One of the most troubling consequences of Donald Trump’s time as president — and the last two years of his steady diet of sour grapes over his 2020 defeat — is the distrust he has sown toward America’s elections.
Trump began this assault on democracy years before he became a serious contender for the White House. He promoted the “birther” conspiracy, which falsely claimed Barack Obama was not born in the United States and thus should have been barred from the nation’s highest office.
That conspiracy theory attracted only a fringe group of right-wing zealots. The false allegation, though, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump — a lie he and his allies have repeated over and over — has gone mainstream, at least within the Republican Party. A recent poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly 6 in 10 Republicans continue to believe that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.
They cling to that belief despite members of Trump’s inner circle, including his own daughter and his attorney general, acknowledging he had lost fair and square. They cling to it despite dozens of court rulings that rejected every legal challenge the Trump camp filed to contest the results. They cling to it despite the credible testimony of former Trump aides that Trump himself privately admitted he had lost, even while he tried to overturn the results, including encouraging an attempted insurrection before Biden could be certified the winner.
This calculated, years-long scheme to foster distrust in election results is now threatening to spill over into next week’s midterm elections. Only about half of Americans, according to the same AP-NORC poll, have high confidence that the votes will be counted accurately.
The political parties, particularly the Republicans, are mobilizing a brigade of “poll watchers” to be on the lookout for fraud on Election Day, which rarely if ever occurs with in-person voting. The Republicans have fielded scores of candidates who peddle Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election, including some who would oversee future elections if they are victorious on Tuesday. Some election officials and workers have been harassed so badly that they have resigned their positions or decided not to run for reelection.
This could be one of the more divisive midterm elections in our nation’s history, with either side poised in advance to claim the other cheated and to launch protracted legal fights to overturn the results of any contest that is close.
The ramifications of such intense voter skepticism are frightening. It can spill over into violence, as evidenced by the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol or the savage attack last week on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. It can make it nearly impossible for either party to govern when it’s in power.
American democracy is rooted in the presumption that election results are to be respected, even when they go counter to the personal preference of a significant share of the governed. Cast that nearly 2½-century presumption aside, and the U.S. risks anarchy, in which government authority is not recognized and citizens feel empowered to act as they please.
The goal of Trump and his diehard followers is to produce what Abraham Lincoln would have called a house divided. They’ve been successful at it. Such a split, however, will destroy a nation if it goes deep enough.
