Editor’s Note: This is the first in our post-election series of articles exploring the destabilizing effect the Trump administration has had, and continues to have, not only on the foundations of American government, but on the minds of American voters. Today, the brilliant Ian Murphy on the impact of Trump’s refusal to concede.
As chinks turn into small cracks in the defensive, GOP wall protecting Trump's refusal to cede the election - and the Presidency - to Joe Biden, Democrats look oblivious to a bigger risk to the incoming Biden Presidency.
Trump must stand aside eventually. His case is being laughed out of court by judges appointed by Presidents of all stripes. Election experts agree Biden's lead is too large for a recount to fix.
Every avenue to a shock Trump success is narrowing, and the election outcome feels inevitable.
Trump will probably never agree that he lost the election - he told supporters weeks ago that the only way he could lose was if there was cheating - but sooner later he will be forced to acknowledge that while he does not accept the result, he can no longer legally dispute it.
This is not the “game over” that Biden needs.
Trump's supporters remain steadfast in their support of him, unquestioningly supporting even the wildest and most outlandish claims of ballot fraud. If nothing else proves the lack of evidence to support the President's allegations, it's the blank pages submitted in support of the President's case in court, time and again. If real, hard evidence existed it would surely have been put before a judge by now. Instead Trump's legal team is left trying to create a new definition of hearsay that allows, well, hearsay to be admitted in evidence.
The real danger to Biden is no longer the courts. The true threat is that of rumour, gossip and bare-faced lies that threaten to undermine his Presidency before it starts.
If 35% of the country believes ballot fraud gave Biden the election, that 35% also believe that Biden will be an illegitimate President.
Remember how Republicans treated President Obama?
Obama came into office talking about “reaching across the aisle” in a way Biden's recent speeches are reminiscent of, and Republicans smelled blood in the water.
Rush Limbaugh led the charge. He said compromise was a dirty word and any Republican who compromised lacked conviction.
By the end of Obama's time in office that refusal to compromise had soured into pure obstructionism with the refusal to even give Merrick Garland a hearing.
It's not going to be any better for President Biden.
Not only are we more divided as a country, but also the last four years have seen sharper partisan lines drawn in Congress. The inability to agree on a COVID-19 relief bill for the past five months is a case in point. It shouldn't be this hard to find something a majority in Congress can agree on - but it is.
Republicans have every excuse to make life harder for President Biden than they did for Obama. They control the Senate and the split ticket victories in key Senate and House seats justify, to them, a claim that Biden has no real mandate to pursue his agenda. The public elected a contrary Senate to be a check on him, they will argue.
They aren't entirely wrong - split ticket voters imply people who wanted Trump out of office but generally felt more comfortable with Republicans so voted Republican downballot. Part of the left's job is to help these voters feel uncomfortable with downballot Republicans and more comfortable with Dems. But the public made clear they wanted a President Biden and that is mandate enough. For all his unity overtures, much of what he accomplishes will be through executive order not legislation.
In addition to Republicans claiming Biden has no real mandate will be the claim that he is not a legitimate President. 70% of Republican voters say they don't think Biden won a "free and fair" election. Republicans playing to the base - and many will be, with an eye on mid-terms or the 2024 Presidential nomination - will feed into this and refuse to co-operate with a President they "aren't sure" is legitimate.
If this thinking is allowed to take hold it will paralyze Biden's Presidency. Why should an illegitimate President get to nominate a Supreme Court Justice, they will say, and the Senate majority will refuse to hold hearings until after the next general election. Biden won't have the votes to do anything about it. Why should an illegitimate President get treaties ratified, they will say. Better to wait for a legitimate President to re-negotiate them.
Implicit in this is the reality that to the GOP only a Republican President is a legitimate President. Look at how they hounded President Obama for his long-form birth certificate vs. how they refuse to contemplate the possibility that anything untoward happened for Melania Trump to gain an "Einstein" visa for her modelling work.
President-Elect Biden has to put this illegitimacy falsehood to bed right away.
Biden seems content to take a leaf out of Michelle Obama's playbook - "When they go low, we go high" - but while this may be more dignified, it does nothing to kill the rumours.
Trump has dozens of cases pending across all the battlefield states, alleging that he was cheated one way or another. Their primary purpose is to grow that narrative so people don't think of him as a loser. The eventual narrative will be that he won bigly but those dirty Dems robbed him - despite the fact that most of the battlefield states have either a Republican Governor, a Republican majority in the state legislature or both.
The vast conspiracy that defrauded Trump could only have occurred with Republicans, at best, turning a blind eye in multiple states. That's blatantly not what happened and in most cases it's a narrative both sides within the GOP are resisting.
The corrosive effect, however, is a steady drip of news stories of alleged ballot fraud. There are so many of them it doesn't seem possible they could all be false - despite the fact that none so far have any verifiable hard evidence to support them.
This is how reputations are destroyed and Biden must mount an effective assault on this false narrative or it will be used by Republicans to define his Presidency.
Biden can stay above the fray if he must. He has supporters who are well equipped to press his case.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris needs to prosecute the case against ballot fraud. It's the type of thing she was hired for. Mayor Buttigieg proved himself to be a more than capable debater who can forensically dissect an argument and sound perfectly reasonable doing so. He was a regular on Fox News during the campaign and needs to be out there again, explaining why these cases are stuff and nonsense. Republicans John Kasich and Colin Powell endorsed Joe Biden for President.
Send out an army of familiar, capable and effective speakers to hit the airwaves and make the case for Biden that the pending cases are frivolous fishing exercises with no merit to them and ground, through logic, argument and gentle but thorough persuasion, the claims of illegitimacy into the dust.
The alternative, should the stories be allowed to flourish, is a President Biden who cuts a very lonely figure, isolated in his Oval Office, unable to make significant progress on any of the many important issues he needs to be addressing. A neutered, one-term President.
Biden can remain, statesmanlike, above the conversation if he doesn't want to get his hands dirty but unless his team go on the offense the inaccurate and unfair view that he is an illegitimate President will take root and undermine his time in office.
If Biden really wants to be President - versus the man who threw Trump out of office - then the time to act is now.
Spot on. They ignore the conspiracy theorists at their own peril.