Wif an American president is inaugurated, it should indicate the pinnacle of American democracy and power. The extended ceremony is designed to convey the peaceful transfer of power and that the nation moves forward, no matter how bitter the election.
But when Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th U.S. president on Wednesday, the ceremony will look anything but. America arrives at an incredibly dangerous moment at the inauguration, just two weeks after a violent Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol and several Republican lawmakers voted against it to confirm the outcome of the election. For months, Donald Trump has refused to recognize Biden as the legal winner of the election – a belief shared by legions of his supporters. The ceremony will be heavily attended due to threats of violence. Trump does not care.
While Trump has accelerated this dangerous moment, it has been shaped by a deliberate Republican strategy to undermine faith in the election to make it harder to vote. The myth of voter fraud and repeated allusions to the stolen election has moved to the center of Republican ideology in recent decades from fringe theories. The refusal to accept the election, and the attack on the Capitol, are a consequence of the strategy.
“Donald Trump was definitely the spark and he had a lot of enablers and facilitators, but the ignition was all laid,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. ‘The strategy was to slowly, gradually, undermine Americans’ confidence in the security of elections, increase their belief in the existence of widespread voter fraud to enable them to accept what would otherwise be a truly illegal and anti-democratic would be considered. agenda to restrict access to voting. ”
Republicans have been using misleading and erroneous data for years to indicate that the election is in danger of fraud. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the former Secretary of State, used the threat of non-civilian votes to justify a law requiring people to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote (the law has since been passed by a federal court blocked). Conservative advocates have also used misleading data analyzes over the past few years to indicate that the voter list is filled with ineligible voters.
By 2016, when Trump claims that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, it fits neatly into the story the Republican Party began embracing.
Two years later, there were signs that the questioning of the election results had moved to Republican Orthodoxy. Paul Ryan, who served as House Speaker at the time, said it was “strange” and “strange” that Republicans fell behind in California racing because more ballots were counted after election night. When Trump began making similar claims last spring and summer that the ballots would lead to fraud and cost him the election, few Republicans objected.
The party began attacking ballots and sending in ballots, something Republicans had long relied on. When Trump claimed something was amiss while states were still counting votes after election day, Republicans, with a few exceptions, also supported him. The rhetoric began to have real consequences, as supporters began protesting at polling stations and harassing workers to count ballots during the November election.
And at the time of the Electoral College certification, the attempt to undermine confidence in the vote went so far as to allow two-thirds of the Republican House and a dozen senators to completely undermine the idea of the election results throw, to support. .
“It went from voter fraud in a particular election to ‘stolen election,'” said Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden who studied the allegations of voter fraud. “I do not think it would have been so successful if the fraud myth had not been planted long ago.”
Kobach, an ally of Trump who briefly led a White House panel to investigate voter fraud, said it was “entirely appropriate” for members of Congress to object to the certification of election college votes. He noted that since 2000, Democrats have repeatedly objected to the counting of college ballots for Republican presidential winners (in all cases, however, the effort is not supported by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has already conceded the race). ).
He rejects the idea that there is any connection between concerns about election fraud and the attack on the Capitol.
‘I’ve talked more than 100 times about voter fraud to small audiences and very, very large audiences. Maybe hundreds of times. “It has never ignited passions so that people want to march to something and break windows,” he told the Guardian. “The idea that it’s inciting to talk about the integrity of our election is idiotic.”
Kobach, who has built a national reputation by focusing on voter fraud, also underestimated the importance of a Biden presidency, in which a significant number of people do not accept him as a legally elected figure.
“I would say it would be very much the same as the last four years, while you had a lot left and thought that Donald Trump was not legally elected because they believed that Russian interference elected him,” he said. “You will have a lot on the right to doubt whether the results in the five states were accurate representations of legal votes in those five states, but I do not think it will be any different.”
Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the polls closed in 2016.
Since the Electoral College’s votes last week, several businesses have announced that they are interrupting donations to Republican lawmakers who voted against upholding the election results. The disruption comes after business interests for years supported conservative groups that facilitated voter identity laws and extreme partisan strife, allowing Republicans to take votes without fear of consequences.
‘People were prepared to tolerate this anti-democratic behavior up to a point. “And when it boils over, when it becomes so extreme that people cannot ignore it, they are prepared to reject it,” Weiser said. “To see it so vivid at the same time broke that complacency.”
Biden is inaugurated on the Western Front of the Capitol on Wednesday amid the growing rejection of complacency. But convincing Trump’s supporters that the election was legal and overcoming the doubts sown in US elections could be an impossible task. We may have only begun to see the consequences of the damage.