You can say a lot of things about Donald Trump, but you can’t say he didn’t warn us.
In 2016, on the debate stage, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked a simple question of the Republican nominee: If you lose, will you concede?
Trump declined to provide an answer. “I will look at it at the time,” he said, before adding: “I will keep you in suspense.”
Refusing to accept the results of the election would have separated Trump from all the presidential candidates who had been defeated before him—from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to John McCain and Mitt Romney—and Wallace, an institutionalist whose father had interviewed commanders in chief dating back to President Kennedy, wanted to give Trump a second chance to fall in line with that precedent.
“There is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country is the peaceful transition of power,” Wallace explained. “Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?”
Trump smirked, before repeating the same answer he’d offered seconds earlier: “I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?”
The outcry was immediate—and the following day, at a rally in the swing state of Ohio, Trump seemed to have been pressured into backtracking: “I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all of the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election.”
Better late than never, right?
He paused for dramatic effect.
And then he delivered the punchline: “…if I win.”
The crowd roared. Trump laughed. A wolf in wolf’s clothing, ready to blow the whole damn house down.
On Election Night 2016, defying the predictions of polls and the premonitions of pundits, Donald Trump did end up winning, but he refused to accept the results anyway. Because while he had come out on top in the Electoral College, the official tally said he had received about three million fewer votes than his opponent, a hit to the ego he could not countenance.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he insisted. He went on to tell congressional leaders that he believed up to five million Americans had broken the law to cast ballots. The evidence? His friend Bernhard Langer, an over-the-hill golfer, saw people at the polls who “did not look as if they should be allowed to vote,” as though you can identify who is on the rolls by their facial features. (Langer, for his part, is not a United States citizen, so if anyone could have committed voter fraud at the polling place that day, it was the German.)
Trump went on to argue—bafflingly—that every single one of the alleged illegal votes cast in the 2016 election went to Democrats. Every single one! “None of them come to me,” he said. “They would all be for the other side.” Of course, he had literally no backing for these claims. But Trump was no longer just a reality television star with a Twitter account, firing off hot takes about how the Emmys were rigged against him without being able to do anything about it.
Now this man was president of the United States. His desk was the Resolute Desk. His office was the Oval Office. His house was the White House. Donald Trump had managed to become the most powerful man in the world, and he was dead set on using the authority that had been vested in him to disenfranchise the Americans who had cost him the popular vote—even if he had to destroy democracy in the process.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three hundred thousand Americans, from every corner of the country, paid their respects at his funeral—but only one was chosen to lead the mule wagon that carried his body: Albert Turner.
This is where Turner stood for so much of his life: by Dr. King’s side, yes, but also at the collision of peril and promise. Like the Sankofa bird, which flies forward while looking back, he was always aware of the injustice behind him, but resolute in his commitment to keep on marching. He marched in Selma when Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered. He marched on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when gas was sprayed and batons were swung. He marched from block to block, in town after town, registering citizens after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law—convincing Black Americans in Alabama that they had a place in our democracy.
He understood why so many of his fellow Alabamians were skeptical when he knocked on their doors. After all, even as a college graduate, Turner himself had been denied the franchise by a literacy test—so if anyone had reason to doubt whether Alabama would ever welcome Black Americans into politics, it was him. But he didn’t believe that the answer to his state’s legacy of oppression was resignation. He believed it was organization. So Turner devoted his life to persuading Black men and women in Alabama to make their voices heard at the ballot box; and because of his leadership, the state finally began electing candidates who looked like the people they were supposed to serve.
In the eyes of many Alabamians, this made Turner a hero, one of the founders of our nation’s movement for voting rights. But in 1985, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama didn’t see it the same way. No, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III believed Turner was a criminal—and spent extensive taxpayer dollars on an investigation whose goal was to convict this giant of the civil rights movement of voter fraud. How else, Sessions seemed to wonder, could this man have brought so many Black Americans to the polls?
Thankfully, the witch hunt failed, Turner was exonerated, and the man who led the investigation into him was denied a federal judgeship because of his history with race—a history that reportedly included calling the Voting Rights Act “an intrusive piece of legislation.” But in the end, Jeff Sessions was not blacklisted for what he had done. Instead, he ascended, elected to the United States Senate by the people of Alabama and appointed attorney general by President Donald Trump.
