Slate "Our Trump Traumatized Brains Need a Break. We Won't Get One"
There’s a specific pain to realizing that the norms broken over the past four years won’t be restored.
By LILI LOOFBOUROW
NOV 17, 20205:43 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/trump-trauma-hurt-biden-victory.html
The aftermath of Joe Biden’s resounding defeat of Donald Trump has been a vertiginous loop-de-loop alternating between relief and horror. The cathartic joy the majority of Americans felt when Biden’s victory was finally called the Saturday of election week evaporated in the following days, when it became clear not only that Trump intended to do anything he could to stay in power but that Republicans had no intention of stopping him. It was the latest and most frightening escalation in a Republican Party that has grown increasingly untethered from reality or rules. We should have already known that they would do this—their increasing commitment to an authoritarian model was made clear when Mitch McConnell violated the very rules he himself articulated in 2016 in order to seat Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court just days before the election. But somehow, that one didn’t hit the country in the same way—it came too close to the election, too close to the moment when people thought they would have the ability to “fix” what was happening in America. And so, many assumed that it wasn’t actually possible for Republicans to have become so arrogant and immune to any rules at all that they would challenge the very basis on which this country depends: an election where people like you and me vote to determine a winner.
But that’s what Republicans did. As hurricanes of misinformation inflated angry Trump supporters with false stories about massive voter fraud, once-respectable Republicans fanned the flames. Rather than congratulate Biden, they turned American democracy into a game of malicious Calvinball, insisting that Trump “had the right” to contest the election on the basis of no evidence at all—as over a dozen meritless lawsuits have now proved. Lindsey Graham made himself fully available to Trump, and loudly and angrily echoed his lies in dramatic spurts, even if doing so meant he was implicitly questioning the basis of his own victory. (If the election were a fraud, how could he have won reelection?) And Graham apparently went a step further: In a truly shocking development, Georgia’s (Republican!) secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, revealed Monday that Graham tried to illegally pressure him into throwing out legally cast votes. He has witnesses; at least one other staffer was one the call.
And so these weeks have left us in a peculiar position wherein we find ourselves saying dangerously obvious things like “The election decides the presidency” or “Donald Trump lost the election.” It is frightening when self-evident things are urgently stated; it implies that the whole edifice is tottering. For those of us who still clung to some faith in American norms and institutions, that faith has repeatedly proved we were chumps. Still, somehow, many of us believed (or tried to believe, because what else can you do?) that an election could provide an entirely legitimate and refreshingly procedural offramp from a bad and dangerous course. Plenty of Americans hope this can be the beginning of the restoration of “checks and balances” or that it could make us a country wherein laws and even norms mean something. Or anything.
That experts insist Trump poses no real danger despite his efforts at an autocoup is not reassuring to those who have moved from relief back to panic, thanks to a kind of reactivated trauma. We have been falsely reassured too often that norms would protect what Trump wouldn’t. The emoluments clause will stop him from profiting from the presidency, experts wrote at the beginning of Trump’s term. We are not a corrupt country. But no Republican tried to stop him, so Trump enriched himself immensely as president. We were repeatedly informed that the administration was violating the Hatch Act. Somehow, it didn’t matter—and the violations grew in number and scope. If this election was meant to reaffirm the normative powers of a country with two centuries of smooth transfers of power, if the hope was that a refreshingly dull and bureaucratic protocol like an election would revive “norms” by enforcing consequences for those who violated them, it is not succeeding. Not just norms but democracy itself is hanging on by the skin of its teeth. The world the United States has generated is one where many Americans are still baselessly denying that Biden won, and it can’t be chalked up to ignorance: The White House press secretary herself is insisting that Trump will still be president.
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Some Republicans have insisted, under the cowardly cover of anonymity, that while they privately accept the results of the election, Trump needs time to come to terms with his loss. I have not known what to say to this; it is beyond egregious to endanger the nation by denying the president-elect intelligence briefings because a con man needs time to stop conning. The argument itself frays at a threadbare democratic tradition that has never once paused to center the feelings of a single man. Trump has destroyed many stable and American features of governance with his party’s full support. It was clear enough—given that he claimed in 2016 that the election he won was “rigged”—that he would call this one unfair regardless of the evidence. The algebra for this moment was there if you were looking for it. But it took more pessimism than even I had to predict that the entire Republican Party would back his obvious, self-serving lie. That is a frightening, frightening development. The effect is political nausea just when Americans expected relief.
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lots more - a good read...captures well how I've been feeling, that's for sure.
