narrative is one that Trump cultivated during his 2016 campaign, and this time around he worked diligently from early in the election season to condition his supporters to believe that only a massive conspiracy – with a focus on mail-in ballots – could deprive him of victory in November. 

And it worked. Polls over the past several weeks have consistently shown that large majorities of Republicans believe that the election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden, and that a majority of Republicans – meaning tens of millions of Americans – believe that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the election. It is safe to say that today, Americans are living in alternate universes. For most of the country, we held an election, and Joe Biden won. He and Kamala Harris are now assembling their cabinet and preparing to take office on January 20th, as the Constitution provides. For those following Trump’s lead, he remains the rightful winner, and there is no such certainty of what will, or should, transpire next month. Speaking from the White House this week in a speech he posted on Facebook and described as the most important he has ever made, Donald Trump asserted that “If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be President.” 

George Washington might not have been able to imagine Donald Trump, but he did envision the situation that has transpired. Washington, along with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton,  feared that the rise of political parties and the manipulation of partisan passions could lead to the undoing of the constitutional republic they had worked so hard to create. In his farewell address to the nation in 1797, Washington specifically warned that a group of people – "a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community" in his words – might succeed in leveraging heightened partisan passions to hijack a political party and use it as a vehicle – “an artificial and extraordinary force” as he described it – for pursuing their own interests “in the place of the delegated will of the nation.”  

And so we are watching today. A major political party, animated by tribalism and stripped of the core principles for which it once stood, has become the tool and cudgel for one man and his family. It is a story that has played out throughout history in other countries; it just wasn’t supposed to happen here. Before our eyes, the transcendent notion that vox populi vox dei – the underpinning principle of democratic government that the voice of the people is the voice of God – is being put to the test by the President. 

There was a brief moment this week when it appeared that the light of truth might pierce the reality distortion field that Trump has created around the election. Gabriel Sterling, a senior Georgia Republican election official – one of many local government officials in battleground states who will be recorded as the heroes of this moment – denounced the President, and his enablers in Congress, for continuing to rile up his supporters.

“It. Has. All. Gone. Too. Far. All of it.” Sterling began, standing before a phalanx of microphones, his voice shaking in anger. “Joe diGenova [a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia and a Trump campaign attorney] today asked for Chris Krebs, a patriot who ran CISA, to be shot. A 20-something tech in Gwinnett County today has death threats and a noose put out, saying he should be hung for treason... Tricia [the wife of the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger] is getting sexualized threats through her cell phone. It. Has. To. Stop. This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this… Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”

Sterling’s press conference was reminiscent of a similar time in our history, when many across the nation’s capital cowered in fear of a bully, and a single person’s words broke the spell. That earlier moment came during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, when Joseph Welch publicly shamed Senator Joseph McCarthy for his reckless cruelty, with words widely credited with ending McCarthy’s reign of terror. “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”  Welch admonished the Senator – and his 27-year-old chief counsel, Roy Cohn, who would go on to be Donald Trump's cherished advisor. “Have you left no sense of decency?”

Of course, this is not the 1950s. Decency has no place in the Republican Party of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Sterling’s words did nothing to shame the President, and his impassioned plea could not shake Congressional Republicans from their disgraceful silence. In today’s world, there is no shame and there are no confessions of complicity. Responding to Sterling’s reprimand, Trump tweeted a link to Sterling’s press event under the words “Rigged election,” and moved on.

To any dispassionate observer, the President’s efforts to overturn the election have quickly migrated from tragedy into farce, as he continues to move forward with claims of massive, systemic voter fraud despite his 1-41 record in lawsuits challenging state election results, and assertions by his own Attorney General, along with Chris Krebs, that no such fraud has been found. Most of the country is ready to move on, if only Trump would accept the will of the voters, as has the losing candidate in every presidential election since George Washington defeated John Adams in 1789. Yet, to suggest that Donald Trump is becoming a comical figure, a caricature of himself, is to ignore the enormous damage that he has done to the nation since it became apparent that he lost the election. What will come next remains to be seen; but if we have learned nothing else over the past four years, it is that we need to learn to imagine the unimaginable, as it may well be what happens over the weeks to come.

Trump’s speech from his bunker in the White House was a rambling forty-five minute tour de force of conspiracy theory, finger-pointing and self-pity, as he staked his claim once again that he was the rightful winner of the November election. In time-honored style of authoritarian demagogues, he wrapped himself in the flag: “If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that has taken place in the 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore” – even as was doing his level best to undermine the future of the republic he had been elected to lead.

To watch that speech is to realize how close to the precipice we have come. As Trump spoke, it seemed as if at any given moment he wanted to give the call to arms that many of his supporters are clamoring for. Each time he paused in the speech and then began “Today I will …”, I fully expected that this was the moment when he would declare martial law, and suspend the Constitution, as suggested by his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. 

It didn’t happen, of course. But that does not mean it couldn’t. A few brief words are all it would take, and the future of the nation would be transformed.

 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Donald Trump's Fangs Remain Deep in the Neck of the GOP.

It was an act of political terrorism in plain sight. Donald Trump blackmailed Georgia Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. He knew and they knew that if they failed to do what was expected of them, he had the power to destroy their careers with a single tweet. They are both wealthy – among the wealthiest members of the Senate – and they could afford to ignore him and do the right thing. But you can't put a price on power. 

