It was probably not a Good Thing that the United States elected Donald Trump president in 2016. We here at LoS have maintained that he is not an appropriate head of state for a number of reasons, the primary one being a violation of the sense of decorum proper to the office: in peace time (what’s that?) POTUS is supposed to be a largely ceremonial position, and it’s hard to project dignity when you are famous for adorning the casinos you own with your name in big neon lights.
But it’s also true to say that in the long run this is not a terribly important problem. Warren Harding (elected 100 years ago this year) wasn’t terribly dignified either and is widely rumored to have passed away in an especially undignified manner. The Republic survived.
The Republic could have easily survived a Trump presidency, however distasteful it might have been, but at this point might not. The danger to the Republic has come not from Trump but from his most virulent detractors, who are often referred to as the “swamp”, which is not a bad shorthand for the courtier class of the nation’s capital that include all the highly credentialed operatives and – importantly – the media that reports on them.
From the beginning of the Trump presidency the courtiers have been visibly apoplectic, and the media reporting in and from Washington has crossed every imaginable boundary. At one recent “press conference”, a reporter actually asked the president if he was going to apologize to the American people for all of his lies.
This signals the total absence of decorum, not by Trump but by the media.
Trump has been raising all kinds of issues about fraud in the 2020 election and has a team of lawyers litigating cases in “swing states” like Michigan and Pennsylvania. From the media coverage you would think that no one has ever made or litigated election fraud claims before Trump. Talk about lies. Or maybe staggering ignorance. In any event, in most places such as New York State there is an “Election Law” and similar claims are litigated almost every year. Indeed there are lawyers who are known practitioners of election law. It’s like a little niche.
The simple and well known fact of the matter is that fraudulent voting and other irregularities are a regular feature of elections, they are litigated often, and while most of the time they do not change the initial outcome, nevertheless on rare occasions they do.
So what is bizarre about Trump’s fraud claims is not that he is making them but how those claims are treated by the courtiers, which is to uniformly and repetitiously denounce the very idea as “baseless” and repeatedly not to say constantly assert that there is “no evidence” of fraudulent voting.
But again, there is almost always some fraudulent voting.
The idea that repetitive mantras can make something so when it isn’t is prevalent among the courtiers. More specifically, a claim of “no evidence” where there obviously is evidence is something we have seen often from a certain type of…..prosecutor. Prosecutors and courtiers share a common quality: they tend to be spoiled.
We’ve devoted some thought recently to this term, “spoiled”. It implies a defect that cannot be fixed. In the case of courtiers and prosecutors it amounts to a defect of reasoning. And we are not talking about poor reasoning skills. This is more like a refusal to reason because it gets in the way of what you want.
Like a spoiled child.
Spoiled children are a problem for their parents. Spoiled adults with power are tyrants. Tyrants are a problem for the polity, and a very serious one at that. At some point, checks and balances collapse and the all bets are off.
There are plenty of checks and balances against a rogue president. The question now is if there are sufficient checks and balances against the courtiers. And if there are not, what is the remedy for a tyrannical courtier class?
We are not anxious to witness the answer to that question. Not this morning, anyway.