When Many Believe the Election Was Rigged

Following his recent defeat at the polls, President Trump has taken the only consistent path forward: to persist in claiming loudly and passionately he was cheated at the polls and is the rightful president of the United States.   Prior to and even after the election, he maintained, “the only way we are going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”  

So, what can we expect from here on out?

1. We can assume from his history of never acknowledging an error in judgment that Trump will continue his claims, refuse to concede and leave the White House insisting that he was cheated.
2. It’s likely that after the election has been certified, many congressional Republicans will eventually acknowledge the President’s defeat.  But what is also clear is that long into the future a large segment of Trump’s base will still believe he was cheated.  
3. Said one senior Republican official naїvely, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.”  Ask the transition teams in intelligence agencies what the downside is!.
4. It’s likely, therefore, that many congresspeople will give ongoing support to the ex-President, ignoring reality and claiming that President’s Biden’s presidency is illegitimate.  They will have every reason to obstruct his presidency at every turn.

[To get some idea of how long Trump could keep this lie going, consider that he was one of the early proponents of “birtherism,” the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore not eligible to be president.  Only after incontrovertible proof from a longform birth certificate presented eight years later did Trump grudgingly acknowledge that Obama was born here.  But by that time, 72% of Republicans still believed that the birther lie.]

5. Given the persistence of such an obvious lie as birtherism, it’s almost inconceivable that the “rigged-election” lie will disappear, considering especially the large number of die-hard Trump supporters who will be unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance of a Biden victory. 

6. If they are dependent on those supporters for re-election, some Republican legislators will continue to maintain that Trump was cheated.   Trumpism will not go away.

7. Will even the Republican leadership strongly and publicly denounce the lie?  Given their unwillingness to accept the evidence in the impeachment hearings, it is doubtful.

When government becomes that dysfunctional, when large numbers of politicians propagate the lies, why would anyone have faith in democracy?

 

I realize how speculative this sounds.  None of us knows the future.  Our democracy survived the Civil War, and we could survive this.  But we have also never had a president so incompetent, so deceitful, or less committed to our democracy.

The election of President-elect Joe Biden certainly gives us reason to hope.  This 244-year old democracy has been enormously resilient.  But we are in new territory.  It will demand something new from us.