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the target of the President's ire after Georgians threw their electoral votes to Joe Biden, had done nothing wrong. To the contrary, Raffensperger was just doing his job, and had done it well. Perdue and Loeffler knew that, and they knew that what they were about to do could destroy his career. Indeed, it could put his life at risk. But this was not personal; it was strictly business. 

In theory, the Republican Party should be delighted that Donald Trump lost. His continued rage tweeting and his emotional instability since Election Day should be warnings that his defeat at the polls is offering them a chance – perhaps their last chance – to move the party in a new direction. Instead, with few exceptions, Republicans in the nation's capital remain paralyzed. With the January 5th runoff in Georgia looming, and Trump willing to turn on Perdue and Loeffler, Trump holds all the cards. He knows it, and they know it.  

So no one was surprised when Perdue and Loeffler issued a public statement this week demanding that Raffensperger resign from office, pillorying him for overseeing an election permeated with mismanagement and fraud. "Every legal vote cast should be counted," they lashed out. "Any illegal vote must not. And there must be transparency and uniformity in the counting process." 

Of course, the legal votes had been counted and there was transparency, and neither Perdue nor Loeffler offered any evidence of election fraud or misconduct to justify their attack. Indeed, the Election Security Rumor Control group within Donald Trump's own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has examined and dismissed the myriad claims of election fraud that have flooded the Internet over the past ten days. Yet Perdue and Loeffler gave no heed to the facts on the ground. That Raffensperger is a fellow Republican mattered not one whit, and not a single national Republican came to his aid. Once someone is in Trump's crosshairs, to come to their defense is out of the question. 

The death threats were sure to come, and they have. Trump's supporters include some seriously crazy people. They show up with their long guns if he gives the slightest nod. All it took was a tweet,"LIBERATE MICHIGAN" or "LIBERATE VIRGINIA," for them to don their camo and tactical gear, stride menacingly around state capitals, and plot to kidnap governors who dared to cross the President. They love to do their Taliban imitation – driving around in pickup trucks with Trump flags and American flags flapping in the wind. Those flags flying side by side are the definition of irony. There is little alignment between what Donald Trump is all about and what America aspires to stand for. If anyone had any doubts, he confirmed it this week.

Lindsey Graham – whose metamorphosis from John McCain's wing-man to Donald Trump's odalisque will be the subject of any number of psychohistorical dissertations in coming years – had it exactly backwards when he pronounced on Fox News the other day, "If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there’ll never be another Republican president elected again." The threat to the future of the GOP is not the election system. Republicans actually did quite well on Election Day. And having secured control over a large majority of state governments in a decennial redistricting year, their prospects for the coming decade are brighter than predictions of an inevitable demographic decline otherwise suggest.

The problem facing the Republican Party lies not with the electorate, but with the President himself. Republicans avoided the widely-predicted electoral collapse on Election Day and gained ground in the House and in state-level elections, even as Donald Trump suffered the most devastating loss in the popular vote by an incumbent president since FDR defeated Herbert Hoover 57% to 40% in 1932.  

Yet despite the electorate conveying a clear message that they are fine with the GOP, but cannot abide another four years of the political, physical and metaphysical carnage Donald Trump has unleashed on the nation, the President's hooks remain deeply set in the body of the GOP in a way that neither Hoover nor Carter could have ever imagined after being sent home after their first term. After four years of being repeatedly asked when they would stand up for country over party, Republicans across the capital, with few exceptions, continue to answer: Not Today.

While Republicans have privately been on tenterhooks, wondering when they can cut bait on Trump and move on, he has given them a clear answer: Over my dead body. This week, Trump established the "Save America" political action committee to fund his political activities after January 20, 2021, and is reportedly contemplating launching his 2024 comeback bid as soon as Joe Biden's victory is certified. Meanwhile, Don Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, are reportedly making moves to take over the Republican National Committee, with their sights set on supporting a Trump restoration.

If you follow the money, it tells you that Donald Trump knows he has lost. His campaign has demanded a recount in Wisconsin, but thus far has declined to put up the $3 million to pay for it. True to his grifting ways, he has already begun diverting contributions his team has been raising for his Election Defense Task Force to his new political slush fund. 

Congressional Republicans might want to believe that if they pander to Donald Trump's emotional frailty just a little longer, he will accept the results and allow everyone to move on. But they are mistaken. To the contrary, Trump famously holds grudges – many point to Barack Obama's mocking him at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2011 as the root cause of his continuing rage at his predecessor; and moving on is not in his lexicon. With the loss of the White House barely two months away, securing his power over the GOP is critically important, whether to assure support for his or his children's future political aspirations or to assist in his defense against the prosecutions that many believe are coming. 

The post-apocalyptic landscape that lies ahead for the GOP is coming into focus if they cannot craft a strategy to extricate themselves from Donald Trump's clutches. Even in defeat, they fear him. The President who led them to unexpected success at the polls is quickly morphing into his next role as a political terrorist. His interests are his own – as they have always been – and as long as a large share of the Republican Party base remains loyal to him, he will wield a sword of Damocles over the Republicans in Congress. Perdue and Loeffler might have been his first victims, but they won't be the last. 

