CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump, Elections and Democracy: How We Can Move Beyond Electoral Fetishism

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed public address on July 16 – an attempt to pressure Congress to approve his “Save America” election legislation – turned out to be a pitiful bust.  Even Sean Hannity seemed embarrassed by a speech that claimed large‑scale “election vulnerabilities,” including hundreds of thousands of alleged non‑citizen votes and Chinese hacking of voter files but offered zero evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Evidence or no evidence, Trump can’t stop alleging that the vote for Biden was rigged – a compulsive accusation that anti-Trumpers attribute to his inability to accept defeat, his delusional tendencies, and his intention to challenge the results of the upcoming federal midterm elections.  The president’s bad motives and psychological mischigas are undeniable.  Even so, his election denialism has significant causes that most Democrats avoid mentioning, since to do so could expose their own role in provoking the madness of King Donald.

Where the election of 2020 is concerned, the president is quite crazed – but what drove him around the bend?  Most critics seem determined to forget that the original trauma in this case – the first serious allegations of a rigged election casting doubt on the authenticity of the voting process – were the charges made by Democratic leaders and pursued by various “deep state” agencies under Joe Biden that Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians to defeat Hilary Clinton in 2016.

How could a vulgar upstart and political amateur like Trump defeat a seasoned professional like Hilary?  It must have been a Russian plot!  Few Democrats these days have much to say about “Russiagate.”  They seem to have difficulty remembering that during the 2016 campaign the DNC hired a former British spy to compile evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy (the “Steele Dossier”) while encouraging F.B.I. director James Comey to begin a major investigation of his own.  The Steele dossier turned out to be weakly sourced and unreliable.  After the election Democratic-controlled congressional committees held extensive hearings on the matter, also without significant results.  And after two years more of further investigation, Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a report stating that Russian agencies had indeed attempted to interfere with the election, but that evidence of a conspiracy implicating the Trump campaign was lacking.

All that work to “explain” Trump’s election – and with such disappointing results!  Not only was the conspiracy unproved, but there was no evidence at all that Russian interference had had a measurable impact on the 2016 election.  In that year six key industrial states that had voted for Obama four years earlier went for Trump by substantial majorities – not because of Russian trolls or hacked Clinton emails, but because so many working people felt that the Democrats had abandoned them.  Even so, the losers could not resist charging, in effect, that the election had been “rigged” by Trump and the Russians.

It seems clear, in retrospect, that the Russiagate allegations were hardly more substantial than Trump’s subsequent insistence that the election of 2020 had been stolen.  But today’s Democratic leaders take no responsibility for attempting to delegitimize a winning presidential candidate by casting doubt on the validity of the electoral process.  Nor, even if “progressives,” will they admit that any of the criminal charges brought against........

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