- President Donald Trump has challenged America’s democracy throughout his presidency, and he’s taking this to new conspiratorial heights as votes are still being counted in the 2020 election.
- Trump falsely declared victory on Wednesday and called for votes to stop being counted. He also falsely said votes arriving after Election Day “WILL NOT BE COUNTED” — vote counting is a process the president has no authority over.
- When leaders in other countries have behaved the way Trump is behaving right now, the Trump administration has condemned their behavior and called on them to step down.
- On Saturday, Trump refused to concede after mutliple outlets declared president-elect Joe Biden the winnner of the 2020 presidential election.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
No president in modern US history has exhibited more disdain for the democratic process or disseminated more disinformation during an election cycle than Donald Trump.
On Saturday, after multiple news outlets declared president-elect Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede. He’s breaking from a hallmark of American democracy that dates back to the earliest days of the republic. World leaders have recognized that Biden is president-elect, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — the leader of America’s closest ally. But Trump is continuing to reject reality.
Trump also falsely declared victory early on Wednesday — with millions of votes still uncounted — and vowed to go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote count, in a move that mirrored the behavior of authoritarians.
“Trump claiming a victory he never won, and saying he will take it to the Supreme Court. This is what dictators do. Stop,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted early on Wednesday.
Similarly, Brian Klaas, a political scientist at the University College London, on Wednesday said, “Trump just prematurely declared victory. It’s authoritarian. It’s undemocratic. It needs to be repudiated by anyone who believes in the values of the American republic.”
Conservatives have also expressed alarm over Trump’s rhetoric.
“That was one of the most dishonest and despotic speeches ever given by a president of the United States,” Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who was originally a Republican but became an independent last year, said on Wednesday via Twitter.
“A sitting president undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans without evidence is not only dangerous & wrong, it undermines the very foundation this nation was built upon,” Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas said in a tweet on Thursday.
With his path to victory in the 2020 election dwindling on Thursday, Trump called for vote counting to stop. He said votes arriving after Election Day “WILL NOT BE COUNTED,” which both is false and a process over which he holds no legal authority. Trump has baselessly claimed that the election is being stolen and that “surprise” ballots are being dumped in battleground states to boost president-elect Joe Biden’s chances.
Votes are being counted, not stolen.
What Trump was doing was akin to an NFL team that’s losing in the Super Bowl calling to stop the game with a quarter remaining while accusing their opponent of cheating when they’ve clearly just been outplayed.
Read more: Meet 39 people on Biden’s transition team preparing to demolish Trump’s legacy
To put it another way, the president is throwing an electoral temper tantrum because he’s losing.
Trump is getting desperate
Carlos Barria/Reuters
It is normal for vote counting to continue after Election Day, and full results are never available on election night. Many states accept absentee or mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, including from overseas military voters. The president has talked a big game about his support for troops, but what he’s demanded could disenfranchise thousands of military voters.
For months, Americans were told there would be delays in the 2020 election results. An unprecedented number of people voted by mail this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it takes officials much longer to process and count mail-in ballots than in-person votes.
States also have different rules on which ballots they count first, and laws in key battleground states like Pennsylvania limited officials’ ability to begin counting mail-in ballots before Election Day. Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania also blocked efforts to allow those officials to begin counting some of those ballots before Election Day, something that’s permitted in several other states.
It’s no mystery why more votes are coming in, and it’s not a conspiracy to disenfranchise Republican voters. There are myriad reasons it’s taking longer than usual to declare a winner in this race.
The president has essentially suggested that any result that is not in his favor is fraudulent.
Accordingly, Trump has filed lawsuits seeking to stop counting votes in three states, including two where he’s ahead of Biden in the available results, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Meanwhile, Trump wants voting to continue in two states where he’s behind the former vice president, Arizona and Nevada.
No substantial evidence has emerged to suggest that the integrity of the vote has been compromised in a major way in any of the 50 states or Washington, DC. The process actually appears to be going more smoothly than anticipated. But Trump is still working to sue his way to victory as his reelection prospects look grim.
Trump is a danger to America’s democracy
Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election began long before November 3. Throughout 2020, the president spread misinformation on mail-in voting, pushing the unsubstantiated claim that it leads to widespread voter fraud. In reality, voter fraud is extremely rare in the US.
The president also refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power ahead of Election Day. Once it was clear Trump was defeated he rejected the outcome.
It’s vital to the health and longevity of America’s democratic process for presidents to accept the results of elections if they lose.
Every president since John Adams in 1800 has conceded and peacefully stepped down when they’ve been defeated in an election. Though the US is far from faultless, this aspect of its political system has been a beacon for the world for centuries. When leaders don’t accept election results, it can induce chaos and violence in the streets.
Last December, Trump was impeached over allegations he solicited a foreign government’s interference in the 2020 presidential election. The president had urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into Biden and his son Hunter while withholding military aid from Ukraine as it fought a war with Russia. This was related to groundless allegations that Biden had abused his power as vice president to shield Hunter from an investigation into a Ukrainian gas company whose board Hunter served on.
To put it another way, Trump was asking the leader of another country to publicly smear a political rival who was seen as the likely 2020 Democratic presidential nominee at the time. The president has dismissed the notion that he did anything wrong.
Trump is not the first US president accused of engaging in nefarious activities to boost his chance of being reelected. Richard Nixon is perhaps the closest example. Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 as he faced impeachment over the Watergate scandal, which centered on his efforts to cover up his ties to burglars arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
But Trump has even surpassed Nixon in terms of his assault on democracy in the US. The president has habitually attacked the free press, exhibited more admiration for autocrats than democratic US allies, and displayed a relentless aversion to facts. A democracy can’t function if people can’t agree on basic things, and Trump has made that far more difficult by consistently making erroneous claims about vital issues.
Before Election Day, top experts on authoritarianism said Trump was behaving much like the fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Trump is continuing to follow a dictator’s playbook and testing America’s political system in unprecedented ways as he frantically tweets election disinformation to his millions of followers. When leaders in other countries have behaved the way Trump is behaving right now, the Trump administration has condemned their behavior and called on them to step down.
Cheney Orr/Reuters
Experts on extremism and democracy feared that there would be violence surrounding the election.
On Wednesday night, a large group of Trump supporters, some of them armed, gathered outside a vote-counting center in Phoenix, Arizona, and demanded that votes be counted. This was linked to a baseless conspiracy theory that election officials were manipulating ballots. In other cities across the US, people took to the streets to protest Trump and his call to cease vote counting. Dozens of arrests were made overnight in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Portland, Oregon, per The Associated Press.
The country, battered by a pandemic that’s killed more than 234,000 Americans under Trump’s watch, seems more divided than it’s been at almost any point since the Civil War. Trump is stoking the tension in dangerous ways, with potentially irrevocable consequences.
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