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Headed into a Firestorm, a Landslide is the Only Answer.

We are headed into a firestorm, the headline blared. Is there any reason to think otherwise? Four years ago, in his inaugural address, Donald Trump looked at the country that he had been elected to govern and saw carnage. It may have been hyperbole, but if it was not the reality of our country when he won the presidency, four years later, carnage is what he will leave us with. If we are lucky.

For four years, Trump has specialized in turning Americans against each other in all manner of ways for his own political advantage. Four years after his American Carnage address from the steps of the Capitol, the country is beset by political division, disease, racial strife, and economic collapse. Gangs armed with assault weapons freely stake out the steps of state capitols, plot to kidnap elected officials, and stalk Trump's political opponents on the highways, doing their best Mad Max imitations from their flag-festooned pickup trucks. Except ours is not a post-apocalyptic world, but rather a pre-apocalyptic one – if the headlines are to be believed – in which each of these groups had, and continue to have, every reason to believe they are doing the President's bidding.

Looking back over the past four years, it's hard to point to any significant acts Donald Trump has taken as President that have been geared to the common good rather than his own self-aggrandizement, personal self-interest, or tied to his own political ends. As we look forward to the weeks that will follow election day, the sense of dread predicting the firestorm to come reflects the widespread acknowledgement that every action he will take will be firmly in pursuit of his own interest. The impact on the nation, the impact on our sense of common purpose, and the higher responsibility we each have as citizens in a democracy – none of that registers with this President, as Ted Cruz warned the nation early on. 

James Madison, John Jay, and other founders of the Republic warned the nation early on that the sine qua non for a successful system of self-government was not the language or laws set forth in the Constitution, but the virtue of the leaders committed to the greater good that would make it possible. The requirement of "republican virtue" was the context of the famous Benjamin Franklin quote, i.e., that the drafters at the Constitutional Convention had given us a republic, rather than a monarchy, "if you can keep it."

Donald Trump is not a virtuous man. If there is a single question on which overwhelming majorities of Americans agree, it is that. Even his core supporters, particularly women, who cling to him out of their visceral distrust of the media and elites view him as a narcissist, a bully and a racist. Evangelicals made their deal with the devil knowing full well that they were pinning their political hopes and dreams on a man who lacked the core virtues that they have historically supported as an essential requirement of leadership. The Republican Party has long held character and virtue to be threshold requirements of its candidates. Republicans struggled with Ronald Reagan's multiple marriages. They castigated Bill Clinton for his personal conduct. Before party leaders could do anything about it, however, Trump got his hooks into the party base, and the rest of the Republican Party set aside the warnings of Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham.

Now we are all paying the price, exactly as the founders warned. Donald Trump has been committed to voter suppression – because he believes that the more people that vote, the less likely he is to win. He has worked for months to foment distrust in the results of the election; and in just a matter of days, if not hours, we are going to see how far he is prepared to go to manufacture victory through legal maneuvers, should the electorate vote to deny him a second term. For months now, he has telegraphed his intention to litigate the election outcome to the Supreme Court, as well as his view that the justices that he has placed on the Court owe him a duty of loyalty to deliver the election to him when the time comes.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh deeply damaged both his own and the Supreme Court's credibility last week when he appeared to endorse Donald Trump's campaign against late arriving ballots – including those timely postmarked – foreshadowing the legal and political drama that many expect to see unfold. The second of Trump's three Supreme Court appointees, Kavanaugh suggested that counting absentee ballots that arrive after election day could lead to "suspicions of impropriety," despite the fact that counting such duly cast ballots is the law of the land in many states. 

Under our federalist system, voting practices are governed by state rather than federal law; and some states allow absentee ballots to come in after election day, while others do not. Accordingly, states whose absentee ballots are due no later than election day – and that allow such ballots to be opened and counted as they arrive – may well know their results on Tuesday night. Other states – including those that accept ballots postmarked by election day, or do not allow the counting of ballots to begin until the polls close – surely will not. Rather than calming the waters, reaffirming faith in our federalist system, and encouraging all Americans to be patient as all legally cast votes are duly counted, Kavanaugh lent credence to fears of election fraud and manipulation that Trump has been working diligently to incite, and to Trump's stated desire to have the Supreme Court intervene to halt the counting of ballots after election day. 

Writing in the Washington Post this weekend, two of the foremost experts in election law, Republican Ben Ginsberg and Democrat Bob Bauer, offered soothing words during the current election tempest. Trust the process, they suggested. For more than two centuries, people on local boards of elections across the country have made elections work, even in tumultuous times, and provided the basis for an orderly transition of power. Unfortunately, however, the challenge we face is not related to the effectiveness of election systems at the local level, but emanate from the top. President Trump's own Commission on Election Integrity searched to no avail for evidence of corruption that might bolster his claims. Yet those results did nothing to temper Donald Trump's claims of corruption and fraud. 

The notion that faith in local election systems may not be enough to assure a smooth outcome to the election was echoed this week by Marco Rubio and other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who raised fears that Trump's plans are providing a path for Russian and Iranian information operations to pile on and further exacerbate public distrust and discord. "This is a really dangerous moment," Senate Intelligence Committee member Angus King (I-ME) commented, echoing headlines in the media. "The only antidote is a landslide."

