Get Over It!

To my relief we will not have four more years of Donald J. Trump. I am not sure that our collective interests could have endured that. Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States on 20 January, 2021 at noon following an historic victory in last week’s election. When all of the votes are counted, President-elect Biden is expected to have over five million more votes than the sitting president. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 has a candidate beaten a sitting president by that large of a margin. Projections indicate that Mr. Biden will end up with 306 electoral votes, the same as Mr. Trump in 2016, who failed by three million votes to garner a popular vote win. By every measure, Mr. Biden is the clear winner in this election for president.

For now I will leave it to the historians to parse out the significance of this election. To me, it reinforces that we need to make serious changes to our election process. I am now convinced that the Electoral College must go. We need to learn to use absentee and mail-in voting effectively. We need all of the states to count those early ballots before Election Day so that results are posted in a timely fashion. We need to make Election Day a holiday. While it was inspiring to see that people would wait in line for as long as six or seven hours to vote in parts of our country, the question remains — why should they have to do so in the greatest democracy on earth?

I will leave it to the political analysts to dissect how Mr. Trump, now widely considered as our worst president ever, got more votes in this election than in 2016. In my view it was his apparently successful tactic to make the current pandemic a false choice between stopping its spread and reopening the economy. Coupled with his successful propaganda that Mr. Biden would only be a pawn in the hands of the — dare we say it? — socialists that will really run the country in his place, his campaign appears to be more effective than it should have been. Looking back over the last four years, I will never understand how so many people thought that he did a good job and that we wanted four more years of a budding autocrat in charge.

My primary concern is the ongoing shenanigans of the president and his enablers in the United States Senate and elsewhere. That Mr. Trump continues his refrain from the past year, that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged, does not surprise me. His logic is his own. I will win. They say I lost. I could only lose if it was rigged. Therefore, it was rigged. I would expect nothing else from the man-baby currently occupying the Oval Office. I just want to yell get over it and get out!

I am most appalled at the attack on our democracy being perpetrated by the majority of Republican Senators. They are echoing and spreading Mr. Trump’s lies about a rigged election and consistently push the idea of voter fraud. This is extremely dangerous. It puts the legitimacy of our entire process in jeopardy. The Republicans keep trying to push law suits in the courts without evidence. As we used to say, they have gone “0 fer.” (All of them were dismissed as of this writing for lack of evidence.) Note that they only challenge the presidential results, even as they accept the results of the races that they won that were on the same ballots. So far, it appears that Americans accept the results of the voting, with 79% agreeing that Mr. Biden won and only 3% saying that Mr. Trump won. (The rest say that they don’t know or are waiting for more results.)

Given that the population as a whole accepts the results, why would senior Republicans deliberately and with malice of forethought push such wild tales that only undermine our election system? Why would they risk a nut case or a group of nut cases taking some sort of violent action to “solve” the problem themselves? I have three possibilities.

The easiest, silliest, and most popular theory is that everyone around Mr. Trump knows that he lost but that they must assuage his ego, lessen the blow, and come up with a story that allows him to believe that he is not a loser. If the election were stolen from him, then he did not lose. If this is true, then we should all be extremely happy that he is no longer president because such behavior is infantile. It also shows that senior Republicans have no integrity if they believe that such behavior, and such a dangerous story, is okay. They are willing to let the entire nation convulse to sooth the ego of one man. Shameful.

A second possibility is that they need the base to remain energized so that they can raise money and turn out the vote in Georgia. Two Senate seats will be decided there in January following a run-off between the top two vote-getters. The control of the Senate remains in the balance. If the Republicans win even one seat, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell remains in place. If the Democrats win both seats, the split in the Senate will be 50-50 and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris breaks any ties, thus making Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) the Majority Leader.

A corollary of this theory is that because Mr. Trump did so much better than expected, he will continue to dominate the Republican Party and become a “king maker” for those with ambitions to run for president, or any other office, over the next four years. They need to keep him on their side and since personal loyalty to the Supreme Leader is the only thing that Mr. Trump cares about, they need to keep kowtowing to him. Mr. Trump is also using the claim of a corrupt election to raise money. For himself. Mr. Trump activated a “defense fund” web site that solicits donations to fight on and stop the “fraudulent” election in court. However, when one drills down into the fine print, the vast majority of the funds are going to Mr. Trump’s new political action committee (PAC) “Save America.” One thing you can be sure of with our current Commander-in-Chief, he never misses an opportunity to make a buck off of his supporters.

The third possibility, which I hesitate to bring up since it is so outlandish, is that Mr. Trump and at least some of his cohorts actually believe that the election was stolen. Or, at least they honestly think that they can play the game out to keep themselves in power by any means necessary. That scenario is absolutely unfathomable. And yet, for years we have thought that surely Mr. Trump would not go “that far,” and then he crashes right on through any barriers to keep him on track. One lesson that he and his enablers have learned is that they can ignore the law with impunity because in the end, no one can do anything to stop them. He was impeached. So what? Congressional hearings? Ignore them. Department of Justice investigations? William Barr won’t allow it. And on, and on.

In the aftermath of the election he is systematically cleaning out all of his government appointees deemed insufficiently loyal and replacing them with his most fierce acolytes. In agency after agency this is ongoing. The headline grabber is in the Department of Defense where the Secretary of Defense was arbitrarily “terminated” via Tweet without warning to any official in the Pentagon. Yesterday, other high civilian officials in the department were also summarily fired and replaced by die-hard Trump loyalists. Why? Good question. It could be retribution for not doing Mr. Trump’s bidding. It could be a loyalty reward to his new appointees so that those folks can put it on their resume for the future. It could be because there is a bigger plan that the removed officials would not have allowed.

So far, all of those removed were civilians. I will be truly alarmed if Mr. Trump removes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (reportedly Mr. Trump is unhappy with him) or other senior military officers. Anyone that stands in Mr. Trump’s way gets removed. To what end? In addition, when asked about a transition yesterday, Secretary of State Pompeo replied that he was ready to transition to four more years of Mr. Trump. A not funny joke from someone who should know better? (He is a West Point graduate. What happened to “Duty. Honor. Country.”?) Or a hint?

I am not a conspiracy theorist by nature. I am not one now. All I know is that nothing Mr. Trump does is surprising, even as at the same time it can be shocking. Additionally, his administration refuses to cooperate with the incoming administration for a smooth transition. Perhaps Mr. Trump and his minions think this is some kind of payback, but it is also dangerous. Transition teams are not just courtesies or traditions. They need to get to work in order for the government to function smoothly. Any delay much past the end of this week will have an impact on our national security. One finding of the 9/11 Commission is that the delay in calling the Bush-Gore election, and thus a far shorter transition for President Bush and his team, was a contributing factor to failing to protect against the terrorist attack. They were still getting up to speed on a number of issues and still putting people and policies in place.

This is the United States of America. By deliberately creating chaos and delaying a smooth transition of the government, Mr. Trump and his allies are undermining our national security. With a bevy of mostly unqualified “actings” in key positions throughout the government for the next ten weeks, bad actors are calibrating their options to take advantage of the situation or to further undermine our world standing. By deliberately lying about the election, Mr. Trump and his supporters allow domestic terror groups to see an opportunity to take advantage of the chaos.

All involved took an oath of office to the Constitution, not to one person. It is time that they do a gut check and reorient their thinking towards what is best for the country rather than for themselves. Unfortunately, that may be one of Mr. Trump’s legacies. It isn’t about country, it’s about me, me, me.

I still remain optimistic for our country. We can get through this. I just do not understand how some of our officials can ignore their oath and their sworn duty.