South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham drew some derisive laughter for his recent remarks arguing that Mr. Trump should be free of any criminal inquiry into his attempts to steal the 2020 election, and that instead we should let the next ballot totals decide Trump’s fate. Per Mr. Graham:
The American people can decide whether they want [Trump] to be president or not. This should be decided at the ballot box, not a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail.
. . . And this is setting a bad precedent. And what I fear, is that you’re changing the way the game is played in America. And there’s no going back. We’re in for a very hard time if this becomes the norm.
A good deal of the commentariat erupted that Sen. Graham had this exactly backwards. As Steve Benen explained, “the United States tried to decide the former president’s fate at the ballot box, and Trump decided not to care. This isn’t some obscure, tangential point; it’s the foundation of the entire scandal.”
This point is obviously correct. But I want to write about two more important reasons why Sen. Graham’s comments are so wrong.
First, in a twisted way, Sen. Graham’s statement is right. Mr. Trump’s political fate should be decided at the ballot box. That is how a mature democracy should work. Up until this point, at least in the modern era, it is inconceivable that a sitting president could remain a viable candidate for re-election if, as with Mr. Trump, he or she openly had attempted to subvert an election, including through repeated lies, intimidation, violence and fraudulent submissions to state legislatures and courts . . . plus hiding retention of classified documents. How could that not end a politician’s career? But the problem today is less Mr. Trump or his threat of future fraud and/or violence. No, the true threat we face today is that Republican voters no longer consider this disqualifying behavior. Mr. Trump’s favorability among Republicans consistently hovers around 70%. A recent NYT poll found that only 17% of Republican voters believe that Trump committed a “serious crime,” and 22% of that small group would still vote for Trump anyway. (Notably, Senator Graham is a member of that 22% group,)
At this point, alarm over Mr. Trump seems to be beside the point. I mean, who was the real threat to our nation: Jefferson Davis, or the multitudes of Confederate voters who forced this country to ruin?
Second, and as Jonathan Chait aptly points out, not enough attention is paid to the sheer size of Trump’s electoral loss. The 2020 election was not, by way of example, a close election won by the loser of the popular vote and decided by one state (much less by an official 537 vote difference in that state, as with Bush v. Gore). No. Trump lost the popular vote by over 7 million votes and over 4 percentage points, and he lost the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232. This was not a close election. Thus, the claims by Mr. Trump and Republican voters are not just fraudulent, but outlandish. Mr. Chait explains why this makes the Republicans’ position so dangerous:
To not prosecute Trump’s coup attempt would effectively legalize the tactics he employed. It would consecrate a new system in which an election result, even a clear one with multiple states providing a margin of error, would merely be the start of a negotiation. The outcome of the process would be determined not just by the votes but also by which party controls the legislative and judicial channels that will steer it and has the will to power to assert the most favorable claims.
The start of negotiations . . . . So, the Republicans’ vision of future presidential elections would resemble the shambolic and corrupt Debt Ceiling crises. And the way we shut down our government periodically, we also can have periods with no plainly elected president (despite plain election results) or even unelected presidents.
The bottom line is that our country faces a clear and present danger: Donald Trump. the Republican voter.