And why that’s somehow even more offensive than Trump himself. Occasionally, out of some vestigial reflex, I still go through the archaic motions of being a citizen in a functioning republic. I wrote to my congressman last week.
My representative, Andy Harris, is not what you’d call a major player in the D.C. arena; he’s a low-level Republican tool who sits on the leadership committee of nothing, doesn’t introduce a lot of legislation, and reliably votes along party lines — basically, does as he’s told.
His parents were émigrés from Soviet bloc countries — his father from Hungary, his mother from Poland — and Harris is still holding fast against the red menace, the gravest threat facing us in 1954; he once took a stand against naming a post office after Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Maya Angelou because she was “a communist sympathizer.” About the best thing that can be said of him is that he probably accurately reflects the ideology and values of his constituents in the poor, rural part of Maryland where I live.
I’ve written Harris several times before, about issues from health care to guns to the impeachment, and he invariably responds with a form letter affirming his unwavering support of whatever’s the worst imaginable position on that issue. In my latest letter, written while Trump was still attempting to discredit the elections in several swing states where he’d lost, I told him that, although we had agreed on very little over the years, I assumed there were still certain fundamentals on which all citizens of a republic could agree, among them a respect for the democratic process and the peaceful transition of power.
I hoped that not allowing the president to overturn a legitimate election might be one thing with which we could both get on board. Harris was the one member of Congress to boldly vote “present” on a resolution condemning the QAnon movement (17 of his fellow Republicans at least had the courage of their delusions and voted against it), and yet I had some feeble faith that, in defense of this most basic right of American citizens, he might, for once, be willing to take a stand.
I am still sometimes surprised, even in well-disillusioned middle age, by my capacity for disappointment.
There it was, on official letterhead of the U.S. House of Representatives: The little gunsel was actually parroting the president’s lies about widespread electoral fraud.
“Unfortunately, there have been reports of large-scale voting irregularities in some of the crucial swing states that will decide the election,” he wrote. (Note his use of the rhetorical trope alluding to vague “reports” — the equivalent of Trump’s “a lotta people are saying…” — not making any concrete, disprovable accusations, and disowning any authorship or endorsement of them, just repeating what he’s allegedly been hearing.) “Specifically,” he wrote, “I am very concerned about mail-in ballots being validated and counted while election observers were denied legal ‘meaningful’ access to closely watch the process.” (Trump’s lawyers have sheepishly had to retract this claim in court under increasingly direct questioning and the implicit threat of disbarment.)
Harris has not only acquiesced to Trump’s narrative, he even participated in an obliging little pantomime in support of it, co-signing a letter to the president’s personal attorney general, William Barr, about their deep concern for the integrity of the election. “Will you commit to using all the resources at your disposal to ensure that only legal votes are being counted and being counted in a fully transparent manner immediately?” they demanded, like a posse of plucky Mr. Smiths demanding justice.
There it was, on official letterhead of the U.S. House of Representatives: The little gunsel was actually parroting the president’s lies about widespread electoral fraud. In a way, my podunk congressman’s reply outraged me more than the pathological lies of Donald Trump, from whom we’ve come to expect no better. It was more local, more real, the way the photo of a single victim can move you to pity and indignation when the numbers of a massacre do not.
Harris, who had the benefit of an expensive education (he’s a fellow Johns Hopkins alum, to that institution’s discredit), knows as well as I do that these “reports” are stuff Donald Trump made up; he’s just performing for the benefit of Trump’s less fortunate constituency, who subsist on an intellectual diet of disinfotainment, shout radio, and Facebook posts with a lot of exclamation points. This son of refugees from a totalitarian regime is now obediently disseminating propaganda and abetting an attempt to discredit a legitimate election, an accomplice in a crude, inept attempted coup. This embrace of authoritarianism isn’t exactly an ideological departure for Harris, who’s gone on record in support of Viktor Orbán, dictator of Hungary and ally of Vladimir Putin, but it is the first time he’s advocated for it domestically. I can only imagine that Andy Harris’ parents would be ashamed to see him become an apparatchik.
That my congressman is an authoritarian toady is an embarrassment only to his constituents; his complicity in this crime, however, is endemic to his whole party. Another 38 Republican representatives signed that posturing nonsense to Barr along with Harris. We should all by now have gotten over our shock and outrage that Republican politicians would ignore the president’s fumbling assault on fundamental democratic principles, the rule of law, scientific and medical expertise, common sense, and basic human decency. We’ve all learned, over these last four years, how much of what we vaguely assumed must be enshrined in law was a matter of mere protocol — what we call, now that they’ve all been violated, “norms.”
Senators couldn’t just shrug off impeachable crimes, we thought; the attorney general isn’t just the president’s personal hatchet man; of course, electors will ratify the people’s votes. A president wouldn’t pardon himself not because it wasn’t technically legal, but because it just isn’t done, the same way he wouldn’t make fun of someone’s diability or get into a fight with a teenage girl or brag about his penis size on TV. Norms, it turns out, are fragile, ephemeral things, dependent entirely on the good faith of people who know to behave like citizens of a democracy, not thugs grappling for power in a junta. John Ralston Saul, speaking of the Nazis, wrote of “the profound panic of a world somehow abandoned to a logic which had cut the imaginations of the perpetrators free from any sense of what a man ought to do versus what he ought not to do.”