And so it may have to be if we are to find a viable path forward. Only a landslide offers the prospect of shaking up the political landscape and sending a strong enough jolt through the Republican Party that GOP leaders in Congress will stand against whatever steps Donald Trump might actually take to overturn the results of the vote and cling to power. Anything less than a landslide may well leave Republican leaders hamstrung between their sense that Trump could ultimately prevail, and the better angels of their nature. 

Long lines at polling places in Texas and Georgia leave me hopeful that a landslide is possible. Each time I see the images, I am reminded of women in Afghanistan, a decade or so ago, with purple ink on their fingers, their faces radiating with joy at the thrill of democratic participation. Then I remind myself: this is America, it is not supposed to be this way.

Despite the warnings of the founders, we simply never thought it could happen here. A populist demagogue, elected to office, and fully prepared to tear a nation apart to keep himself in power. But it did. With a bit of luck, if Americans across the country are treating their right to vote with the same reverence as once did the women of Kabul and Kandahar, we may yet have the landslide we so urgently need. If we don't, the consequences will likely be dire. Within days, if not hours, we are going to know the answer.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Donald Trump may well lose next week. Now for the bad news.

There are nine days left until Election Day. In just over one week, we will know if there is a clear winner in the presidential race. But even if Joe Biden wins, and one national nightmare comes to an end, the nation will continue to face challenges that may not be easily addressed by a change in who sits in the Oval Office. 

Four years ago, it was eleven days before Election Day when Jim Comey announced the FBI's new investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, turned the presidential race on its head, and effectively put Donald Trump on a path to winning the Presidency. While some may debate whether or not Comey's letter led to Clinton's defeat, Donald Trump is quite certain of its impact. It is the reason he has been demanding that Attorney General William Barr or FBI Director Christopher Wray announce that they are opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden. It worked before, and he believes it can work again.

Even as Joe Biden continues to maintain a wide lead in national polls – averaging 9.1% at Fivethirtyeight.com and 8.0% on RealClearPolitics – Democrats, along with a fair share of Republicans and independents, remain terrified that Trump will once again grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. That fear is not unreasonable. While Fivethirtyeight currently gives Trump only twelve chances out of a hundred to win a second term, 2016 was nothing if not a lesson in probability. A twelve percent chance is not zero, and a lot of things happen only twelve percent of the time and we are not surprised. 

The difference this time around is that Donald Trump has a track record. This week, Gallup released a poll indicating that 56% of Americans believe that he does not deserve to be reelected, compared to 43% who believe he does. The 43% number is consistent with Trump's approval rating, which rarely exceeded 44% over the entire course of his presidency. That number is significant because a president's approval rating is widely viewed as the most reliable indicator of how he will perform on Election Day. Indeed, if you look through polls taken over the past several months – nationally and in the battleground states – 44% stands out as a ceiling that Trump has struggled to exceed. 

The reality remains that Trump has lost ground across nearly every demographic group in which he held an edge four years ago. Biden has made strides among the military, the elderly and white women, and even to some extent with less-educated white men. Yet the fear of what may yet happen remains unabated.

Absent being able to engineer a Comey-style October Surprise – so far, Rudy Giuliani's Hunter Biden gambit appears to have had little impact – the final presidential debate was Donald Trump's last opportunity to reframe the narrative of the presidential race away from the pandemic and his own job performance. It has become a truism of politics since the first televised presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960 that the best way to predict voter reaction to a televised debate is to watch it with the sound turned off. And so it was last week. While Donald Trump was more restrained than in the first debate in September, the poll results were no better; he came across once again to focus groups of undecided voters as a nasty, humorless person. With the sound on you heard a man with no compassion for immigrant children torn from their parents' arms. With the sound off, you saw a man scowling and glowering. 

Trump's comfort with cruelty is not something to which his most loyal supporters turn a blind eye. Rather it is what many of them love about him. He has engendered within our politics a dynamic of roiling bitterness and resentment that reverberates at his rallies. Dating back to his early flirtations with David Duke, Trump has sanctioned conduct and brought into the mainstream behavior that has long been kept at the fringes of society. While people were shocked to see white supremacists march in Charlottesville early in Trump's presidency, little shocks us anymore – even when we see images of men with assault weapons lurking threateningly in state capitols. It barely makes news now when the FBI announces that it has made arrests in one plot after another involving plans to kidnap or kill state governors or Joe Biden. We fully expect active voter intimidation, if not violence, around polling places over the coming days. 

Donald Trump has exacted a high moral cost on his supporters, as they have learned to think things and do things they likely never would have thought or done before. One example is the price paid by his supporters in the evangelical community. For forty years, evangelical leaders have undertaken a strategic effort to support Republican candidates in exchange for the GOP commitment to build a conservative judiciary and Supreme Court. This effort reached a new level in 2016, as evangelical support for Donald Trump was more unified than for any President in memory. Yet it was an alliance that came at a steep price. While Trump delivered the judges and justices he promised, the moral stature and credibility of those evangelical leaders who stood by his side and prayed in the Oval Office have been ground into dust as they have become complicit in tolerating deeply inhumane practices. The silence of those leaders as infants and children have been torn from the arms of their parents and held in prisons along our southern border reflects their compact with Trumpism. Giving cover to his cruelty is the price they paid to win the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. 

