The Final Act

T he president of the United States, Donald Trump, is rage-tweeting as I write. He has moved from a conspiracy theory about the poll watchers and mail trucks of fake ballots to a conspiracy theory about software that was programmed to inflict an electoral loss on Donald Trump. Soon, it will just be crazed statistical tautologies and a demand not to certify the results in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

This August I wrote that for many progressives, “squaring up and beating Trump in an election” would not be enough. They desired instead to “topple” Trump in a final, extraordinary confrontation.

And so it is. A section of Trump’s opponents moved on remarkably quickly from celebrating Joe Biden’s win to worrying about an open coup against democracy. They cite the tweets. But of course, it was tweets that drove several panics this year, about the subornation of the Post Office to Trump’s electoral ambitions, about the imminent silencing of health experts and the release of a fake vaccine. In the end they were just tweets. Why won’t people accept that a man they’ve deemed an inveterate and compulsive liar is bullshitting them?

Many of these commentators have experienced the Trump era as a kind of drama. They think their own hysterical tweets amount to a “resistance” effort. In many ways they were projecting their anti-democratic fantasies onto Trump. When the Left said that “democracy was on the line” in the election, the message was quite clear that if the legal election did not go for Biden that large portions of the Left would not just further defect from the constitutional order but that they would immediately dispense with democratic norms altogether. This wasn’t some subliminal message that has to be conjured by a clever-dick conservative scribbler. Corporations and shop owners heard it loud and clear and boarded their storefronts in major American cities as a hedge against riots led by college graduates.

To justify the years of conspiratorial thinking and resistance, they need a final act in which Trump casts off all disguise and threatens the entire American system as such. Only then can they defeat him totally, discredit forever his supporters, and lay claim to that American system as entirely their own. The hope would be to build a new consensus that shuts out most of their domestic political rivals forever. What many progressives secretly fear about the Biden victory is that normal electoral defeat is just as legitimizing for Donald Trump and his voters as victory would be. If Donald Trump and his supporters peacefully transfer power, it means progressives may one day have to give it back to the deplorables again.

Experts in extremism have been worrying aloud since summer about whether Trump supporters would “accept” the results of the election. We are told over and over that the things Trump says are harmful. If you want to be fearful, you can look to a poll from YouGov that informs us that 86 percent of Trump voters believe Biden did not win the election legitimately. If you want reassurance, look to a Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows that 79 percent of Americans believe Biden won the election and that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the loser should concede. The obvious contradiction demonstrates that the terms and numbers are too unsubtle to capture American attitudes.

And why should these claimed beliefs of Trump supporters trouble us? A similar YouGov poll in 2018 found that 66 percent of Democrats believed that Russia had altered the vote tallies in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (This is not true, and such a story was promoted only by people on the fringe.) That finding troubled no one. Extremism experts did not appear to talk about how loose talk of Russian conspiracies was undermining our democracy. Nobody did soul-searching about their loose fascism accusations after Donald Trump’s election when a Bernie Sanders fan tried to shoot congressional Republicans. Hillary Clinton’s statements that Donald Trump is an “illegitimate president” are hand-waved away. Why?

Because our expert class operates on the unstated premise that Republican voters are suggestible slack-jawed psychopathic killers waiting to be activated by careless presidential statements. The congressional baseball shooter is an exception to Democratic peacefulness. Republican-associated violence is held to be emblematic. That’s why everyone jumped to blame Sarah Palin for the shooting of Gabby Giffords, but nobody in the mainstream blamed the SPLC for the shooting at the Family Research Council.

This style of politics makes Republicans and conservatives into the kind of caricature that Democrats accuse Republicans of holding against foreign Muslims. In this view, Republicans are blindly religious, authoritarian, poorly educated, and violent. Strict political monitoring and intervention against their activity is therefore justified.

The truth about Trump is that his tweets and weak election lawsuits aren’t a coup aimed at overturning the American order; they are a ploy to pay down campaign debts and build interest in his future endeavors in media. Progressives may view conservatives as his mark. When he leaves the office of presidency, progressives will be glad to see him go, but they will miss the fantasy of treating his supporters as collaborators and fifth columnists.