NEWS
ANALYSIS
An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office
President Trump’s effort to overturn the election he
lost has gone beyond mere venting of grievances at the risk of damaging the
very American democracy he is charged with defending.
Peter Baker
By Peter
Baker
Jan. 4,
2021
Updated
12:55 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— President Trump’s relentless effort to overturn the result of the election
that he lost has become the most serious stress test of American democracy in
generations, led not by outside revolutionaries intent on bringing down the
system but by the very leader charged with defending it.
In the 220
years since a defeated John Adams turned over the White House to his rival,
firmly establishing the peaceful transfer of power as a bedrock principle, no
sitting president who lost an election has tried to hang onto power by
rejecting the Electoral College and subverting the will of the voters — until
now. It is a scenario at once utterly unthinkable and yet feared since the beginning
of Mr. Trump’s tenure.
The
president has gone well beyond simply venting his grievances or creating a
face-saving narrative to explain away a loss, as advisers privately suggested
he was doing in the days after the Nov. 3 vote, but instead has pressed the
boundaries of tradition, propriety and the law to find any way he can to cling
to office beyond his term that expires in two weeks. That he is almost certain
to fail does not mitigate the damage he is doing to democracy by undermining
public faith in the electoral system.
His
hourlong telephone call over the weekend with Georgia’s chief election
official, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find” enough votes to overturn
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in that state only brought into
stark relief what Mr. Trump has been doing for weeks. He has called the
Republican governors of Georgia and Arizona to get them to intervene. He has
summoned Michigan’s Republican legislature leaders to the White House to
pressure them to change their state’s results. He called the Republican speaker
of the Pennsylvania House twice to do the same.
He and his
staff have floated the idea of delaying Mr. Biden’s inauguration, which is set
in stone by the Constitution, and he met with a former adviser urging him to
declare martial law. His erratic behavior has so alarmed the military that he
might try to use force to stay in the White House that every living former
defense secretary — including two he appointed himself — issued a warning
against the armed forces becoming involved.
And he has
encouraged Vice President Mike Pence and congressional allies to do anything
they can to block the final formal declaration of Mr. Biden’s victory when
Congress meets on Wednesday, seeking to turn what has historically been a
ceremonial moment into a last-ditch showdown over the election. The idea has
disturbed even many senior Republicans and it is guaranteed to fail, much to
the president’s frustration.
“The
‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican Party will go down in infamy as weak
and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our Nation, who were willing to accept the
certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter
on Monday, quickly drawing a warning label from the social media firm.
He denied
subverting democracy, posting a quote he attributed to Senator Ron Johnson of
Wisconsin, one of his Republican allies: “We are not acting to thwart the
Democratic process, we are acting to protect it.”
But Mr.
Trump’s efforts ring familiar to many who have studied authoritarian regimes in
countries around the world, like those run by President Vladimir V. Putin in
Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary.
“Trump’s
attempt to overturn the election, and his pressure tactics to that end with
Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, are an example of how
authoritarianism works in the 21st century,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of
“Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.” “Today’s leaders come in through
elections and then manipulate elections to stay in office — until they get
enough power to force the hand of legislative bodies to keep them there
indefinitely, as Putin and Orban have done.”
The call
with Mr. Raffensperger, which was recorded and released to the news media after
Mr. Trump tweeted a false version of the conversation, provided a breathtaking
case study of how far the president is willing to go to preserve power. He ran
through one unfounded conspiracy theory after another, pushed Mr. Raffensperger
to “find 11,780 votes” to flip the election outcome, appealing to him as a
Republican to show loyalty and implicitly threatening criminal charges if he
refused.
“So what
are we going to do here, folks?” Mr. Trump said at one point. “I only need
11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.”
The call
was unseemly enough that even some of the president’s allies distanced
themselves. “One of the things, I think, that everyone has said is that this
call was not a helpful call,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, one of the
Republicans pushing to reject Biden electors from swing states, conceded on Fox
News.
Mr. Trump’s
claims that the election was somehow stolen from him have gained no traction in
any of the dozens of courts that he and his allies have petitioned, including
the Supreme Court, with three justices he appointed. Republican election
officials in swing states like Mr. Raffensperger have rejected his claims as
false. Even Mr. Trump’s own attorney general, William P. Barr, said he saw no
widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. But that
has not deterred the president.
Mr. Trump’s
fidelity to the concept of American democracy has long been debated. He has
expressed admiration for strongmen like Mr. Putin, Mr. Orban, President Xi
Jinping of China and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, evincing envy of
their ability to act decisively without the checks of a democratic government.
He has asserted at various points that the Constitution “allows me to do
whatever I want” with the special counsel investigating him and that his
“authority is total” to order states to follow his wishes.
He has
sought to turn government agencies into instruments of political power,
pressuring the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies and go easy on his
friends. He has made expansive use of executive orders that courts at times
ruled went too far. He was impeached by the House in 2019 for abuse of power
for pressuring Ukraine to help him sully Mr. Biden’s reputation and then
acquitted by the Senate last year.
From his
earliest days in his campaign, critics suggested that he harbored autocratic
tendencies that raised questions about whether he would eventually subvert
democracy or seek to stay in power even if he lost, questions that grew loud
enough that he felt compelled to respond. “There is nobody less of a fascist
than Donald Trump,” he insisted in 2016.
Even so,
Mr. Trump did little to disabuse those fears in subsequent years, suggesting
last summer that the November election be postponed and refusing to commit to a
peaceful transfer of power if he lost. Even now, just two weeks before the end
of his term, Mr. Trump has left doubt about how he will leave the White House
when Mr. Biden is inaugurated.
What he
could try to do to stop it remains unclear since he seems out of options. But
he is not yet willing to acknowledge the reality of his situation and follow
John Adams’s example.
Peter Baker
is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last four presidents
for The Times and The Washington Post. He also is the author of six books, most
recently "The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker
III." @peterbakernyt • Facebook
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