Over the past four years, as Donald Trump has given succor and support to white nationalist and conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the price that other Republicans are paying for their embrace of the President has become starker still. An interview last Sunday between Fox Business News anchor Maria Bartiromo and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson provided a glimpse into the growing influence of conspiracy theories in Republican rhetoric. Bartiromo and Johnson, each prominent members of what was once the center-right political mainstream, bantered freely about Hunter Biden in terms that touched on elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and seemed more akin to Alex Jones's InfoWars than a mainstream network. 

QAnon – a conspiracy theory whose main villains are a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats involved in pedophilia and child sex-trafficking – has emerged as a growing force in Republican politics. According to recent Yahoo News/YouGov survey research, 50% of Trump supporters believe that "top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings," and only one in six Trump supporters don't believe it is true.

With nine days to go, polls continue to suggest that Joe Biden is favored to win the Presidency. Yet even if he does, the bad news comes in the shape of the world that he would inherit on January 20th. Over the past four years, Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the soul of the country. While we were sorely divided before he arrived, to watch as he and his supporters – in Congress and elsewhere – have worked deliberately to exacerbate those divisions is to realize how difficult the challenges are going to be to rebuild some semblance of normalcy to our politics and to our country. 

Even if he fails to win a second term and one national nightmare comes to an end, we are going to have to confront a deeper, perhaps more difficult reality. Liberated from the prospect of another four years of Donald Trump, the nation and the world will face the arduous – albeit constructive – task of figuring out where we go from here.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Republican leaders have to decide: Donald Trump or Democracy.

For a day or so over the weekend, Donald Trump was off Twitter, but for notes of thanks here and there. What a relief it was. The relentless pressure that Trump applied to Joe Biden and Chris Wallace at the first presidential debate last week mirrored the daily pounding the country has had to endure months on end from a President who is determined to dominate every news cycle. 

His surrogates on the Sunday talk shows were subdued. Sparring with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Steve Cortes went so far as to suggest "the MAGA movement is bigger than just President Trump." It seemed to be a ludicrous proposition, but Trump's COVID hiatus has clearly left many of his minions reflecting on where things go from here, with the election less than a month away. 

The future of the Republican Party hangs in the balance. Not just because of the notion that the nightmare of Trumpism might well outlast the President's term in office, but because in a very short time, Republican leaders may be forced to make a choice. Donald Trump has made very real threats that he is prepared to undermine the results of the coming election if it does not go his way, and those leaders are going to have to decide where they stand.

It was barely six weeks ago, on the last night of the Republican National Convention, that the final capitulation of the Republican Party to Donald Trump's will was complete. Few Republican luminaries from the pre-Trump era chose to participate in the quadrennial meeting. Not a single former Republican president, vice president, or nominee chose to attend. There were no Bushes, no Bakers and no Cheneys, no former cabinet officials of any note. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan – the 2012 standard bearers –  stayed away, each now widely reviled across TrumpWorld. 

As its first order of business when the conventions convened, the RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel announced that the party had decided to dispense with having a party platform. The fundamental debates that have animated the GOP for decades – between small government conservatives and what Pete Peterson famously called the unholy alliance of big-spenders and tax-cutters – have been set aside. After decades of embracing its identity as the Party of Ideas – from its legion of supply side gurus, to Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, to Ryan's myriad plans – any pretense of innovative ideas of diversity of thought was extinguished. In its place, the GOP told the world that it now officially stands for nothing more than whatever Donald Trump might happen to tweet in the moment. 

The fourth night of the convention marked the apex of Donald Trump's triumph. His choice of the White House as the venue for delivering his acceptance speech violated historical and ethical norms, and, as such, encapsulated the raised middle finger to the political establishment that has been central to his political movement. The South Portico was festooned with American flags – the type of over-the-top patriotic imagery that we have come to expect from authoritarians across the globe – and the carefully choreographed entrance was everything the President could have hoped for. 

As he and Melania slowly and deliberately descended the steps from the White House to the south lawn, and he moved to the podium, the imagery was unmistakable. The strongman, wife on his arm, graciously making an appearance before his gathered political retainers. Juan and Eva Perón could not have done it better. As he concluded his hour-long speech, fireworks appeared in the sky above the People's House, spelling out the name "TRUMP." The debasement of the GOP – and the country – was complete. 

The weeks that ensued have been dismal for the Republican Party. In one story after another, in his own words and in the words of others, Donald Trump was revealed for who he is. He was quoted trashing people in the military as losers and suckers, and evangelical pastors as hustlers. His taped interviews with Bob Woodward revealed the depth of his public lies regarding the pandemic and his disregard for the well-being of those who attend his rallies – and foreshadowed his similar disregard for major donors gathered at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club just hours before his positive COVID test was announced this week. Then came the release of tax information by the New York Times, and the disastrous first presidential debate. 

Even before the RNC gathering in late August, Senate Republicans were showing signs of preparing for life post-Trump. Fully a third of Senate Republicans made it clear to Mitch McConnell that they would no longer rubber stamp Trump's request for additional coronavirus stimulus funding. This weekend, no doubt with a flagging economy and declining poll numbers in mind, Trump tweeted from his hospital bed for McConnell to get a deal done with Nancy Pelosi. Whether McConnell can deliver looms to be a significant test of whether Trump has fully lost his grip over Senate Republicans who are returning to the anti-debt rhetoric of their pre-Trump years. 

