The entire premise of Donald Trump’s life is that he has never once been defeated. His project, and that of those around him, then, has been to maintain that illusion. This hasn’t always succeeded. He’s lost plenty of things—money, court cases. But never before has he faced the kind of public humiliation he seems poised to as Joe Biden’s victory becomes inevitable. How does someone who delights in calling others “losers” react to becoming a loser himself, in the most concrete sense of the word? How does the most vainglorious man in America bring himself to accept defeat and concede?
The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t. Unable to face the reality of his circumstances, he is doubling down on his delusions—that the world is conspiring against him; that he’s the big, strong winner he’s always claimed to be. He wants to convince his supporters, the courts, and himself that he is both victim and victor and has made clear that he’ll burn everything to the ground to do so. This is unsurprising. If his decades of public life have taught us anything, it’s that he simply can’t help himself. But the aides and allies who have enabled him these past four years are not bound by his paranoias and neuroses. They’re making a choice. And while some who have stood by him now seem to be taking tentative steps backward, others are sticking, enabling him still as he tries to take a blowtorch to the foundation of democracy.
Claiming that he’s actually won the race but that Democrats, the media, and others are stealing the election from him via widespread fraud, Trump has insisted—on Twitter mostly, but also in a sad attempt at a strongman speech at a White House briefing Thursday—that states stop tabulating votes, except where he’s behind. Several Republicans have broken with him, saying that all votes must be counted. “Taking days to count legally cast votes is NOT fraud,” Marco Rubio, who has frequently humiliated himself at the Trumpian altar after criticizing him during the 2016 campaign, tweeted Wednesday. But several of Trump’s loyalists have egged him on.
“It is lawless,” Ted Cruz told Sean Hannity Thursday night, echoing Trump’s lies about cheating. “And they need to follow the law.” “Everything should be on the table,” Lindsey Graham said on the same program, when asked if the votes Trump has falsely characterized as fraudulent should be invalidated. “Philadelphia elections are as crooked as a snake,” the president’s golf buddy added, referring to the city whose absentee ballot count would eventually swing the crucial Pennsylvania race toward Biden. “President Trump won this election, so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Laura Ingraham. “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” “Join together,” he added, “and let’s stop this.”
The most powerful man in the world—for now, anyway—casting doubt on the legitimacy of an election is dangerous enough. But it’s especially so with allies amplifying his baseless claims. Not everyone is endorsing the madness. Friendly faces on television from Chris Christie to Rick Santorum have declined to defend Trump’s remarks, and several GOP lawmakers—including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—issued statements breaking with him after his Thursday night news conference. But those rebukes were largely bloodless, and many urged Trump to provide evidence if he’s going to say there’s fraud, giving weight to his claims by taking them seriously. Others, like Mitt Romney, countered that “counting every vote is at the heart of American democracy,” but didn’t directly criticize Trump. (The Utah Senator issued a follow-up statement on Twitter Friday in which he said the president was “wrong to say that the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen,” though he still supported the president’s efforts to pursue his baseless challenges through the courts.)
Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey were a little more direct. “This is getting insane,” Kinzinger wrote Thursday. “I saw the president’s speech last night and it was very hard to watch,” Toomey said, unprompted, on the Today Show Friday. “The president’s allegations…are just not substantiated.” But even these calls for restraint were drowned by the noise from the president and those standing by him. “This election is not over,” his campaign said in a defiant statement Friday morning, as Biden pulled ahead in Georgia and Pennsylvania and it became only a matter of time before the race was called in his favor.
That the president reportedly has no plans to concede is predictable. That anyone is going along with him still is shameful, particularly given Graham and McCarthy won reelection this week in the very process the president is decrying as fraudulent. It begs the question: Why stay loyal to him? Any cynical self-preservation instincts that may have contributed to their sycophancy, and that of the Republicans still queasy about fully denouncing him, are falling into the widening gap between Biden and Trump in the vote count.
Moreover, in their continuing deference to Trump, they’re helping to animate the most dangerous elements of Trumpism. Already we’ve seen Trump supporters, some of them armed, descend on ballot processing centers in states like Arizona and Michigan, and on Thursday authorities in Philadelphia thwarted a potential attack on the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where votes were being tabulated. Since he came into power, Trump has turned the country into a tinderbox. Now that it seems he’s about to lose it, he’s trying to set it ablaze. Democrats can try to cool tensions, and responsible Americans can put out some of the smaller fires. But it’s only the people in his administration and his party who can knock the matches out of his hand. So far, they haven’t.
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