Adam Boulton Diary – Trump the sore loser is trying to steal the election
The gloom hanging over Washington DC lifted minutes after America’s mainstream news organisations “called” the Election for Joe Biden. A role they have performed since Queen Victoria’s times. Trump’s unprecedented refusal to concede meant that painstaking vote-counting in many states had dragged on for so long after the polls closed on Tuesday night that it was now an unusually sunny Saturday afternoon. Neither the weather nor the weekend explained why tourist hotspots around the White House, which had been deserted until now, started to throng with cheering, dancing and singing local people of all ages and races.
There were spontaneous street parties in other Democratic voting metropolises across the US, including in San Francisco, New York City and Pennsylvania. The celebrations were sweetest for DC because the residents of the nation’s capital were cheering deliverance from four years of occupation by an alien ogre. The shops and restaurants which had been boarded up for fear of unrest should the President win a second term, immediately started to open for business. Unlike the MAGA capped Trump supporters outside some counting stations, no one was wearing a flak-jacket or carrying an assault rifle.
I had not seen such a throng since the Women’s March in January 2017, which far outnumbered Donald Trump’s poorly attended Inauguration the previous day. Women were in the majority again in the crowds last weekend and it was striking how many girls turned out to assert their reproductive rights. The indecent haste with which Trump levered Amy Coney Barrett onto the US Supreme Court was not a vote winner with this demographic cohort.
Was this all a case of premature jubilation? By this weekend the President had not spoken in public for a full week, preferring instead to tweet from behind the barricades he has had put up around the White House that he was the true winner of the Election if only “LEGAL” votes are counted. His definition of legality seems to be votes that back him or the Republican party.
His stance is contradictory and without any genuine foundation. At one point he and his supporters were demanding “stop the count” in states including Pennsylvania where they were in danger of falling behind and “count the votes” in those such as Arizona where they hoped to catch up. Trump is boasting that Republicans did well on his coat tails in the races for the Senate, House and State governments, without noting that they did so courtesy of some of the very same ballot papers which he now wants thrown out.
Whether you consider the US to be a “nation under law”, or a nation of shyster lawyers, there is an outside chance, as I write, that Donald Trump could bully his way back into another four-year term. This “coup d’etat”, in the words of one seasoned British diplomat, would require more connivance from the courts and Republican members of Congress than I suspect they would be prepared to give but it is just possible.
During the campaign Trump and his allies made no secret of their possible emergency strategy if the tide of votes turned against them. In recent times both Trump and George W Bush were elected in spite of their Democratic opponents, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, getting a significantly larger share of the popular vote across the nation. What matters is winning members of the Electoral College state by state in a system structured to give more weight to less populated, rural, “red states” over the likes of New York, California and Illinois. In effect tens of thousands of voters in a handful of states decide which way the Presidency swings. Republicans have long used control of the system to try and suppress the total number of voters who turn out (having learnt many of the tricks from the racist Dixie Democrats of the past). As Trump has admitted, the more people who voted the less good it was likely to be for him or his party. This was a bigger problem this year because many states expanded early voting and mail-in voting because of Covid. Unlike Republicans, Democratic inclined voters were repeatedly told by the Biden campaign to take the outbreak seriously. So, this year they were even more likely to opt for the opportunity to not vote in person, on Election Day.
Trump, who is now railing against legal votes which came in “late”, used his executive power over the summer to cut the funding to US Mail, thereby hampering its ability to accommodate the wave of mail-in ballots. But both the Post Office and the Election officials have proven remarkably resilient and competent this year, although handling large numbers of the alternative kind of ballots has taken some time, not least because laws were passed in some states to make sure the postal votes were counted last. No wonder Trump argued that only votes cast on the day should count.
So far all of the Trump campaign’s lawsuits have been tossed out – bar one technical, if menacing, complaint about admitting extra observers to counts in Pennsylvania. None of them raised questions about a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona where Biden is well ahead.
Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr threw precedent out when he ordered Federal Officials to investigate vote abuse allegations now, before States certify their results instead of afterwards, as is the norm. But his qualification that those allegations must be “substantial” perhaps indicated that he is covering his back with the President but does not expect his complaints to get anywhere.
Still, all Trump has to do to keep his hopes alive is to stop a few states from certifying results by the middle of December when the Electoral College meets. If the college can’t rubber stamp a President-Elect – the choice goes back to Congress on a state-by-state basis, which favours Republicans.
Last Saturday the crowds celebrating “Bye-Don” were joined by a small group of Trump supporters huddled around the Washington Monument. They were quickly surrounded and outnumbered by teasing and good-natured Biden fans. The Ever-Trumpers favourite slogan is now “Stop the Steal”. That cuts both ways. Who is really trying to steal the next Presidency from the rightful winner?