The greater challenge facing the Republican Party, however, is not the survival of its members in November – Mitch McConnell's singular concern in the moment – but whether it is prepared, in the face of a contested presidential election, to affirm the primacy of its commitment to the democratic order. The most revealing moment over the past several weeks came during a regular White House press briefing, when the President declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the 2020 election. It was a softball question – similar to "Do you disavow white supremacist groups?" – that the Donald Trump took instead as one more opportunity to amp up his core supporters. 

Should Donald Trump contest the election results as he appears prepared to do, Republican Party leaders will be forced to take a stand. The plans that the Trump campaign appears to have in the works, as described by Barton Gellman in The Atlantic, are not about recounts of close state races, circa 2000, but the wholesale overturning of state results under the fabricated pretext of fraudulent mail-in ballots. The President has been nothing if not transparent in laying the groundwork for such an effort, and has worked assiduously to instigate distrust among his supporters for any election result other than his winning, and winning big. 

The challenge for the GOP is that it the loyalty of the Republican Party base to Donald Trump may well be stronger than to the country itself. Forget the American flags they fly from their pickup trucks and boat flotillas, their love for the President's trolling, tweets and cruelty may well outstrip their affection for American democracy itself. According to Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels, a large share of Republicans have only a tenuous commitment to the basic principles of democracy. 

In his study released this summer, entitled "Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy," Bartels observes that that while large majorities have, over time, endorsed core democratic values in the abstract, that support breaks down when put to the test in specific circumstances. Unsurprisingly – but certainly dispiriting – Bartels concludes that "the strongest predictor by far of these antidemocratic attitudes is ethnic antagonism – especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans, and Latinos. The strong tendency of ethnocentric Republicans to countenance violence and lawlessness, even prospectively and hypothetically, underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary US politics." 

In Bartels' peer-reviewed study, a majority of Republicans agreed with the statement: “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” And significantly, more than 40% agreed with the statement:“A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” In both cases, Bartels noted that most of those who did not agree outright with those statements said they were unsure whether or not they agreed. Only 20-25% of the Republicans who participated in the study were clear that they disagreed with either of the propositions. 

Against the backdrop of a significant share of Republicans supporting force or violence to preserve their view of "the traditional American way of life," the Trump campaign pursuing anti-democratic, yet legal paths to circumvent the November vote should Trump lose is relatively mild stuff. Bartels' data suggests that the President will be given wide latitude by a large share of Republicans to use whatever means he sees fit to stay in power.

If there has been any doubt among a large swath of Republicans that the Party of Lincoln has fallen under the sway of a man who has more affinity with autocrats than democrats, events over the past month should be forcing Republicans who care about the future of the party to face that reality. Yet, even in the wake of his straightforward no-peaceful-transfer-of-power threat, Republican apologists did their best to defend the President with their tried and true list of "What the President is saying...." reinterpretations of his words.

For their part, the Wall Street Journal editorial board began by lamely suggesting that the President "clarify his view" lest some voters find his comments reckless and irresponsible. Then they rambled on for hundreds of words explaining how Democrats were the real culprits, for being too easily triggered by a president whose primary political tactic for years now has been trolling Democrats. Finally, when they had exhausted all excuses, they came to rest where they should have started: "The legitimacy of election results is the bedrock of American democracy. 

The notion that the MAGA movement is bigger than just President Trump, as Steve Cortes suggested, is mirrored in Larry Bartels' data. Donald Trump has clarified his views and his intentions: he is willing to create havoc if need be to keep control over the White House and the country. The threat is very real, and there is little reason to believe that his MAGA movement will not support him in whatever he chooses to do. If the Wall Street Journal and Republican leaders – blinded by partisan hatreds as they might be – actually believe in the bedrock principles of Madisonian democracy, as they have long claimed, this would be the moment to stand up and defend it.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. 

Waiting for Donald Trump's next tweetstorm.

It occurred to me that Covid-19 might yet save Donald Trump's presidential campaign. I imagined that he might have a moment of epiphany. Lying in his hospital bed, an oxygen mask strapped on his face, fearful of what might lie ahead, he might think of the 210,000 Americans who had died on his watch and consider the mistakes that he made along the way.

His fear would be real. He had described Covid-19 as a killer in his conversations with Bob Woodward, even if he had perpetuated to this day the belief among his followers that it is something between the common flu and a Democrat hoax. Now was the moment that he would come clean, and it could be a powerful, cleansing moment for the country. He would apologize for failing to be honest with the nation. He would promise to do better, and to lead the nation to health. He would assure the country that as we put the pandemic behind us – really put it behind us – he would rebuild the economy to greater heights than ever.

He might even apologize specifically to those who had been most adversely affected. Frontline workers, people of color, service workers whose sources of livelihood had disappeared. He would call on his supporters – his MAGA fire-breathers and wealthy donors alike – to follow his lead and heal a pandemic-stricken nation. 

There are 30 days left until Election Day, and short of revving up Bill Barr's goon squads and the Proud Boys and their ilk, such a moment of confession and renewal might be the only path forward to reelection. Swing voters and suburban women, whom he has alienated step-by-step for months now, culminating in his 90 minutes of rage at the first presidential debate, would respond positively to the contrition and the humility.

