Elections are about the future, not the past, as the old cliché has it. But as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway, U.S. voters can’t seem to escape the noxious aftermath of the 2020 election.
Many would like to move on, but Donald Trump won’t let them. He wants to rerun the 2020 contest next year, only this time with him winning. Complicating his improbable bid is the belated legal reckoning he and his lackeys now face for scheming to steal the last election.
The 2024 elections, thus, are shaping up as yet another Trump-induced stress test of America’s democratic resilience. The first culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress, when President-elect Joe Biden narrowly escaped the first coup attempt in U.S. history.
Now Trump, the instigator of that seditious plot, somehow is leading the race for the GOP nomination. Evidently, millions of white, non-college-educated voters so adore him and so detest Democrats that they are no longer willing to abide by the constitutional rules and safeguards that have upheld America’s experiment in democratic self-rule for 247 years.
To vote for Trump is tantamount to endorsing his delusional claim — laughed out of more than 60 U.S. courts — that widespread voter fraud cheated him out of a “landslide” victory over Biden.
Trump isn’t just running against the man who made him a one-term president, he’s running against reality itself. This sobering fact confronts Republicans with a basic test of sanity and patriotism. Will they follow Trump again down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, partisan hatred and mob violence, or will they affirm the integrity of U.S. elections?
Although Trump has failed to produce a smidgen of proof for his slanderous claim that U.S. elections are rigged, there’s abundant evidence that he tried to nullify the voters’ verdict in 2020. The wheel of justice grinds slowly, but his rendezvous with legal accountability at last seems imminent.
The Department of Justice’s special prosecutor, Jack Smith, is expected to file criminal charges against Trump soon. Investigators reportedly are homing in on the millions he’s raised on false claims of election fraud, his collusion with GOP efforts in several states to create phony slates of electors and his attempts to browbeat Mike Pence into blocking the routine congressional certification of Biden’s victory.
Trump’s accomplices are facing the music too. Last week, Michigan charged 16 Republicans with forgery and other crimes for presenting themselves as the state’s 2020 electors, even though Biden won Michigan by a significant margin.
In Georgia, Fulton County prosecutor Fani T. Willis also is targeting Republicans who falsely swore to be 2020 electors, as well as Trump’s brazen attempt — captured in a recorded phone call — to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to falsify the official vote count.
Trump’s legion of lawyers also is on the hot seat for flooding courts with frivolous lawsuits alleging election fraud. Last month, for example, a federal appeals court upheld sanctions imposed on former Trump attorney Sidney Powell for groundlessly suing to overturn Biden’s Michigan win.
No crony has fallen farther than Rudy Guiliani, who slid from “America’s Mayor” after 9/11 to Trump’s Grima Wormtongue after 2020. He, and attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and others face disbarment or other disciplinary actions in various states. As of last spring, the 65 Project has filed 75 complaints against Trump lawyers, aides, other government officials and false electors.
Meanwhile, Trump’s foot soldiers, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other so-called “patriots” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, continue to be brought to justice. As of last May, 1,033 rioters have been arrested and 485 have been convicted and sentenced.
While the law nets the minnows, the kingfish still swims free. In fact, Trump allies brag that each indictment only makes him stronger. In the eyes of his true believers, any attempt to hold Trump responsible for his misdeeds is evidence that Biden is “weaponizing” the government against him.
But Trump’s mounting legal woes also are proving to be a huge and growing distraction. More than half the money Trump raised last quarter went to pay legal bills rather than his campaign. More criminal charges and riveting trials next year will keep him in courtrooms and off the hustings.
What happens if he’s convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison? Trump wouldn’t be the first U.S. presidential candidate to campaign from jail. But he won’t elicit much sympathy from independent voters, who broke for Democrats in both 2020 and in key Senate races in the 2022 midterms. Trump’s standing among college-educated Republicans also slipped since the Jan. 6 debacle.
Nonetheless, he’ll keep running, not least because he sees the president’s power to pardon criminals as his ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card.
And he’s more vengeful and dangerous than ever. Trump lately has threatened to weaken Congress, create an imperial presidency and sic federal prosecutors on his political opponents.
None of this would be happening if Senate Republicans had done their duty and convicted a manifestly guilty Trump in either of his two impeachment trials. They didn’t, so Americans find themselves embroiled in Trumpean psychodramas for a third straight presidential election.
If the courts don’t get him first, it will be up to U.S. voters to cancel Trump’s political unreality show and let America move on.
Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).