None of this political servility is due to any personal loyalty, of which Donald Trump is congenitally incapable and cannot himself command. The only thing Trump’s ever honestly earned is a reputation for thin-skinned vindictiveness, and he will, at his churlish whim, sic his rabid fans on any politician who fails to humor his delusions or thwarts his toddlerish will. He’s like the creepy kid in that Twilight Zone episode who keeps a whole town in a state of petrified compliance ’cause he’ll turn you into a giant Jack-in-the-Box if you fail to sufficiently praise or thank him, your head bobbing on a spring. And he’s useful; he got them the tax cuts and deregulation they owe their campaign donors and regressive Supreme Court justices for their evangelical base.
I have little doubt that Trump is despised by all but the most brainwashed dingbats in Washington on both sides of the aisle, and that these calculating pols, who think in two-, four-, and six-year terms, are patiently waiting for him to exhaust his legal options and process his rudimentary emotions until his usefulness (and immunity) ends and they can gravely cluck over, and privately toast, his destruction. But in the meantime they’re hedging their bets; no one’s willing to risk being branded a traitor by the infraright.
“What you have to understand about these guys,” a friend who worked on Capitol Hill once explained to me, “is they’re not afraid of losing their next election; they are terrified of losing their next election. Their whole identities are so wrapped up in their office that if they lose it, they will cease to exist. It is an existential threat to them.” They’re afraid not of the oafish Trump himself but of the base he commands, those fanatics who believe he’s a hero chosen by God, to whom his every clumsy, childish lie is gospel, a vocal and monomaniacal voting bloc who can torpedo any Republican’s reelection. Plus a lot of them carry guns and like to make death threats.
I know that not all Republicans, or all Trump supporters, are like this. After the election, a relative in Texas wrote me: “Congratulations on your November 3rd win. He is now everyone’s President and has our allegiance… I think it is safe to say we all want peace and prosperity, to work together and stop the spread of hate.” Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election is as much an insult to these decent citizens as to those of us who voted for the other guy — to anyone who respects basic civics-class principles or playground fairness. But, unlike the Democrats, who’ve ignored and disowned their progressive wing for decades, Republicans have so avidly pandered to the bigots at their fringe that they now control the party.
The real villains in any failing democracy are never the politicians, who are ultimately cringing, fearful creatures, easily bribed or bullied, but the electorate. I’m afraid that Andy Harris may actually represent his constituents’ wishes: He and Trump’s other accomplices in the party are cynically repeating the president-unelect’s lies because their voters want to hear them, and passively acquiescing to his attempted coup because they back it. I honestly don’t know whether Trump’s base genuinely believes his transparent fabrications — that the Democrats stole the election in a massive national fraud executed with a coordination and flawlessness the Democrats have never successfully applied to any other endeavor in history — or if they just pretend to because it’s to their side’s advantage, the way sports fans all agree a disputed play was their team’s point. Or maybe there’s no longer any difference for them between what they believe and what they want.
Donald Trump has petulantly wrecked as much of its citizens’ faith in the apparatus of democracy as he could on his way out, smearing his name in feces across the pediment of American history.
As of this writing, it looks like Trump’s amateurish attempt to overturn the election has failed. Trump likes to hang out with dictators and thinks they’re cool, but he’s always been a wannabe; luckily for us, he’s too stupid and weak to become one. But it was, as Wellington admitted of Waterloo, “A damned close-run thing.” It all came down to a handful of unelected officials who aren’t hostage to the mob placing their professional reputations and personal integrity above partisan politics: Trump’s own lawyers, who withdrew from his spurious cases; Trump-appointed judges, who tossed them out of court; and Republican election board officials who ratified the will of the voters, despite pressure from the president and threats from his supporters. Our elected representatives may be shameless sociopaths and opportunists, but these ordinary men and women were unwilling to disgrace themselves in front of their colleagues, friends, and families to humor the delusions of a would-be autocrat.
But we shouldn’t forget, or forgive, Andy Harris and Trump’s other craven accessories who unhesitatingly betrayed their country and their constitution. Their names should be remembered, and reviled. And we also shouldn’t forget that they acted out of fear of their constituents — our relatives, neighbors, and co-workers, who were eager to disenfranchise their fellow citizens (especially Black ones) and trash the last semblance of an ostensible republic for the sake of a one-time win. Whether he was deluded or stalling, bluffing or just deflating the ball ’cause he was mad that he lost, Donald Trump has petulantly wrecked as much of its citizens’ faith in the apparatus of democracy as he could on his way out, smearing his name in feces across the pediment of American history; that damage won’t be easy to fix, nor the stain easily expunged.
Hopefully, Trump was just a fluke, a grotesque aberration; but someday a more competent, charismatic fascist may come along, and we now know how undefended our system is against such men. We know that our elected officials will do nothing to stop him so long as they think he’s their fascist, and that a significant number of our fellow citizens — a lot of the same ones who like to cosplay minutemen and fantasize about standing up to “tyranny” — will welcome his rule. The founders tried to proof their system against tyrants, but there’s only so much any system can do; ultimately democracy, like civilization, is a “norm,” a fragile consensus, dependent on good faith, fair play, and ordinary people choosing, every day, to do the right thing.