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.