Irony for All
In June 2016 I quit the Republican Party. Here’s part of what I wrote then:
As far as I can tell, Donald Trump believes in nothing except Donald Trump. According to him, he has the world’s greatest memory, one of the world’s best brains, a more than adequate penis, and an easy answer for every one of the nation’s problems. What he obviously does not have is humility.
Donald Trump is now the titular head of the Republican Party. Therefore I cannot be a Republican. I hope to someday return to the fold, but not until the party has repaired this disaster.
The election is over now, and Joe Biden will be our next president. However, as I wrote a month ago, Donald Trump is so much a captive of his ego that he cannot bring himself to concede. Instead, the president claims over and over that the election was stolen.
I’m much more concerned with the Republican Party than Mr. Trump. One way or another, he will fade into insignificance. As he goes, though, his ego tantrum may greatly weaken the immediate GOP future. The irony of it must delight Democrats.
Mr. Trump claims, with no evidence, that the election was stolen by fraud. His own Attorney General denies this, but that doesn’t matter. It’s safe to say that millions of people—millions of would-be Republican voters—will believe Trump. “It’s all rigged, anyway,” they think. When you believe that, why bother to vote? As a result, two senatorial run-off elections in Georgia may well go to the Democrats. The Georgia senatorial races were extremely close, so it would only take a few thousand discouraged Republican voters to give the run-off elections to the Democrats. If discouraged Republicans stay home, the Dems win. And if the Democrats win those races, they will organize the Senate, giving them much greater opportunities to enact “progressive” policies.
The irony gets richer. Despite polls that suggested a strong “blue wave” in which the Democrats would take the White House, control the Senate, and increase their control of the House, the 2020 election was actually very good for Republicans. The GOP gained seats in the House, they held their slim lead in the Senate (pending Georgia’s two seats), and they did very well in many state legislatures. How could they lose the presidency and still do so well down ballot? The answer is obvious. Some voters—not a huge percentage, but a few million voters nationwide—split their tickets. They voted for Republican candidates at the state level and for Congress, but they voted against Mr. Trump. On the whole, the president did significantly worse than his party.
Nevertheless, Republican leaders continue to kowtow to Trump. They need to recognize the damage his ego is doing to their party. They need to say out loud: You lost the election fair and square, Mr. President.
Republican leaders need to defend the integrity of our system of elections. (Yet another irony: the Georgia Secretary of State is a Republican. And Trump accuses him of not stopping massive fraud.) If they don’t restore faith in our elections, they deserve the electoral defeats that will follow.
Democrats don’t complain about electoral fraud. Their excuse (which many believed before the election) was “voter suppression.” We could debate at length how much voter suppression there really is. But notice that when people believe someone is trying to keep them from voting, many of them will try harder to vote. Worries about voter suppression motivate people to vote. But worries about electoral “fraud” discourage people from voting.
I would like to rejoin the Republican Party. But its leaders need to wake up and smell the irony.
