Trump's Dangerous Clown Show Keeps Rolling Along - Rob Horowitz

Trump's Dangerous Clown Show Keeps Rolling Along - Rob Horowitz

Apparently undeterred by a unanimous defeat in the US Supreme Court and the fact that the Electoral College officially voted for Joe Biden yesterday, predictably ratifying his comfortable 306-232 victory, President Trump continues to plow ahead with his dangerous, if often unintentionally comic effort, to hang on to his office by overturning the will of voters.

The president is able to do so with impunity because he continues to be enabled by Republican elected officials and his media allies.  These enablers not only either back up or attempt to sanitize the repetitious series of outright falsehoods that Mr. Trump communicates to his supporters in interviews with friendly television hosts and from his Twitter feed, such as “this was the most corrupt election in American history” and he really “won the election in a landslide”; they continue to support fundamentally undemocratic actions such as pressuring state legislators in states that he lost where Republicans have legislative majorities to replace the existing Biden slate of electors with a slate of Republican electors that will vote for him.

Two-thirds of Republicans in the House of Representatives, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, and 17 Republican State Attorney Generals even signed on to the outrageous suit by the state of Texas that sought to have the US Supreme Court throw out the more than 10 million votes cast in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and award the presidency to Donald Trump by judicial fiat. This is, of course, the case a conservative US Supreme Court that now contains 3 Trump appointees recently rejected by a 9 to 0 vote.

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In his brief to the Court, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro pointedly outlined the high stakes, “Texas's effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated."

One of the go-to-tactics of President Trump’s defenders when they are pressed in television interviews is to fall back on the fact that 70% or so of Trump supporters believe that there was widespread voter fraud and the election was rigged against the president.  They then assert his continued challenge of the results is a good thing because these doubts must be resolved. These enablers act as if these doubts emerged in some organic way as opposed to being systematically created by the president who has uttered falsehood after falsehood beginning months before the election precisely to create a false impression among his supporters that the election was going to be and then turned out to be conducted in a way that was unfair to him. 

If the enablers, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sean Hannity, Greg Gutfeld and even less robust defenders such as Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner, really wanted to remove the false impression created by the president they would simply join Attorney General William Barr in pointing out that Trump’s own Justice Department looked at the allegations and concluded that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

President Trump is employing the exact same playbook that he used when he led the birther movement, falsely and repeatedly charging that President Obama was not born in this country.  For this equally shameless and despicable effort, he generated similar results in the sub-set of the public likely to believe him.   Seventy-two percent of registered Republican voters doubted that President Obama was born in the country as recently as the summer of 2016, according to a NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll conducted then. This was despite the fact Trump never supplied any credible evidence and Obama produced his actual birth certificate, showing that he was born in Hawaii.

Trump is a classic conman, raising doubts through flooding media with false information that is boldly and repeatedly proclaimed and then claiming that the burden of proof is his opponents’ responsibility.  To be successful conmen need enablers. Unfortunately, Trump has these in abundance. 

It is long past time for Republican elected officials and the president’s media enablers to put country ahead of their fear of Donald Trump’s ability to hurt them either politically or with their audience respectively.  It is not too much to expect that they start telling their constituents or viewers the truth. 

That is the way to stand up for democratic governance, renew our nation’s founding values, and remove unfounded doubts about the fundamental fairness of our elections.  

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.