It would be a long shot, but it might actually keep him in the White House, and his family out of jail.

I don't know if it was a moment of reverie or fear, but it passed. 

Contrition and humility were never in the cards. "Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE," Trump tweeted this morning. I don't know what I was thinking.

Before I left for a hike this morning, I thought back to when Len Bias died. One of the great college basketball players of my lifetime, Bias died of a cocaine overdose three days after he was drafted number two by the Boston Celtics. From that moment, recreational cocaine use on Wall Street visibly fell out of favor. I thought that perhaps the President lying in Walter Reed Hospital with Covid-19 might have a similar impact.

I was wrong. Like always, a large percentage of hikers that we passed along the narrow trail continued to disdain wearing masks. The hiker with a "Trump 2020" tee-shirt smiled and greeted my dog warmly. But he did not wear a mask. 

When I drove to the store a bit later, I passed a Trump rally on the street corner. A dozen or so people waving American flags, holding up signs, and darting into traffic to hand out fliers. But, as always, they were clustered close together and only one or two wore masks. 

Clearly, the lessons of Donald Trump lying in the hospital, and the growing toll of the super-spreader event on the White House lawn, had meant little or nothing.

The norm of prayers and condolences in these moments are well understood across society. When someone is sick, you wish them well. When someone dies, you tell people you are sorry for their loss. And the wishes and sorrow should be sincere, and usually are. We are all human, and no one should wish suffering or harm on anyone. 

Yet Donald Trump has changed all that. He has made causing suffering and harm a deliberate goal – or at least a widely acceptable consequence – of public policy in ways we have never seen before. He made it a matter of policy to separate parents from their children along the southern border, and locked their children in cages. He did it with such incompetence and reckless disregard that many could never be reunited. Now, we hear reports of the forced sterilization of young women. It is barbaric, and it is all in our name. We are Americans and this is our policy.

He has used the pain and suffering of others as props in his never-ending political reality show. Now, we are supposed to express our sympathy for a man who publicly derided Hillary Clinton when she was stricken with pneumonia during the last campaign, and who made fun of a disabled journalist, and who promoted or instigated conspiracy theories accusing any number of politically useful targets of unspeakable acts. 

I thought, perhaps, being stricken with Covid-19 might produce a moment of epiphany, even as I knew that was not possible. From the moment I heard that he had been sent to the hospital "as a precaution," I immediately suspected it was a lie. And what has ensued has been a stream of lies. We really have no idea what his condition is from one moment to the next.

Lying has become a matter of habit in this administration. From the top. Donald Trump has always lied, whenever and however it serves his purpose. And those around him must lie. It is a condition of employment, part of the culture. He went to the hospital because his condition was serious, but they cannot call him sick, because that sounds weak, so they lie. 

Today, driving home in the car, after the hike and after the Trump rally, I turned on the radio and heard a physician begin to address the media. My immediate thought was, finally, a doctor with no spin. Then he started. "The patient is 74 years old. Male. Slightly overweight..." There it was, I thought immediately, this is not a Walter Reed physician, this must be Trump's personal physician. And it was. He was spinning Trump's weight, as they have since the beginning. And so it went. A reporter asked, "Has the President been on oxygen." It is a reasonable question for understanding the extent of the illness. "He is not on oxygen now," the doctor responded. He evaded the obvious follow up. More spin. Slightly overweight.

My notion that Donald Trump would emerge from Walter Reed a changed man was an illusion. Perhaps there will be a sympathy vote; we are a forgiving people by nature. But as with all things Trump, the sympathy and compassion will only go one way. His own experience with the nation's best medical care will not leave him sympathetic to those whom his administration is aggressively seeking to deprive of medical care. His own brush with death will not humanize him to the point where he apologizes for his policy failures and cruelty, or shows a modicum of empathy toward those who have suffered under his watch.

It has been 48 hours since Trump's last tweetstorm, where he lashed out at his enemies, near and wide, as he is wont to do. Whether Covid-19 changes him at all will be measured by how long that hiatus lasts, and how soon the viciousness that is his nature and that his supporters love so dearly returns for all the world to see. For a moment there, I suspected that it was possible that things might change. I now realize how unlikely that is. 

Stop whining! Politics is hardball and always has been.

I get it. Republicans are shameless hypocrites. A dozen or more GOP senators have done an about face, turning their back on a Merrick Garland rule they made up in the first place. The excuses were all over the map, but they needn't have been. Over the course of the past half-century, the Republican Party has been animated by two objectives above all else: cutting taxes and appointing conservative judges. While Congressional Republicans hung their hat on "supply side" theories early on to justify their tax cuts, it did not take long before they decided that piling up debt was a price they were willing to pay – or have someone else pay – for piling up campaign cash and winning elections. Are Republican senators willing to vote to put Donald Trump's nominee on the Supreme Court days before a presidential election, violating whatever pledges they might have made in the past that they wouldn't? In a New York minute, as it turned out.

Despite the rage among Democrats about the hypocrisy and unfairness of it all, this will be an easy vote for GOP senators. After four years of prostrating themselves before Donald Trump, notions like honor and integrity and putting country before party have disappeared from their muscle memory.

