On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in Congress, finally recognized Joe Biden as the president-elect after the Electoral College certified his victory on Monday. “The integrity of our elections remains intact,” Biden said in a speech after the Electoral College vote. “And so now it is time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history. To unite. To heal.”
It’s a fine thought. But first many Americans will want to inspect the wound: For more than a month now, the Republican Party has helped Trump wage a campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election. How serious are these schemes — which, if the president’s Twitter feed is any indication, are still ongoing — and how much damage might they do to the integrity of American democracy? Here’s what people are saying.
Trump and his Republican allies have tried to subvert the will of the American people in so many ways that it can be difficult to keep track:
• Since well before November, they have sought to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections and disenfranchise voters by weaponizing a false narrative of voter fraud.
• They have filed nearly five dozen challenges to the handling, casting and counting of votes in every level of the judiciary in at least eight different states. Perhaps the most high-profile concerned a Supreme Court petition from Texas to overturn election results in four battleground states, which gained formal support from 18 state attorneys general and nearly two-thirds of House Republicans, including the minority leader.
• They have tried to throw out hundreds of thousands of votes cast in majority-Black precincts.
• They have organized slates of shadow electors in Georgia and Michigan as a means of creating an “alternate” Electoral College tally.
• And finally, they have planned to dispute the election on the House floor on Jan. 6, when Congress will meet to formalize the Electoral College results.
Yet all of these efforts have so far failed. As The Times editorial board writes, the electoral system itself has proved remarkably resilient despite the stresses placed on it, including a pandemic and the largest turnout ever recorded. “The votes were counted, sometimes more than once,” the board notes. “The results were certified. In the states that have attracted the particular ire of Trump and his allies, most officials, including most Republican officials, defended the integrity of the results.”
That includes judicial officials, too, as Daniel Drezner points out in The Washington Post. “For all the fears about the Federalist Society and conservative court-packing,” he writes, “Politico’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported last week that ‘several of the most devastating opinions, both Friday and in recent weeks, have come from conservative judges and, in some federal cases, Trump appointees.’” Perhaps the most decisive defeat for Trump came from the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Texas lawsuit, which all three of Trump’s appointees voted to shut down last week.
That decision effectively ended any prospect Trump had of reversing Biden’s victory through the courts, and constitutional scholars say the remaining efforts to do so through Congress are also all but certain to fail. “What is happening is not a coup, or even an attempt at a coup,” Drezner writes. “It is a ham-handed effort to besmirch the election outcome by any easily available means necessary.”
The incompetence of Trump’s attempt to subvert the election is not a reason to discount its seriousness, Zeynep Tufekci argues in The Atlantic. The end he seeks may be out of reach, but the means — a mobilization of executive, judicial and legislative power to contest election results, implicitly and explicitly endorsed by one of the country’s two major parties — will now be available to more competent successors.
Consider that of the 249 Republicans in the House and Senate, 220, or 88 percent, refused in a recent survey to acknowledge that Biden had won the presidency. (Two said that Trump had won.) And when the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the Texas lawsuit, the head of the state’s Republican Party suggested that “law-abiding states” secede from the union.
“The next attempt to steal an election may involve a closer election and smarter lawsuits,” she writes. “Imagine the same playbook executed with better decorum, a president exerting pressure that is less crass and issuing tweets that are more polite. If most Republican officials are failing to police this ham-handed attempt at a power grab, how many would resist a smoother, less grossly embarrassing effort?” Dave Weigel of The Washington Post tweeted.
“There is an anti-democratic virus that has spread in mainstream Republicanism, among mainstream Republican elected officials,” Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U., told The Times. “And that loss of faith in the machinery of democracy is a much bigger problem than any individual lawsuit.”
It’s also not clear that the damage Trump did to that faith is reversible, Michelle Goldberg writes in The Times. Other presidents have deceived the country, as anyone who lived through the Iraq War remembers, but Goldberg argues that Trump’s insistent and unapologetic fabrication of alternate realities stands unparalleled. “Trump has eviscerated in America any common conception of reality,” she writes. “He leaves behind a nation deranged.”
Several polls have found that a large majority of Republican voters do not believe Biden’s victory to be legitimate, which raises questions about even the possibility of shared understanding that reconciliation requires. In The Times, Bret Stephens predicts that it could take decades for Americans to understand the damage done to social trust and how to repair it. “If enough people believe that a government is not elected legitimately, that’s a huge problem for democracy,” Keith A. Darden, a political science professor at American University in Washington, told The Times. “Once reality gets degraded, it’s really hard to get it back.”
