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Anyone who has watched Donald Trump for the past four years will not be surprised by the behavior of the US president since the election.
He had warned that he would not accept the result if he lost, cynically setting the stage for false claims about electoral fraud. What was unexpected was the reaction of a broad swath of Republicans.
This week, attacks on the US electoral system orchestrated by Trump intensified.
On Tuesday, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit with the supreme court alleging that elections in four other states were illegal. Republican state attorney general Ken Paxton has asked the nation’s highest court to stop Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin from casting “illegal and constitutionally tainted votes” when the Electoral College meets Monday to formalize the result of the elections.
All four states, three of which are controlled by Democratic governors, responded and filed court documents urging the supreme court to reject Texas’s request.
“Mr. Paxton’s actions fall below the dignity of the attorney general’s office and the people of the great state of Texas,” said his Michigan counterpart Dana Nessel.
Doubt
Legal experts have cast doubt on the merits of the Texas case, aside from the unusual request by one state that the supreme court act as a kind of trial court for other states. Some have wondered aloud whether Paxton, one of several attorneys general believed to have met with the president at the White House this week, is seeking the president’s forgiveness. He is charged in a securities fraud case and faces charges of abuse of office, which he denies.
But the Texas case is more than a long-term legal challenge. Seventeen other states, all with Republican attorneys general, have joined the case. In a new escalation, 106 Republicans in Congress signed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit aimed at overthrowing the election result.
The willingness of so many Republicans to ask the Supreme Court to intervene to effectively deny the results of the November 3 presidential election is as unheard of as it is alarming.
The United States now faces a political perspective in which hundreds of elected officials are giving credence to Trump’s allegations of election fraud, even though the president’s own attorney general, William Barr, has said there is no evidence of fraudulent activity that would change the result.
Among Trump’s vocal supporters on the issue is Senator Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate and Trump rival who is a potential Republican nominee in 2024. Cruz is a regular contributor to the conservative media, making allegations of voter fraud, and Trump was asked this week to argue the Texas case if he is heard by the supreme court.
Some Republicans have spoken out. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, by the way, a staunch supporter of Ireland on Capitol Hill, said it was completely unacceptable for Trump to urge states to revoke the result and that he had personally congratulated President-elect Joe Biden.
But the vast majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill have yet to publicly accept that Biden won the election. The most obvious explanation for his denial is not just loyalty to Donald Trump, but fear of his voters. A Quinnipiac University poll this week found that 77 percent of Republicans believe there was widespread election fraud.
Media
Much of this public sentiment may reflect the continuing power of the right-wing partisan media over political opinion in the United States. High-profile Fox News anchors like Sean Hannity are promulgating unsubstantiated claims of widespread voting irregularities.
Opening her show in primetime on Thursday, Hannity praised the Texas lawsuit. “Seventeen attorneys general are not going to risk their reputation in any case that does not have significant legal merit and that does not have solid constitutional grounds,” he told his viewers. “We are not dumb, we are not blind, we can see that everything sucks to heaven,” he said of the election, before moving on to a monologue about Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who revealed this week that his tax matters were the subject of from a federal investigation.
Throughout this time, Donald Trump continues to wage war against the truth through his Twitter account. “#CANCEL!!” tweeted from the White House on Wednesday, the same day the United States surpassed a new milestone of more than 3,000 daily deaths from coronavirus.
The president has not mentioned the victims of the pandemic since he lost the election. What it has done is successfully elevate marginal fraud claims to the mainstream, through clever manipulation of social and traditional media. The implications for American democracy can be profound.
