“This is the way it ends. Not with a bang but with a WI/MI/PA.”
The November 4 tweet, by one Will Roscoe, seemed an apt epitaph for the blustering rancour that was Donald Trump’s presidency.
With battleground states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania called for Joe Biden in the presidential poll, along with Arizona, Nevada and Minnesota – and with Biden leading in Georgia – Donald Trump should have been slinking off to lick his wounds.
Should have.
Instead, in the liminality of post-election America – where an outgoing president holds the levers of power, while an incoming president prepares to take hand of them – Trump is refusing to concede a presidential race he has very clearly lost. (At the time of writing, Biden holds a 4.7-million lead in the popular vote; The Guardian is predicting he will win 290 Electoral College votes – well ahead of the 270 he needs – while CNN has him at 306.)
Trump is holed up in the White House, obsessively clicking refresh on the Breitbart homepage and railing against the world on Twitter. Tucked into this stream of victimhood is a tweet in which he fires his defence secretary – a prelude to a purge of Pentagon officials (they’ve been replaced by Trump toadies).
With characteristic eloquence, Trump claims to have won the election “by a lot”.
Ever the aspiring autocrat, he’s casting doubt on the entire democratic system, declaring widespread voter fraud in the states he’s lost. Only, there’s no evidence of this. The New York Times went to the effort this week of contacting the top election officials in every US state. Forty-five responded. In four of the five that didn’t, the newspaper “spoke to other state-wide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state”. Not one reported a major voting issue.
States are in any case in the process of verifying the tally – an audit that’s part of the traditional certification process. And a recount is unlikely to shift things either: as Richard Hasen points out in The Atlantic, in the closest states, Trump and Biden are separated by 10,000-20,000 votes; a 2016 recount in Wisconsin (the most recent such event) shifted the outcome by just 571 votes.
Nonetheless, Trump’s campaign team is pursuing multiple legal challenges, including a 105-page federal filing in Pennsylvania – despite the Electoral Count Act specifying that states, not the federal government, should be the arbiters of electoral disputes.
Six states have reportedly thrown out 13 court challenges so far, and the federal challenge seems particularly flimsy. (Here it’s worth reading Hasen’s Atlantic piece, which offers a clear view of why the legal challenges are unlikely to hold any water – and why they are dangerous for democracy.)
In the face of all evidence to the contrary, secretary of state Mike Pompeo smugly referred to a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” when briefing journalists on Tuesday. And The Guardian reports that Democrats are apoplectic that “government agencies have been told to proceed with their budgets as if Trump had been re-elected”.
Trump’s administration is obstructing Biden’s team at every turn in the mammoth task of presidential transition. To give you an idea of what has to be done before January 20: “The new president will have to recruit 4,000 political appointees, including 1,250 who require Senate confirmation,” according to the nonpartisan Centre for Presidential Transition. That’s in addition to preparing a $4.7-trillion budget, getting a policy agenda off the ground, and taking charge of 2-million civil servants and 2-million active duty and reserve soldiers.
The unbearable narcissism of Trump
Not that everyone is particularly surprised that Trump is fighting every step of the way. Those who know him well – like his former lawyer and convicted fraudster Michael Cohen – saw this coming. “He will not concede,” he told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer just prior to the election. “He’s going to challenge the validity of the vote in each and every state he loses – claiming ballot fraud, seeking to undermine the process and invalidate it.”
It’s fascinating to see how predictions of Trump’s response made before November 3 are playing out. But Mayer’s article also offers insight into why Trump needs to win – outside of the “narcissistic injury” of losing.
For one, his finances are under strain. Within the next four years he will be on the hook for more than $300m in loans he’s personally guaranteed; he’s got about $900m in real-estate debt due within that same period; and if he loses a tax dispute, he’ll have to cough up $100m.
More importantly, he’s facing at least two serious legal threats in New York state that could result in felony convictions. Staying firmly put in the Oval Office mitigates those threats.
“Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, 26 accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated 4,000 lawsuits,” Mayer writes. “That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Biden.”
Blood on his hands
While Trump digs his fingernails into the presidency with an obduracy that in any other case may be admirable, his country is floating, rudderless, amid a surge in coronavirus cases.
The White House has said nothing about the US recording more than 140,000 new cases on Wednesday, averaging 1,000 deaths a day, and hitting a record 65,368 Covid hospitalisations.
Not that no-one saw this coming: epidemiologists have been warning for months about a winter surge, according to the New York Times. And again, the country is chasing its tail.
The US is short of personal protective equipment – the Strategic National Stockpile has just 115-million of the 300-million N95 masks it had hoped for ahead of winter. North Dakota is so short of health-care workers, that its governor has suggested those who test positive but are asymptomatic should continue to work in hospital wards, the newspaper reports. And nursing homes are considering training residents’ family members to make up for the shortfall in staff.
“It’s hard to believe that on November 10, it feels very much like the middle of March all over again,” Dr Shikha Gupta, executive director of Get Us PPE, told the New York Times.
Dr Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist, said: “With 1,000 deaths per day, it’s like two jumbo jets dropping from the sky. If every day two jumbo jets would drop from the sky and kill everybody, don’t you think that everyone would be in a panic?”
Not Trump, it seems. No, he’s obsessing about how drug manufacturer Pfizer apparently stiffed him out of the presidency by waiting until after the election to announce its vaccine is 90% effective.
It shows him up for the odious hollow man that he is. One that the US will be well rid of.
*De Villiers is the features editor of the FM
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