It never occurred to me in November of 2016 to suggest that Donald Trump stole the election.
I was disappointed, of course. No, honestly, I was more than that. I was flabbergasted and depressed, and very uneasy.
Instead of a bright, well-educated, well-informed, deeply flawed former U.S. secretary of state, former U.S. senator, and former first lady of the United States, voters had selected a more-deeply flawed, woefully under-informed New York real-estate hawker and reality TV personality who dealt in conspiracy theories and serial falsehoods.
I feared for the future of this nation because of that decision. But I didn’t think it was voter fraud.
It was Hillary Clinton’s own fault. She lost the election she should have won.
Oh, sure, Russian bots manipulated reality in the minds of some voters, and probably cost Clinton votes and benefitted Donald Trump. So did Julian Assange and Wikileaks and Russian hacking of stunningly vulnerable Democratic computer systems.
Yes, Clinton was also hurt by James Comey’s ridiculously timed, ridiculously reasoned announcement, less than two weeks before the election, of a new fork in the old trail of FBI investigations of Clinton and her emails that would lead to nowhere.
She had a lot working against her, including bias toward strong, opinionated women.
Even considering outside attackers, Clinton’s loss was her own
Mostly, though, she blew it herself by being a mediocre candidate who ran — or allowed her people to run — a worse-than-mediocre campaign. She was reckless and self-serving in her handling of her emails, and she was arrogant in her response to criticism and in some of her campaign rhetoric.
She ran a weak, tentative campaign aimed at not losing rather than winning. And she ignored or, worse, alienated key voters in key states at the worst possible time.
So she lost. Period.
No fraud. No stolen votes. No big conspiracy. Just a lousy campaign by a surprisingly weak candidate who, I think, would have been a good president.
Trump was a weaker and worse candidate who only managed 46 percent of the popular vote in this nation, compared to Clinton’s 48 percent. But he won enough in the right states to break the “blue wall” and earn a reasonably comfortable Electoral College win.
Some Democrats struggled to accept that. Some refused to accept it. They committed themselves to four years of attacking the new, uniquely unprepared, and unqualified president. Many of the attacks were justified. Trump encouraged them by bad behavior that worsened with his time in office and led to an impeachment by Democrats in the U.S. House.
I thought impeachment was a bad idea. It was almost as politically driven as the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Republicans were responsible for that, back when they held the House and Clinton was engaged in serial lying about his dysfunctional personal life even as he performed admirably as a gifted-and-effective president.
The Trump you see is the Trump there is
Trump has been the same in public and in private. And that’s not a compliment to consistency. Whatever he might have done well from a conservative perspective, he has proven incapable of being presidential, and he spun a daily web of lies far beyond anything Clinton ever did at his worst. Trump lies about pretty much everything, in a way that no prominent U.S. politician in my lifetime, and perhaps of all time, ever has.
It was pretty clear during the impeachment that Trump did what Democrats claimed he did in the Ukraine. And it was wrong. But it was not wrong enough to disallow the legitimate vote in 2016 and kick a president out of office.
The Republican-led Senate did the right thing, although probably for the wrong reasons, in the Trump impeachment, just as the Democratic-led Senate did the right thing for the wrong reasons in the Clinton impeachment. Motivated by partisan politics more than a sense of perspective, they refused to evict a legally elected president.
My argument all along was that Trump deserved to be evicted, but by voters in November, not by politically driven Democrats months earlier. And he was evicted, by voters, by a much bigger margin in the popular vote and the same margin in the Electoral College total that he had in beating Clinton four years earlier.
So, the upside-down world of American politics was turned right-side-up again. A good, imperfect man with long experience in Washington and center-left views on America and the world earned the highest vote total in history in a U.S. presidential election. Joe Biden will become our 46th president on Jan. 20, as the Constitution directs.
And rather than deepening division, Biden has pledged to seek areas of compromise with Republicans and to begin work to re-establish the systems and structures in the federal government that Trump and his appointees and advisers had worked to damage and de-construct.
