US Elections: Is Trump’s Truculence The Latest Effort By A Man Whose Star Is Fading?

OPINION: US President Donald Trump’s time in the White House is coming to an end. But, as has become apparent in recent weeks, he is unlikely to deliver a polite concession speech.

Instead, the president has spent much of his time since the Nov. 3 election hatching ways to undo what turned out to be a pretty clear victory for President-elect Joe Biden – every credible media outlet has given Biden 306 outgoing electoral college votes. 232. The selected candidate must accumulate 270 votes in the electoral college to win the presidency.

Trump is simply running out of time. By December 8, all states must certify their results, and voters in each state must cast their votes by December 14. The inauguration of the next president takes place on January 20, 2021.

None of this should conceal the undemocratic coup that Trump is attempting as he refuses to admit defeat. However, it is unlikely to be successful.

READ MORE:
* US Elections: Michigan certifies Joe Biden’s victory and ends any remaining hope that Donald Trump will subvert the election
* Elections in the United States: More than 100 Republican experts in national security ask Trump to give in and begin the transition
* Notoriously loud President Trump is (relatively) quiet after electoral defeat
* Joe Biden calls Trump the ‘most irresponsible president’

Your legal challenges alleging fraud and misconduct are close to running their course.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against his claim that the election “observers” were too far away in Philadelphia from the workers counting the ballots.

In Georgia, a manual recount has ended and Biden confirmed the winner. And Michigan lawmakers appear ready to challenge the president, who now seems determined to wreak havoc on the certification process.

Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the election are real. His attempt to sway Republican state legislators, in fact to persuade them to replace voters committed to voting for Biden with voters willing to vote for Trump, is deeply undemocratic.

Under a winner-takes-all system, Michigan’s 16 electoral college votes should go to President-elect Biden, the clear winner for the state by nearly three percentage points.

If Trump had managed to revoke the results, the status of the United States as a liberal democracy could be called into question. Ever since southern secessionists challenged the legitimacy of Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, a single actor had not been so nefarious in their attempts to undermine an incoming president.

Look no further than Trump’s actions on the transition. With more than 250,000 Americans killed by Covid-19 and the number of cases on the rise across the country, one would think an orderly transition in which the incoming president has access to experts who are knowledgeable about preparing the country for the mass distribution of a Covid-19 vaccine would be an urgent and unquestionable priority.

But not in the Trump White House. The General Services Administration, led by a political appointee of the president, must certify Biden as the winner before the incoming administration has access to top public health officials.

This certification will eventually take place, as the president simply runs out of options.

We suspect that he will grudgingly acknowledge that he will not be president for the next four years, repeating an endless series of fabrications about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections. His arguments will resonate with his “base” and have consequences beyond this election cycle.

The Pew Research Center analysis finds: “While a 59 percent majority of all voters say the elections in the United States were conducted and well managed, only 21 percent of Trump supporters have a positive view of how elections were administered at the national level.

“Among Biden supporters, 94 percent say the elections were conducted and managed well.”

The magnitude of these differences is stark and suggests that Biden will have a lot of work to do to unite the country, if at all possible.

Biden himself is attempting to restore moral leadership in a country ravaged by pandemic, racial divide and illiberal tendencies in the executive branch of government.

Rhetorically, Biden has struck many of the right notes, emphasizing themes of unity and national healing. How this will play out in a political sense will be seen once he takes office.

Of course, Trump will continue to make life difficult for the incoming Biden administration. Some reports suggest that you are already considering running for office in 2024.

So it should come as no surprise that the outgoing president leaves a number of surprises for President-elect Biden.

Some press reports in the US claim that in Middle East politics, trading with China, securing oil drilling leases in Alaska, and the Iran nuclear deal, which Biden may wish to rejoin, the Trump’s team is doing everything it can to narrow the incoming administration’s policy options.

Political theorist David Runciman argues that, in democracies, mounds of sand are often made of mountains. The vote count, the constant update of the vote counts, the failed legal challenges, the recounts, the weary effects of the days when politics rules life, Biden’s unspectacular calm, the certification and the College meeting Election will turn this post-election mountain into a mountain of sand like Trump’s. the coup attempt will eventually fail.

Yet Trump has regularly shown us that, in the age of the internet, mountains can also be made from grains of sand. The president’s lies and tweets have turned his presidency into something of a reality television show that has in turn paralyzed, energized or horrified much of the world.

However, the show is in its final season and has not been renewed.

We remember an article that Rebecca Solnit wrote during the first days of the Trump presidency. In it, he clairvoyantly captures the situation Trump finds himself in now.

Although his base and a large number of Republicans still support him, Trump has always surrounded himself with loyal supporters reluctant to question their leader’s judgment and authority. This produces a form of isolation created by Trump, a consequence of the man’s temperament and his unwillingness to tolerate uncomfortable truths.

Reflecting on leaders like Trump, Solnit explained: “In the end there is no one else in his world, because when you are not willing to listen to how others feel, what others need, when you don’t care, you are not willing to acknowledge existence. This is how it feels alone at the top.

“It is as if these petty tyrants live in a world without honest mirrors, without others, without gravity, and are protected from the consequences of their failures.”

Of course, sooner or later Trump will realize that the presidency must be vacated. He will have to face the one thing in his life that he has always tried to avoid: defeat.

Daniel Cooper is a professor at Griffith University and Brendon O’Connor is Associate Professor of American Politics at the Center for American Studies, University of Sydney.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.