Conservatives have been motivated by the Supreme Court for the past half-century with a singular focus that has simply not been true for liberals or progressives. When elections roll around, Democratic voters care about the Court, but it is just one of many issues that motivates their vote. For a large subset of Republican voters, on the other hand, the Supreme Court is all they care about. 

For all the success Republicans have had over the years in packing the courts with young, Federalist Society jurists, they have never achieved the solid majority on the Supreme Court that now appears at hand. Republican presidents have sat in the White House for 32 of the past 52 years, over which time they have placed 15 justices on the Supreme Court, compared to four for Democrat presidents. Yet, over those years, social conservatives have had to watch in horror as one Republican nominee after another – from Harry Blackmun to John Paul Stevens to David Souter – migrated to the left during their years on the Court, and even John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch joined liberal justices in ruling against conservatives on critical issues. 

For social conservatives, filling Ginsburg's seat is the stuff of their dreams, and Senate Republicans understand that voting on this nomination – and in doing so shifting the balance of the Court from an uneasy 5-4 conservative majority to a more definitive 6-3 majority – is an iron-clad obligation that they owe to their supporters. That the vote will happen is a fait accompli; the smartest thing that Democrats can do over the coming weeks is to treat the nominee with dignity and respect, and avoid letting the confirmation process devolve into the culture war that Donald Trump dearly hopes will tip the November election in his favor.

Anger on the left over a conservative replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court has an eerily familiar ring to it. It is the same outrage and indignation that Democrats felt when Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall. Like RBG, Marshall was an icon of his generation, who had made unique contributions to American jurisprudence and social progress. But all of that outrage will not change what is about to take place. Decade after decade, Democrats have found themselves being schooled in the realities of winning elections and wielding power by the likes of Lee Atwater, Grover Norquist, James Baker, Dick Cheney, and Mitch McConnell, who understand that the difference between the political parties is as much, or more, about the focus on gaining and wielding power as it is about policy disagreements. To this day, the dynamics of power seem to elude Democrats, even as it comes naturally to Republicans. 

As the old adage goes, Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall in love. It reflects the historical willingness of Republican voters to rally around their general election candidate, regardless of how nasty the primary fight might have been, while Democratic groups continue their internecine fights long after the primaries are over, never letting go of the candidate of their dreams. The adage might well be stated differently: Republicans understand what is at stake when elections roll around; Democrats don't. The history of presidential elections over the past half-century is replete with Democrats who lost close races as elements of the Democratic Party coalition sat on their hands, while Republicans stood four-square behind their candidate. In 1968, progressives who had swooned over Eugene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy never warmed up to Hubert Humphrey, and many opted to stay home as Richard Nixon won a razor-thin victory. In 2000, Ralph Nader – the high priest of the politics of purity – won enough Democratic votes to hand the White House to George W. Bush. 

After Donald Trump's narrow victory four years ago, you might have thought that Democrats would have learned that elections are won or lost at the margins. But even as the battle rages over the RBG seat on the Court, there are still those within the party demanding to know what Joe Biden is going to do to earn their vote. 

Republican senators have reacted bitterly to suggestions by Democrats that "ramming through" a new justice will be met with harsh retaliation next year should Democrats prevail in November. No one has argued that Mitch McConnell does not have the right under the Constitution to push forward with a vote on whomever Donald Trump chooses to nominate. By the same token, there is nothing that Democrats have suggested that they might do – expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, granting statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico – that Democrats will not similarly have the right to do should they win in November as many in the GOP now foresee. Should he find himself Minority Leader in January 2021, Mitch McConnell will no doubt inveigh against ending the filibuster – a necessary first step to the rest of the Democratic agenda. But warnings about the unintended consequences of steps Democrats might take will likely fall on deaf ears after four years of watching Donald Trump run roughshod over democratic norms and institutions and Congressional oversight, to say nothing of Mitch McConnell's own manipulations of the rules.

McConnell, an inveterate poll-reader, knew the moment he heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died that he had a choice to make. He could have chosen to delay the Supreme Court vote, soothe the waters with Senate Democrats, and bet on Trump being able to run the table in the swing states a second time. But instead – perhaps sensing that his days as Majority Leader are numbered – he chose to take the sure thing. As the conservative pundit Jonathan Last commented. "You might think of Senate Republicans as a bunch of bank robbers, running around in the vault, stuffing every last wad of cash they can grab down the front of their pants because they hear the sirens and they know that the cozzers will be on the scene any minute."

A Biden victory in November once augured a return to normalcy. But notions of normalcy – like Joe Biden's wistful stories of mutual respect and bipartisan cooperation during his years in the Senate – seem increasingly like parables of a past that is lost to us. The irony is that even as Republicans are rushing to install a new justice on the Supreme Court, they are laying the groundwork for the whirlwind to come. While they imagine that their legacy will be a super-majority on the Supreme Court that will put a conservative stamp on the nation for decades to come, their legacy may instead be an historic contribution to the further fraying of the fragile bonds of trust that are the glue of the Republic. The filibuster could well be history by the end of January, and their cherished 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court gone by July. Rather than a return to normalcy, we will instead see retribution and rage – hallmarks of the Trump presidency that we thought we might be able to put behind us – rise to new heights and continue to transform the political landscape.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free." 

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces.