Donald Trump’s inability to believe that he lost, and lost big, is a big problem for his fellow Republicans. But, as ever, it’s a bigger problem for the United States.
Trump’s refusal to engage with a reality he doesn’t like—the reality that he’s a loser—has pushed Republicans to discredit their party and seriously damage U.S. democracy. And he’s still lashing out at any Republican who doesn’t 100% back his assault on the election results, meaning that his die-hard supporters are tarnished for years to come while the people who half-heartedly refused to go along with him are dragged down now.
Trump is truly in denial, some people around him told The Washington Post. “He incontrovertibly thinks he won—and he thinks he won big—and the people around him don’t disabuse him of that because they don’t want to get crosswise, and because they told him he was going to win, so they can’t have it both ways,” someone identified as “one of Trump’s closest advisers” said. “It’s not about his inability to move on. It’s about his inability to even diagnose what happened. He won’t yet conduct the autopsy, if you will.”
“Honestly, I think that he cannot handle being the sitting Republican president that lost Georgia,” according to “a GOP official in frequent touch with the White House,” who also pointed out the total lack of strategy or consideration involved in Trump’s attacks on the Georgia election results, saying “Let’s say you get Raffensperger to commit fraud and get you the 11,000 votes—what does that even get you?” After all, “You still need three other states. I don’t understand what the ‘win’ is here. There’s no strategy.”
But Trump has the best and brightest minds of the Republican Party on board with this lack of strategy. Mostly.
Former Supreme Court clerk Josh Hawley plans to object to counting the electors from Pennsylvania when Congress counts the electors on Wednesday. Fellow former Supreme Court clerk Ted Cruz isn’t saying what state or states he plans to object to. He’s just going to object. To something. Thereby cementing his loyalty to the guy who called his wife ugly and said his father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And none of them are doing it because they join Trump in believing the election was stolen, as one Washington Post source who actually went on the record under his own name pointed out.
“I think it is revealing that there is not a single senator who is arguing that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Josh Holmes, “an outside adviser to McConnell,” said. “The divide in the party is whether it’s appropriate to pull the pin on an electoral college grenade, hoping that there are enough responsible people standing around who can shove it back in before they detonate American democracy.”
It’s performative, and the performance is for Trump and—crucially—for his base, who Trump has scammed into believing his lies about the stolen election, and who people like Hawley and Cruz want to vote for them in 2024. This assault on the will of the voters is basically the kickoff of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Other Republicans are on board out of fear now, as Trump lashes out at anyone who doesn’t lick his boots enthusiastically enough. Sen. Tom Cotton, another 2024 hopeful, declined to go along with the effort to overturn the election in Congress on Wednesday, and Trump quickly threatened him by tweet, saying “Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!”
Trump is fomenting violence in the streets of Washington, D.C., for Wednesday while whipping up an assault on election results in Congress the same day. This is an unspeakably awful moment in the history of a nation that has had its full share of unspeakably awful moments. The only way to salvage anything positive out of it is to discredit not just Trump but the Republicans who have so cravenly supported him—many of them in the hope that not only will it be advantageous to them in the 2024 primary but that these maneuvers will be a practice run for successfully overturning an election in the future—and the violent white supremacists who are his literal foot soldiers.