WWhen an American president is inaugurated, it is supposed to mark the peak of American democracy and power. The elaborate ceremony is designed to convey the peaceful transfer of power and that, no matter how bitter the election, the nation is moving forward.
But when Joe Biden takes office as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday, the ceremony will look anything but. America is coming into office at an incredibly dangerous time, just two weeks after a violent pro-Trump crowd attacked the U.S. Capitol and several Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the election results. For months, Donald Trump refused to recognize Biden as the legitimate winner of the election – a belief shared by legions of his supporters. The ceremony will have a strong military presence because of threats of violence. Trump is not bothering to attend.
Although Trump accelerated this dangerous moment, it was shaped by a deliberate Republican strategy to undermine faith in the elections and make it more difficult to vote. The myth of electoral fraud and repeated allusions to theft of elections has shifted from marginal theories to the center of republican ideology in recent decades. The refusal to accept the election and the attack on the Capitol are a consequence of this strategy.
“Donald Trump was definitely the spark and he had a lot of enablers and facilitators, but the fire was all set,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The strategy has been slow, continuously, to undermine Americans’ faith in the security of elections, to increase their belief in the existence of widespread electoral fraud, in order to allow them to accept what would otherwise be perceived as something really illegitimate and undemocratic agenda restrict access to voting ”.
For years, Republicans have used misleading and flawed data to suggest that elections are at risk of fraud. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state, used the threat of a noncitizen vote to justify a law that requires people to prove their citizenship by registering to vote (the law was blocked by a federal court). Conservative lawyers in recent years have also used misleading data analysis to suggest that electoral lists are full of ineligible voters.
In 2016, when Trump claimed that electoral fraud cost him the popular vote, it fit perfectly with the narrative that the Republican Party was beginning to embrace.
Two years later, there were signs that questioning the election results was moving towards republican orthodoxy. Paul Ryan, who then served as mayor, said it was “bizarre” and “weird” for Republicans to fall behind in California disputes as more ballots in the mail were counted after election night. When Trump began making similar claims in the spring and last summer that ballots in the mail would lead to fraud and cost him the election, few Republicans objected.
The party began attacking the ballot box and voting by mail, something Republicans have long trusted. When Trump claimed there was something wrong with states continuing to count votes after election day, Republicans – with a few exceptions – supported him as well. The rhetoric began to have real consequences, as supporters began to protest at polling stations and harass workers who tried to count during the November election.
And by the time the electoral college was certified, the effort to undermine faith in voting had gone so far that it made it possible for two-thirds of the House’s Republican bench and a dozen senators to support the idea of rejecting election results entirely.
“It went from electoral fraud in a given election to a ‘stolen election’,” said Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden, who studied allegations of electoral fraud. “I don’t think it would have been so successful if the fraud myth hadn’t been planted a long time ago.”
Kobach, a Trump ally who briefly led a panel at the White House to investigate electoral fraud, said it was “entirely appropriate” for members of Congress to oppose the certification of polling station votes. He noted that since 2000, Democrats have repeatedly opposed counting the electoral college votes for Republican presidential winners (in all of these cases, however, the effort has not been supported by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had previously granted the race )
He rejected the idea that there was any connection between raising concerns about electoral fraud and the attack on the Capitol.
“I have already talked about electoral fraud for small and very, very large audiences, more than 100 times. Perhaps several hundred times. He never ignited his passions to the point that people wanted to march on something and break windows, ”he told the Guardian. “The idea that talking about the integrity of our elections is inflammatory is silly.”
Kobach, who built a national reputation by focusing on electoral fraud, also downplayed the importance of a Biden presidency in which a significant number of people do not accept him as a legitimately elected figure.
“I would say it will be very similar to the last four years, when you had many on the left thinking that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected because they believed that Russian interference led him to be elected,” he said. “You will have many on the right harboring doubts about whether the results in these five states were accurate reports of legal votes in those five states, but I don’t think it will be that different.”
Hillary Clinton granted the election to Trump the day after the polls closed in 2016.
Since last week’s poll at the polling station, several companies have announced that they are suspending donations to Republican members of Congress who voted against maintaining electoral results. The pause comes after commercial interests for years supported conservative groups that facilitated voter identification laws and extreme party gerrymandering that allowed Republicans to take votes without fear of the consequences.
“People were willing to tolerate this anti-democratic conduct to some extent. And then, when it overflowed, when it became so extreme that people couldn’t ignore it, they were willing to repudiate it, ”said Weiser. “Seeing him so vividly at once broke that complacency.”
Biden will open on Wednesday on the west front of the Capitol amid growing rejection of this complacency. But convincing Trump supporters that the election was legitimate and overcoming the doubt sown in the American elections can be an impossible task. We can only begin to see the consequences of the damage.