December begins with financial markets setting records, the DOW, S&P, and the tech-oriented NASDAQ flirting with all-time highs. At the same time, over twenty-five million Americans reported not having enough to eat this past week. Long lines with people waiting hours for food are a depressing spectacle for the world’s richest nation, especially when accompanied by record financial markets.
Just as President Trump ignores the pandemic and its tragic results, he ignores the reality of the end of his disastrous presidential term.
Such is the iron grip of Trump on the Republican Party that only a couple of U.S. Senators have publicly acknowledged Biden’s election victory.
Trump has thumbed his nose at accepted norms and procedures that have been followed by Republicans and Democrats alike. He ends his term with violation of a basic hallmark of a democracy, graceful acceptance of defeat, and cooperation with the victor in the peaceful transfer of power.
Had this recent saga involving Trump and his cronies been submitted as a Hollywood script, it would have been rejected as too implausible to deal with. It begins with a president who believes he knows more than military general officers, scientists, and career diplomats. Therefore, as he claims to be the smartest and greatest president since Abraham Lincoln, maybe greater, he deserves election for another term, maybe more, and cannot possibly be defeated. Except by massive fraud, of course.
So the results come in, losing the popular vote by some six million, and the Electoral College by the same margin by which Trump won in 2016, then designated as a “landslide.” Surely, this “proves” that the election was “RIGGED.”
This sets the stage for Trump’s ace attorney, Mr. Giuliani, and his Three Stooges farce on that Philadelphia parking lot between a crematorium and a porn book store. Several dozen lawsuits in multiple states follow. As there were none with credible evidence of improprieties, they were dismissed, many by Republican-appointed judges. A bizarre case included charges by a prominent Trump attorney alleging a tangled web of intrigue including deceased Hugo Chavez, communist money, and Dominion Voting System machines.
A somewhat surprising result of the election is Biden’s Georgia victory. That wasn’t supposed to happen, especially with Trump supporter, Brad Raffensberger, as Secretary of State in charge of the election. He was supposed to use his powers to suppress the vote. In spite of long lines, Democrats came out, and gave Biden that narrow victory. When Raffensberger defended the integrity of the election, Trump and his Republicans turned on the Trump supporter, demanding that he resign. If the guy wasn’t competent enough to sufficiently suppress the vote to guarantee a Trump victory, his usefulness to the Republican Party was over. That left Raffensberger to lament that after he and his family voted for Trump, he was “thrown under the bus.” Georgia’s Republican senators up for reelection in the January Georgia election piled on, calling for Raffensberger to resign.
Georgia’s Governor Kemp joined Raffensberger in rebuffing Trump’s call to overturn the election after Georgia had certified the results. Trump stated that “he is ashamed” that he earlier endorsed Kemp.” He followed the next day with “Why won’t the hapless Governor of Georgia use his emergency powers, which can be easily done, to overrule his obstinate Secretary of State….” For Trump, loyalty only goes one way.
With Trump continuing to stoke doubt about the Georgia election, Republican officials worried that this could depress Republican turnout for the Georgia’s January 5 senatorial runoffs.
If you don’t like the results, keep counting until they come out the way you want. Georgia’s votes were tabulated for a third time.
How about Wisconsin, where Biden won by a mere 20,000 votes? Trump coughs up three million bucks for a recount in the Democratic counties of Milwaukee and Dane. Whaddaya know, in Milwaukee County they find an additional 125 votes for Trump. Oops, they also find an additional 257 for Biden, giving Biden a net gain.
Well, how about Dane County? Maybe in Madison, the “Berkeley of the Midwest,” they can find enough Trump votes to turn that 20,000 statewide Biden margin into a Trump victory. Tough luck—after the counting is over, Biden nets a statewide gain of eighty-two votes.
Then there’s the man with a lot of money laying around who loves the guy in the White House who poses as champion of those left behind while, in reality, he’s making the rich even richer. “We must get this man reelected to continue his largesse to the wealthy.”
Mr. Fred Eshelman, of Eshelman Ventures LLC, coughs up a cool 2.5 million to a Houston outfit, “True the Vote, Inc.,” that promised to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election.”
That 2.5 million may have been chump change to Mr. Eshelman. But he expected results. When no results came forth, he wanted his money back. It’s reported that “True the Vote” offered one million if he would drop any plans for a law suit. (Eshelman v. True the Vote, Inc., U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas)
Meanwhile, twenty-six Republican Pennsylvania legislators, declaring results to be in dispute, submitted a resolution calling for legislative leaders to withdraw certification of the presidential election results and appoint Trump delegates to the Electoral College. Pennsylvania’s legislative leaders assured the public that they have no such plans, and will award their twenty Electoral delegates to Biden. One wonders what would have happened had Biden’s margin been razor thin.
The Biden-Harris ticket won, and is destined to take charge on January 20, 2021. The election is over, but the seamless transfer of power is not. Trump insists that he will leave only when Biden can prove that his election is legitimate. Apparently, state certification is not sufficient proof of legitimacy.
A European philosopher once proclaimed, “History repeats, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Trump’s behavior is some combination of the two, playing out in real life.
— John Waelti of Monroe, a retired professor of economics, can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Saturdays in the Monroe Times.