Denying the reality of the vote ad attacking others
And Trump? Well, in losing he got the second-most votes in presidential history, a disturbing fact — to me, at least — that hardly seems to indicate an election process rigged against Trump. And after losing, he acted true to character, first sulking and disappearing from view, not doing his job in any discernible way. Then he began to revive himself in the only way he knows how, by attacking others and denying the truth.
He still did not spend much time doing his job, including vital work to help assure that the COVID-19 vaccine he helped push in development was rolled out effectively and distributed quickly and wisely. Nor did he work to begin the transfer of power that Americans expect and deserve.
Rather, he further devolved from the presidential into an even-more-deranged fog of bizarre conspiracy theories and election-fraud allegations that were at first entirely unproven and later simply proven wrong, by Republican and Democratic election officials and the courts. And he began to indicate that he would not go gentle into the dark, scary night of his defeat.
There was a spoof video released in November not long after Trump lost and refused to concede. It showed a fairly effective Trump impersonator in a classroom of children playing on a big bouncy ball. Then it showed a fairly effective Mike Pence impersonator coming in to announce that it was time to go and that “Mr. President” should allow the others to play with the bouncy ball.
The Mr. President in the skit threw a tantrum, of course, continuing to bounce on the ball and resist entreaties from his vice president, who eventually had to jerk the ball out from under the screaming Trump impersonator and drag him kicking and screaming, literally, from the room.
It’s hilarious. Also kind of sad. Because in funny fiction it’s a not-far-off representation of what’s going on now in not-at-all-amusing fact.
The difference is that the real Mike Pence isn’t dragging the president from the room. He’s encouraging him by inaction and indulgent affirmation. And others, millions of others, across the nation are doing the same, or worse.
Enablers are many, and most are either cowards or amazingly self-deluded. Some of them are in important roles. A minority of the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate has fallen in line for Trump, as have about 140 members of the Republican caucus in the House. They are assaulting the election process in a way that is both frightening and un-American.
And all based on Trump’s inability to face the reality of his own defeat, and his lapse into the ludicrous with his ongoing lies about widespread voter fraud that simply didn’t and doesn’t exist.
Like Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump made his own defeat
Trump lost because he deserved to lose. He governed for four years strictly to his most fervent base and to his own ego and self-interest. He succeeded in strengthening the love fest with his supporters and even attracting more new or returning voters — many of them angry and disaffected — to the polls.
But in doing so he was further narrowing his appeal in the broader electorate. That helped Joe Biden strengthen and expand his voter appeal. So as you might expect, Trump lost voters in key states he had won in 2016. I remember watching one voter on cable news from one of those states who said she had voted for Trump in 2016 but would not vote for him in 2020: “I honestly didn’t think he’d be this crazy.”
“Crazy” usually loses in big-time elections, in the United States of America, at least. The 2016 presidential election was an outlier that surprised even Trump. Yet, even with all his erratic behavior and wild comments and tweets in the years since, Trump had a good chance to win in 2020 by simply handling the COVID-19 pandemic in a presidential way.
Not a perfect way. There is no perfect in pandemic. He just needed to show compassion and reason and consistency, rather than nutty theories and wildly mixed messaging and irresponsible personal behavior.
But he couldn’t or wouldn’t. So he lost.
No interstate election fraud and webs of conspiracy involving Democratic and Republican elections officials. No boxes of votes dropped off in the middle of the night. No nefarious tinkering with election machines or extraterrestrial intrusions. No throngs of votes by people who have been dead for years.
Reality was a lot simpler. And it had the additional benefit of being true. He lost.
Donald Trump earned that loss, too. He deserved it. Sooner or later, that’s usually the way it works for leaders who fail in their leadership responsibilities. In this nation, at least.
Now the question is, who cares enough about this nation, its Constitution, and its future to actually take away Donald Trump’s bouncy ball and make him leave the room?
History will pay attention to the answer.
