Trump’s post-election gamble

The writer, a Chevening scholar, studied International Journalism at the University of Sussex.

President Trump may have green-lighted the General Services Administration to begin the transition process, but he is still far from accepting the defeat in the polls in clear, unequivocal words.

Nudged by his colleagues from the GOP as well as his campaign advisers, this is the closest he could get to, which is his way of admitting that his days in the White House are numbered as the countdown to the 20th of January begins.

There is a clear method to Trump’s obduracy in not conceding the electoral outcome. In case he does what is a time-honored presidential tradition, it will bring the whole superstructure of conspiracies, half-truths, and lies tumbling down, something he has been at great pains to put together.

President Trump’s own political survival and that of Trumpism too is closely linked to the narrative of the elections having been “stolen through fraud”. Ever since his dramatic rise on the American political landscape a few years ago, he has caused events to happen in a sequence that has put him at the helm of the Republican Party. His grip on the GOP is so complete that there is hardly anything to distinguish between him and the Party.

The only party platform on which Republicans ran their electoral campaign was Trump and his message, which was a recognition of the centrality of the US president to American politics.

Even after the verdict is out and Joe Biden is set to be inaugurated into the office in less than a month, Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican Party is unquestioned and there are hardly any mainstream voices within the Party that might propose an introspection and chart a way forward different from the one identified by Trump. He remains Republicans’ best bet for an election bid in 2024.

The post-poll strategy employed by President Trump is a continuation of his consistent message of ‘voter fraud’ that he began voicing as early as April this year. According to the BBC’s Anti-disinformation Unit, the American president mentioned the rigging and voter fraud for as many as 70 times until Election Day on November 3.

Trump made his Twitter handle the foremost vehicle for the expression of his opinions, claims, and counter-claims. His liberal use of the social media platform to put across unverified claims and unsubstantiated allegations forced Twitter to add a caution for readers to accept the veracity of the posts at their own peril.

However, the incessant Twitter messages of the president served an important purpose: they appealed to and found traction with his support base. BBC research discovered that many influential right-wingers with huge online following amplified the claims by retweeting the posts.

Many Facebook accounts sprang into action under the rubric of “Stop the Steal” banner, echoing the central message of voter fraud and rigged elections. Social media was flooded with videos and claims of the alleged fraud, finding greater traction and outreach as they were shared thousands of times by voters and supporters.

The feeds on these groups were interpreted as the ‘truth’, since mainstream media was thought to be too strongly opposed to the Trump campaign to show anything of the like. People were encouraged to share their observations and instances of the ‘fraud’. The whole episode led to endowing a kind of legitimacy on the claims by reinforcing what sociologists call confirmation bias.

While lawsuits are a normal occurrence in the post-election scenario anywhere in the world, the Trump campaign created history by mounting a legal battle of a scope never seen before, with the aim to contest the poll outcome. As many as 59 legal cases were either dismissed or settled or withdrawn. One such ruling stated that “calling an election unfair does not make it so.”

The US Supreme Court’s definitive and decisive rejection of a lawsuit arguing that the election results in four other states may be overturned was a tipping point that would put an end to the incessant legal battles by Republicans.

The claims of election fraud may never be new. However, what is significant in President Trump’s charged post-election campaign of rigging is that he has invested his political capital into it. He rendered the drive into a systematic, coherent and organized effort with the GOP going along the flow in what has been described as a normalisation of the conversation revolving around the claims of rigging and fraud.

The 2020 election also witnessed the heat being turned on the local officials who had to endure intimidation and threats of violence and even deaths, leading them to request state security.

Taking a cue from Trump, many Republicans also tried to prevent the certification of the state results. They brought their influence to bear on Georgia’s secretary of state who belonged to the same party, to not certify the results. This concerted but vile campaign of intimidation led many senior elected state officials to publicly denounce these “unethical” efforts and vow to uphold the law at the cost of antagonizing the Party.

Brad Raffensperger, a Republican secretary of state for Georgia, responded to the illegal and unfair demand in these words. “I do not think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We are not going to push off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”

In the run-up to the inauguration when the outgoing presidents are generally placeholders for their successors, President Trump has been busy holding meetings with ‘likeminded’ advisers, still trying to put together ‘strategies’ to flip the result in his own favor.

What is, however, noteworthy is that those who have challenged his reading of events and did not subscribe to the supposed way forward found themselves cut out of the consultative process. Trump’s “devolution into disbelief”, as The Washington Post put it, that began on election night was recently strengthened when the duo of Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn held hours-long consultations with him in the White House.

Flynn was Trump’s first national security adviser, who was fired by him, and punished for perjury as part of the Mueller investigation. Powell was shown the door following her claims that “communist money” and the support of the late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, was used to gain electoral victory for Joe Biden, an outlandish and obnoxious charge even from President Trump’s standards.

Pardoned by Trump and granted a place back within his close circle, Flynn proposed the option of martial law to overturn the result. Together with Patrick Byrne, a former CEO, this group of close aides believes that Trump still has a shot at retaining the presidency.

Trump’s willingness to accept any kind of wild theory that affirms his version of things, despite writing on the wall pointing to the contrary, is explained by his political background. The fact that he came from the outside with no prior experience of public life has constrained his understanding of how the system works.

President Trump’s strategy is geared towards expanding his support base by keeping their hopes and aspirations inflated. However, in the process of doing so, he has undermined American democracy and exposed the integrity of the electoral system to serious suspicions and doubts.

The kind of polarisation witnessed in the run-up to and aftermath of the US elections is unprecedented and with serious implications for the future.

Email: amanatchpk@gmail.com

Twitter: @Amanat222