No one wants to admit it, but in Washington, D.C., the election might as well be over—except for the what-if-the-polls-are-wrong jitters, which are real and have been the stuff not just of nightmares but of all-day worrying since Donald Trump’s 2016 upset. Still, there are post-election plans to be made, lobbying strategies to be gamed out, Cabinet positions to speculate about. The election forecasters at The Economist currently give Joe Biden a ninety-six-per-cent chance of winning the Electoral College. According to the political Web site FiveThirtyEight, the former Vice-President has an only slightly more circumspect eighty-nine-per-cent chance. The Cook Political Report has moved Texas into the tossup category—Texas, which has not gone Democratic since Jimmy Carter, in 1976. No wonder the rumors are rife about Biden’s White House, about who will get what job and why. Will Susan Rice, a surprise finalist for Vice-President, be tapped as Secretary of State? Is Ron Klain a lock for White House chief of staff? On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was “very confident” that Biden will win, and spent her weekly press conference outlining her governing agenda for the new Administration, from instituting green infrastructure policies to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. Politico has already started on a transition newsletter, though I am trying not to read it.
This is not because I don’t believe the polls. The election may, in fact, be over. In truth, the polls matter less and less every day from here on in. As I wrote this column, on Thursday, more than seventy million Americans had voted, and there are still five days to go. In some places, more voters have cast their ballots in early voting than in the entire 2016 election. In other words, it’s already the equivalent of 2 p.m.. on Election Day. A late revelation—yet another Trump scandal, or an attack on Biden—can’t change votes that have been cast. And, besides, who is going to change their minds about Donald Trump now, anyway? Since winning four years ago, in a fluke of our electoral system, he has been the most omnipresent, overexposed President in American history. Everybody has an opinion of him, and he has never, for a single day of his Presidency, had the support of a majority of the American people. That is not going to suddenly flip over a Halloween weekend, at a time when thousands of Americans are sick or dying because of a pandemic that he claims is no big deal.
Back in early September, the election already looked to me like a race in which everything happens and nothing matters, with remarkably fixed voter preferences and a remarkably stable set of polls showing Biden with a strong, though not overwhelming, lead. With only five days left until Election Day, this is still the case. Much has indeed happened this fall: scandals that would have destroyed anyone other than Trump. His bout of covid-19 and subsequent tour of the country proclaiming that the coronavirus is being vanquished—even as case levels are hitting record highs. His disastrous performance in the first Presidential debate and ferocious late efforts to label Biden a corrupt and out-of-touch career politician. Through it all, Biden’s lead has held more or less steady. So let’s stipulate—although we won’t know for sure for some days—that the polls are more or less correct. Even without knowing for sure, it is already fair to say that, should Trump prevail, it would be even more unprecedented in modern American politics than his 2016 win—and is, therefore, even less likely.
I have a different fear this time: What if the polls are right—and Trump still wins? The election may be over, but the counting is not. His path to victory through the Electoral College may rest with only a few states where Election Night results are ambiguous enough that Trump could question them and, instead, pursue a win via friendly Republican state legislatures and the pro-Trump Supreme Court. Trump has already spent months laying the groundwork for this, preëmptively attacking the “rigged” election, baselessly suggesting widespread voter fraud in the use of mail-in ballots, and authorizing lawsuits to push for as many restrictive conditions on voting as possible in key states. An American President attacking American democracy in advance of an election has simply never been seen before. But he continues to do it every day, in the final run-up to November 3rd. Whatever the election’s outcome, this is already one of the greatest political scandals of our time, and a lasting blot on Trump’s record.
Whether or not Trump once again succeeds in pulling an unlikely win out of a near-certain defeat, this fall’s campaign may well go down as one of the most scandalous periods of his norm-shattering Presidency. Trump in recent weeks has openly flirted with white supremacy and bizarre conspiracy theories. He has demanded that the U.S. government investigate and jail Biden—it is not clear for what—and he has publicly threatened to fire the F.B.I. director and the Attorney General for failing to do so. He has held rallies at which his supporters chanted “Lock him up,” and did and said nothing to stop them. He has broadcast so much misinformation that social-media platforms such as Twitter have, for the first time, regularly warned readers about the veracity of his posts. He has lied so much that the Times found seventy-five per cent of his statements during a single rally to be untrue. He has issued orders that threaten to politicize the government long after he is gone, including an executive order, last week, which would remove key protections from the professional civil service; the potential consequences of this move are so significant that, on Monday, the Republican Trump appointee who would have to oversee it resigned in protest, warning that the decision will “replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance” across the government.
In recent weeks, scandalous revelations about Trump’s corruption include the Times’ reporting on hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that Trump is personally liable for. (He will not say to whom.) The Washington Post disclosed this week that Trump has used his power to direct at least eight million dollars from the U.S. government—–and his political supporters—into his personal businesses since he took office. The consequences of Trump’s Presidency, meanwhile, include the forcible separation of at least twenty-six hundred migrant children from their parents at the southern border, and last week the awful news came out that five hundred and forty-five of these children are now stranded alone in the United States, owing to the authorities being unable to locate their mothers or fathers.
And this parade of horrors, of course, also includes Trump’s record on the coronavirus, a disastrous performance that, as of this week, has left more than two hundred and twenty thousand Americans dead. Universal mask-wearing could prevent perhaps a hundred and thirty thousand Americans from dying, according to a study in the scientific journal Nature which was released earlier this month. Yet Trump not only refuses to issue a national mask mandate; he has repeatedly and publicly questioned the need for mask-wearing during the fall campaign and has held numerous White House events with packed crowds of unmasked attendees.
The most notable such event, of course, was the public announcement, in late September, of his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. So many coronavirus cases apparently resulted from that gathering, on the White House lawn, that even government public-health officials labelled it a “superspreader” event. Trump has been extraordinarily blunt in admitting that his main reason for pushing Barrett’s nomination through so close to November 3rd was to insure his own reëlection, an effort that culminated in this Monday’s Senate vote to confirm Barrett, just eight days before Election Day. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said of the election, “and I think it’s very important that we have nine Justices,” rather than risk a 4–4 tie. The vote for a Supreme Court Justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and yet it was just another violation in a campaign full of them. Trump’s comment about why he was pushing for Barrett now was a norm-shattering scandal in its own right, undermining the legitimacy of the high court at a time when it is urgently needed.
In many ways, the whole Trump Presidency can be encapsulated in the past few days and weeks. It is self-dealing, denialism, dishonesty, and deflection. It is narcissism, recklessness, and disregard for the public good—and for democracy itself. There is nothing and no one he has not corrupted—or tried to. Even the remaining uncertainty about the election’s outcome is a product of Trump’s cynical, self-serving, and dangerous assault on the political system. Washington can read the polls, but after four years there’s still no poll that can fully account for this President. Folks, it ain’t over till it’s over.
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