That’s right: Jeff Sessions, the same guy who tried to send civil rights leader Albert Turner to jail, was the person the forty-fifth president of the United States decided should be in charge of enforcing the Voting Rights Act.
America waited 219 years before allowing an African American to serve as attorney general. It took only eight more for that seat to once again be filled by a man with, well, let’s just say a complicated view on race.
Given his history, perhaps it’s no surprise that Attorney General Sessions didn’t feel an obligation to respect the legacy I had left behind. From his first day in office, Sessions made it his mission to reverse as much of what we did as he could, day after day, policy after policy, case after case, bringing our country back to a darker (or, I suppose, whiter) era. That was especially true when it came to voting rights, because, in the mind of Jeff Sessions, suppression wasn’t something to be condemned. It was something to be condoned.
That’s why, within his first few months in office, he ordered the Justice Department to switch sides on voting rights litigation across the country. In Texas, where the Department of Justice had spent years fighting a law that made it harder to vote, Sessions decided to file a brief supporting that law. In Ohio, where 1.2 million voters had been purged from the rolls for infrequently showing up to the polls, Sessions dropped the objections we had filed. He even loosened our stance on gerrymandering—backing off efforts to stop the adoption of a map we had proven to be racially discriminatory.
In all these cases, Sessions was aided by the fact that Republicans had stolen a seat on the Supreme Court—refusing to hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and then confirming President Trump’s, Neil Gorsuch, in a matter of months. This theft left conservatives with an illegitimate 5–4 majority, which sided, over and over again, with suppressors, purgers, and gerrymanderers.
One of the most controversial of these decisions surrounded Rucho v. Common Case, a case in which Justice Roberts wrote that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” essentially abdicating responsibility for policing the redistricting process. In response, Justice Kagan wrote a searing dissent: “In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights—in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this nation’s values and law no one defends—the majority declines to provide any remedy.
“For the first time in this nation’s history,” she continued, “the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation.”
She was livid, as were Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor, all of whom signed the dissent with “deep sadness.” And I was, too. Because I know how to read between the lines of Supreme Court rulings, and the consequences of this one were clear: Attorney General Sessions, President Trump, and Republican state legislatures across the country would have virtual carte blanche to continue gutting our democracy.
The biggest threat to our country over the course of President Trump’s four years in office, as legal writer Benjamin Wittes first observed, was his administration’s malevolence—and the biggest saving grace was its incompetence. This is why he never succeeded in kicking 30 million Americans off their healthcare plans, no matter how many times he tried. It’s why he never pulled off building the wall, even with control of Congress. And it’s why he never quite managed to suppress the vote to the extent he wanted to, despite a Supreme Court that had made it possible for him to do exactly that.
His malevolence, for instance, led him to launch the Voter Fraud Commission with the purpose of investigating the conspiracies he had manufactured, without any factual basis, as an excuse for losing the popular vote. With the resources of the federal government—and dozens of staffers devoted to the cause—the commission could have been weaponized to drive down voter turnout. Thankfully, incompetence led its leaders to violate the Constitution, over and over again, in such blatant ways—including asking all fifty states for information on the voting history of their residents—that President Trump was left with no choice but to dissolve the commission only months after it was created amid an avalanche of lawsuits. And when the commission shut down, it did so without producing a single shred of evidence supporting the idea of widespread voter fraud.
The Trump administration’s malevolence is also what led them to try to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census, with the hope that doing so would stop immigrants from filling it out, leaving their neighborhoods underresourced and underrepresented. But incompetence once again saved the day, as cabinet officials left behind a paper trail detailing the racist intent of what they were doing. (The question, leaked documents revealed, was included because it would be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” despite the administration’s perjurious claim that its purpose was to enable the federal government to better enforce the Voting Rights Act.)
Again and again, our country was rescued by the fact that, as The New Republic’s Alex Shephard noted, President Trump and his apparatchiks repeatedly had the wrong answer to the sage question posed by The Wire’s Stringer Bell: “Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”
But while for much of his presidency, Trump’s incompetence tended to mitigate the impact of his malevolence, he nonetheless managed to seriously wound our democracy. “So what if he was bad at it?” wrote The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, one of our preeminent essayists, in an article comparing the damage Trump had done to our country to getting shot in the leg. “Even nonfatal gunshot wounds do terrible things to the human body,” he explained. “They can twist flesh and muscle as if they were dough; shatter bones to dust; leave victims unable to walk without assistance; keep survivors from closing their fingers into a fist. They can poison the blood, drown the lungs, and—even when the body escapes being disfigured—leave the brain scarred by trauma.”
