Donald Trump’s ‘soft coup’ attempt failed, but the damage will last a generation

If democracy is a fragile thing, United States’ democracy is a paper-thin porcelain tea cup. In a fitting end to a repulsive and embarrassing four years as President, Donald Trump has used the last month since losing the election to sow chaos and distrust in the fundamental tenets of the US election system.

The chaos has subsided somewhat, but only because nearly all of the dozens of legal challenges the Trump campaign mounted in the immediate aftermath of the election have failed, some more dramatically than others — including a scathing rebuke from a three-judge Federal Appeals Court made up of judges nominated by Republican Presidents.

But, even if it now appears as though Trump will indeed vacate the White House for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the damage has been done, and it will last.

The foundation of US democracy, and indeed of any democracy, is respect for election results followed by a peaceful transfer of power. Trump has done neither of those two things, and prominent Republicans essentially endorsed his actions via a chorus of deafening silence.

Beyond the mostly-frivolous court cases, the Trump campaign openly courted state and local officials — including seven state legislators from Michigan — inviting them to Washington and wining and dining them in an attempt to have them go against the will of their state’s voters and install Electoral College electors that would cast the state’s electoral votes for Trump instead of Biden.

These efforts failed, thankfully.

As the days and weeks have worn on, things are starting to look slightly more ‘normal’, but it’s also clear that President Trump’s lame duck term — the period of time between the election and the inauguration of the next President — will be perhaps the most-damaging lame duck term of the modern era.

According to Pew Research, just 21 percent of Trump voters say the election was run and administered well. The number is 94 percent for Biden voters, and 62 percent overall. Unsurprisingly, Trump voters are particularly wary of mail-in vote tallies, with just 19 percent saying that they are confident that mail-in votes were counted fairly or correctly. This is remarkably dangerous. When 60 million-plus voters lose (or lack) confidence in the system, it’s a recipe for future disaster, and portends a dire future for elections in the United States more broadly.

The irony here is that, now that all the votes are counted, we know that Trump clearly had a real chance of winning re-election. The final margins in the states that decided the election — namely Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia — were relatively close, especially in the latter two states. All of the months he spent disparaging mail-in voting, and saying the vote would be “rigged” in the event that he lost, very likely cost him the election.

Indeed, if Trump had encouraged his supporters to vote early, vote by mail, or just vote any way besides going to a physical polling place on election day — nearly every state offers some sort of alternative voting method — the results may have been quite different. Combine that with the lack of any new COVID-19 relief packages — an easy political ‘win’ if there ever was one — and his fate was sealed.

The Washington Post has an exhaustive report on the post-election morass that includes interviews with 32 different people, including senior administration officials, campaign aides and advisers to the President, and key figures in his legal fight. The details are spectacular, and paint a picture of a man consumed with ego and delusion, and surrounded by sycophants who were either unable or unwilling to impart hard truths to the man who most-needed to hear them — regardless of whether he was interested or not. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell implored the President to stop berating mail-in voting as “corrupt” or “rigged” and try to get his supporters to take part. This fell on deaf ears.

In the end, Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States, but future elections in the US will likely show the scars of the 2020 presidential elections, and an already-fragile system has only been pushed further to the edge.

Sree Sreenivasan is Marshall Loeb Visiting Professor of Digital Innovation at Stony Brook Journalism School in New York, and co-founder of Digimentors, a social, digital and virtual events consultancy. Twitter: @sree. Views are personal.