The project to get the referees working before the 2024 presidential debates is already underway, with self-deprecating Trump sycophants like Tim Scott who insist that “the moderators will cause interference Joe Biden.” The moderators should not be pushed around, and they should start the first debate with the obvious question that Donald Trump most wants to talk about:
“Who Won the 2020 Presidential Election?”
Of course, it will seem a bit absurd to ask the question to the man who won the election, was sworn in and is currently serving as president and standing there on the stage. It’s an absurd question. But the absurd question of who won the 2020 presidential election – and who insists on denying the facts about it – is the single most important question in American politics today. The fate of one of the major parties and the broader political trend it represents are together entangled in the answer to that question – or rather, in the ability to simply say the answer.
Republicans and conservatives remain in a state of willful, culpable denial about what happened after the 2020 election. The Republican Party will not be able to continue as a normal party until it takes these events into account, and American politics will remain deformed until the Republican Party either makes the necessary internal reforms or – and one solution is just as good as the other. – disappears completely.
The hand gesture was extraordinary – and indefensible. Otherwise, sensible people like Rep. Dan Crenshaw made the attempt coup on the grounds that Donald Trump and his supporters acted partly through lawsuits and by attempting to influence the actions of political actors – as if it were not the case that successful coups typically combine legal or constitutional pretexts, often with claims of election fraud , with political violence and strong-arm tactics. Such a coup brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, arguing that Salvador Allende’s government failed to fulfill its constitutional duties and had taken unconstitutional measures, a position endorsed by the Chilean Supreme Court. There are many more examples of similar coup careers: Francisco Franco, Fulgencio Batista and after him Fidel Castro, Mobutu Sese Seko. Most of what Adolf Hitler did, he did under the color of the law: the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Enabling Act of 1933, the Nuremberg Race Laws. We should not pretend that attempts at legal gilding make a coup less of a coup. Americans can usually see that when it comes to any country but ours.
Nor should we offer anything but contempt to the argument that insists that we should reject the attempt coup because it didn’t come very close to success. There’s a reason we have crimes like tried murder and conspiracy to commit fraud. And a clumsy, incompetent and failed coup attempt could wreak havoc on a constitutional republic that depends on – on a terrifying mate – on the duplicitous virtue of such fickle and weak men as Mike Pence for his safety. But the 2021 coup attempt was not as clearly doomed to failure as many on the right now like to claim: change four or five decisions by three or four men and we could have seen a very different outcome.
Many observers have offered amateur psychoanalytic explanations for Trump’s insistence that he win the 2020 election and be deprived of a second term. Many of these stories are plausible enough, but there’s a more straightforward political version: Trump’s political case for himself in 2016 was that he was a winner — “won so much” and all that. And Trump won in 2016 — then led Republicans to defeat after defeat, both at the polls and in political negotiations, culminating in his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, a cowardly hack who barely bothered to campaign against him . Trump’s repeated defeats and his crowning humiliation at the hands of Democrats in 2020 not only denied him a second term, but also denied: afterwardsthe political argument for his first term as he presented it himself.
It is far too specific to encounter anything other than shame and humiliation in worldly defeat Christian an idea that Trump and the imperial cultists around him need to understand. Trump’s religion is nostrism (“us-ism”, i.e. vulgar tribalism), and nostrism doesn’t work when you lose, because you’re asking your congregants to unite with defeat rather than victory.
If Trump can’t answer one simple question – “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” – then the American electorate, as foolish and ignorant as it is, must be made to face that fact and what it means. Either Trump continues to insist on the legitimacy of his attempted coup, or he admits that he is being political reason for existence is and always has been a combination of delusion and fraud.
The fact that Trump and his accomplices believe that their delusions and fraud can be sanctified by an election victory in November is not entirely irrelevant. But between now and Election Day, the fundamental question must be raised again as many times as necessary.
So ask the question.
Read more at De Uitzending
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