Sowing doubt about the fairness of the election for his political benefit from the presidential pulpit, President Trump said, “if you count the legal votes, I easily win.”Also from TPM: Summer Concepcion et al, ‘Just Pathetic’: Trump Widely Condemned For Wannabe Dictator White House Statement 11/05/2020.
He added, almost predictably: “If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.”
The President’s affect at the presser was mostly listless, projecting a lack of energy and apparent exhaustion with the situation. But his claims are incredibly corrosive to the core of American democracy: that both parties to an election respect the process and its results, allowing a shared sense of reality and legitimacy regardless of who wins and who loses.
Trump has spent the past few days stomping that concept into the ground, holing up in the White House to deride the election as “illegitimate” through surrogates, twitter, and, Thursday evening, a press conference, at which he appeared for the first time in more than 24 hours.
Specifically, President Trump has been trying to argue that votes from Democratic-majority areas are fraudulent, and that the slow counting of mail-in ballots represents some kind of a conspiracy.
Though there is no evidence to support any of these claims, ... Trump, himself, is the first President to use the position of his office to cast doubt on the very process that delivered him there, creating a deep fissure in the American body politic.
Rick Hasen has this take on a possible post-loss posture for Trump (What’s Trump’s End Game If Race Called for Biden? Election Law Blog 11/054/2020):
Trump’s litigation strategy is not created to lead to a difference in results unless PA is the decisive electoral college state and the vote count is so close that the result would depend upon those segregated ballots arriving 3 days after election day. Indeed, one could imagine just as easily TRUMP being behind in PA and wanting to have those ballots counted (and they should be counted, regardless of who is ahead or behind.)Robert Reich comments on Twitter:
If Trump loses, he may grumble and the country move on, or he can try to keep yelling fraud baselessly. If he does, it will be up to responsible voices in society, including Republican leaders, to tell him to accept defeat even if he will not formally concede. This is what happened when Matt Bevin lost the Kentucky governor’s race, yelling fraud on the way out but unable to convince Republicans in the state legislature to take the vote count away from the voters.
But the viral, false claims of an election being stolen by Democrats would be used by Trump and his supporters to undermine a Biden presidency and to further undermine voter confidence among the Trump base in the legitimacy of the election process, something I have been warning about in Election Meltdown and elsewhere for some time. It is dangerous stuff to play with in a democracy, which depends upon losers accepting the results of an election as legitimate and agreeing to fight another day.
Technically, the election is over when Congress and Senate ratify the votes of the College of Electors, on January 6. But Trump will likely challenge the electors, perhaps causing a constitutional crisis.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) November 6, 2020
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