26 United States The EconomistNovember 28th 2020
A
ppalling as it has been to witness an American president try
to steal an election, Donald Trump’s efforts have amounted to
less than the best-informed prognosticators feared. Back in June a
bipartisan group of over 100 political operatives and scholars,
gathered by the Election Integrity Project, war-gamed the after-
math of four scenarios: an unclear result, a narrow win for Joe Bi-
den, a clear victory for Mr Trump and the same for Mr Biden. Only
in the last simulation was America spared authoritarianism by Mr
Trump, a constitutional crisis and street battles.
Mr Biden’s actual winning margin was at the outer edge of a
“clear victory”. And the president’s response to it has been even
wilder than the war-gamers envisaged. (They did not imagine, in
such an event, that he would try to coerce Republican state legisla-
tors to overthrow the results.) Yet none of the other features of the
Trump coups they envisioned has materialised. Attorney-General
Bill Barr has gone to ground. High-powered conservative lawyers
have taken a pass on the president’s bogus fraud claims.
Hence the ridiculous Rudy Giuliani, dripping sweat and hair
dye and ranting about George Soros and Hugo Chávez, has been the
spear-point of Mr Trump’s attempted heist. It has been laughable, a
shambles. It has also illustrated—yet again—Mr Trump’s iron grip
on his party, to the extent that most commentators seem to think
the Republican nomination for the 2024 election is already his for
the taking. They could be right. But Lexington is sceptical.
That is not to deny the president’s success in fast-tracking the
myth of his stolen re-election to the pantheon of right-wing griev-
ances. The same livid Trump superfans who have been rallying all
year against mask-wearing and the scourge of devil-worshipping
Democratic paedophiles have gathered, outside state legislatures
from Arizona to Pennsylvania, to demand that state lawmakers
“stop the steal”. Right-wing conspiracy theorists have been spit-
ting out explanations—involving shadowy Biden-Harris vans
crammed with ballots in Nevada, vanishing sharpie signatures in
Arizona and so forth—for how the steal took place. A large majority
of Republican voters say Mr Biden’s victory was illegitimate.
A bigger majority of Republican politicians are afraid to dis-
abuse them. Three weeks after Mr Biden’s victory, only a few Re-
publican senators had dared acknowledge it. The damage this hasdonetotheirparty,andAmerican democracy, could be profound.
The next Republican loser to cry fraud will be preaching to the con-
verted. Still, the assumption that Mr Trump will continue to pre-
side over the mess he has made of the right is premature.
There is a reason why Grover Cleveland, in 1892, is the only one-
term president to have been given another crack of the whip by his
party. Voters want winners. And it is not obvious why Mr Trump—a
politician whose pitch is based on his claimed inability to lose—
should be a second exception to that rule. Once the smoke of the
2020 battle has cleared, many of his supporters may see him as he
is: a loser whose deranged loss-denialism encapsulates why he ran
behind down-ballot Republicans all across the country. There are
even signs that one or two of his cheerleaders are already chewing
on that pill. “You announce massive bombshells, then you better
have some bombshells...,” said Rush Limbaugh, puzzling over Mr
Giuliani’s performance.
The argument for Mr Trump bucking history rests on an as-
sumption that he will shift his bully-pulpit to the disaggregated
conservative media. With Twitter growing less tolerant of his dis-
information, his offspring and supporters are migrating to Parler,
which takes a laxer view of it. By becoming a staple on the ultra-
Trumpist oan or Newsmax channels—which Mr Trump recom-
mended his followers switch to after Fox News called the election
for Mr Biden—he could access 50m conservative homes. That
would constitute a powerful foghorn. But Mr Trump’s ability to
dictate terms to the Republican Party does not rest on his ability to
entertain its voters. It relates to his power to terrorise Republican
lawmakers with a possible primary challenge. And it is not clear
that, once out of day-to-day politics, he will be able to do that.
oanviewers are divorced from reality in more ways than one.
Where Fox’s heavyweight newsgathering and polling operations
help it to influence the political debate, the hard-right channels
are comparatively irrelevant. Almost no one watches Newsmax on
Capitol Hill. It is notable that the Tea Party movement, a Trump
progenitor, was inspired by an anti-government rant on cnbc. For
all his millions of listeners, Mr Limbaugh could not have had the
same mobilising effect; such rants are expected of him.
It is not hard to imagine Mr Trump, without the ballast of his of-
fice, drifting into a state of lucrative but ever-more irrelevant blo-
viation. He might not have to resort to singing “Baby Got Back” in a
bear costume to get an audience, as Sarah Palin recently did on Fox.
But his wilderness years could resemble those of John McCain’s
embarrassing running-mate more than most commentators imag-
ine. “There is only so long you can live outside the maelstrom of
the American news cycle and maintain relevance,” notes Jerry Tay-
lor, founder of the Niskanen Centre and an astute observer of the
right. Mr Trump’s campaign against the Murdoch channel is prob-
ably raising his chances of learning that lesson by the day. It has all
the makings of a showdown between machine-tooled corporate
competence and his own raging ineptitude.Dances with bears
It is possible to imagine other scenarios. If the Trump clan cap-
tures the Republican National Committee (a prize Donald Trump
junior is eyeing), Mr Trump would have a more than adequate plat-
form. Yet take this as a caution. The Trump-bruised commentariat
is exaggerating his prospects. When a poll this week suggested 53%
of Republicans want him to be their nominee in 2024, it was re-
ported as a testament to his strength. An alternative reading is that
almost half of Republicans already want to see the back of him. 7Lexington The end of the embarrassment
The assumption that Republicans will remain in thrall to Donald Trump could be misplaced