By Monday, Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election had been confirmed by every major media outlet, including Fox News, been welcomed by every leader of the G7 along with dozens of other foreign officials, and been celebrated in the streets of every major American city. As it turns out, all those plywood panels nailed up over windows were only there to shield sensitive eyes from just too much dancing.
When it comes to Republicans, the chorus of accolades falls away to more of a barbershop quartet … minus one. Former president George W. Bush spoke up to express his acceptance of Biden’s victory and offer the traditional best wishes for the coming term. Sen. Mitt Romney has sent along his best wishes, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski—keen to make everyone forget how she flip-flop-flipped on Amy Coney Barrett—decided to acknowledge reality. And that is about it.
But if the reaction of the Republicans over the weekend might be best described as crickets, it now seems that many of them have rediscovered their voices. And they’re using them to take up the cause of destroying democracy.
A long-held political truism is that Democrats fall in love with new leadership, while Republicans simply fall in line. The native authoritarian streak within the GOP expressed itself this week as Mitch McConnell gave the all clear for Republicans in Congress to join Donald Trump in assailing the outcome of the election with precisely zero evidence.
As The New York Times reports, McConnell didn’t just say that Trump was “100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” he applauded Trump’s refusal to accept the results of voting, while claiming that Democrats “just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”
For the record, in 2016 Hillary Clinton’s campaign informed Donald Trump that, should Trump win, they would call within 15 minutes of AP’s declaration. But in the end it didn’t go that way—because Clinton called just seconds after the announced decision to give her concession, congratulate Trump, and offer to help in any way she could.
There is a huge difference between being unhappy about the outcome of an election, and accepting that outcome. With McConnell’s blessing, Republicans are coming down strongly on the side of supporting Trump, even as it requires rejecting democracy.
Among the Republicans most eagerly rushing toward a reverse coup is Lindsey Graham. Freshly blessed with evidence that he can get away with anything, Graham has decided to make it clear to Trump that his tongue has not been lured by any other boots. “We win because of our ideas,” said Graham on Fox News. “We lose because they cheat us.”
Meanwhile, in Georgia, the dynamic is even more astounding. Facing a runoff election for the two seats that will determine control of the Senate, it might seem that David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler would find it beneficial to support the Republican governor and Republican secretary of state in charge of the elections there. Instead, they issued a joint missive attacking the state’s handing of the election, calling it an “embarrassment,” filled with “problems,” and complaining of “too many failures in Georgia elections this year.”
Perdue and Loeffler aren’t just placing their support of Donald Trump ahead of their loyalty to Republican leadership in their own state, they are betting that Georgia’s Republican voters will do the same. They’re betting that those voters will agree with them in attacking their own state, for the benefit of Trump. And what’s the will of the people, compared to the will of Trump?
This intra-party mudslinging might seem like the sort of action that would generate a massive schism within the GOP. If it was happening on the Democratic side, it would certainly generate a raft of “Dems in disarray” stories to be blissfully amplified by every media outlet. But Georgia’s once and would-be-again senators aren’t wrong; because support for Trump is all that’s left of the Republican Party. To the party, Georgia governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger committed the grievous sin of running a fair election.
Republican politicians and right-wing media sources seized on the news that some number of Georgia ballots remained to be scanned. Not only was this played up as “Trump ballots being discarded” in a process where no Republicans were watching. In fact, the ballots—all 342 of them—were from heavily Democratic Fulton County, and they were scanned in not just with a Republican observer watching, but under the supervision of a monitor sent by Raffensperger. None of that stopped either Georgia’s Republican Senate candidates, or Donald Trump’s campaign, from claiming the incident is “proof” of fraud.
For the moment, none of the hastily constructed legal challenges offered by Trump’s campaign have gone anywhere, even when boosted by a Trump-friendly presence on the Supreme Court. But there’s no reason to believe that Trump’s team is about to let any of their claims drop soon … or ever.