So it was with Donald Trump. Sure, some of his most blatant attempts to subvert democracy had failed, but on the eve of the 2020 election, America’s institutions had been severely wounded—damaged by a president who had spent four years abusing his power: sowing distrust in the press; fomenting divisions between parties; profiting from the presidency; and treating the Justice Department like his personal law firm, shutting down cases he didn’t like and opening ones we didn’t need.
What’s worse, many of the checks we had on the presidency didn’t work. The Supreme Court signed off on the key pillars of Trump’s agenda. His attorneys general covered up investigations into his misconduct. The Senate refused to hold him accountable even after he committed the paradigmatic high crime: coercing a foreign power to help him win in an election.
Ultimately, it became clear that the only check left on his power was the people—and if we were going to defeat him, we would need to turn out in droves, despite all the suppressive laws that had passed in the absence of a functioning Voting Rights Act, and despite a global pandemic that threatened to make voting a comorbidity, in no small part because the sitting president sabotaged our country’s response to it.
There was also the knowledge in the back of everyone’s minds—knowledge they knew to be true but didn’t want to believe; knowledge I knew to be true but didn’t want to believe—that while defeating Trump would be hard, convincing him to leave would be even harder.
You can’t fault Chris Wallace for trying.
Four years had passed since their back-and-forth at the presidential debate, and in 2020, Wallace once again had a chance to interview President Trump—so he asked the question he always asked, hoping, hopelessly, to receive a different answer: Will you accept the results of the election?
Trump’s reply? “I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”
Later in the summer, at the Republican National Convention, the president declared: “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.” And in the months that followed, while polls showed him down big, he began laying the groundwork for protesting the results—stoking fears about the widespread use of mail-in ballots, tweeting that they were “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT”; spreading false rumors about “people that aren’t citizens” voting; at one point, even tweeting that we should “Delay the Election,” which isn’t exactly the kind of thing you hear every day from the president in a democracy.
So when, at two-thirty a.m. on Election Night, President Trump claimed victory—boasting “we did win this election,” even though, by that point, it was becoming clear he was losing—nobody should have been surprised. But what happened next, even if it wasn’t unexpected, was unprecedented: The president of the United States wielded the power of his office in an effort to overturn the will of the people.
He started in the courts—filing sixty-three lawsuits that challenged the results of the election. In the days that followed, he lost sixty-two of them, a record that made the Bad News Bears look like the ’27 Yankees. (The one case he did win could have affected only a handful of votes in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden had come out on top by eighty thousand.) Even the Supreme Court, which by now had six conservatives on the bench—including two new Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who had replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the bench after Americans had already started voting (in a historic act of hypocrisy on the part of Senate Republicans that I will unpack in chapter 11, “Saving the Court”)—refused to hear President Trump’s arguments, prompting him to tweet: “It is a legal disgrace, an embarrassment to the USA!!!”
Realizing he would not be saved by the courts, Trump decided to take an extrajudicial approach to challenging the results of the election—an approach that relied on the antiquated and arbitrary process America uses to certify its elections, a process that dates back to our nation’s founding.
As you know by now, our founders weren’t the biggest fans of direct democracy. So at the Constitutional Convention, they decided that instead of sending whatever candidate received the most votes to the White House, they would leave presidential elections up to a body called the Electoral College. Every state, they decided, would send exactly as many delegates to the college as they had representatives and senators in Congress—and, at first, delegates had full discretion over which candidate they would support.
Over the following centuries, this system evolved (as I will detail in chapter 10, “Saving the Presidency”), and by 2020, the Electoral College had become a formality: Each delegate would support whichever candidate had won the most votes in their state—or, in the case of Maine and Nebraska, in their district—as determined by the officially certified results. Then it was up to Congress to formalistically tally up the verdict of the Electoral College and declare a winner.
Even Al Gore, who had won the popular vote and lost the decisive state in the Electoral College by fewer than six hundred votes, did not try to interfere with this process outside the legal system. But President Trump was going to do everything he could to stay in power—and he realized that while the customs surrounding the Electoral College had changed over the past centuries, most of the laws had not, meaning it was still possible, at least in theory, for obdurate certifiers, faithless electors, or rogue representatives to overturn the will of the people. And President Trump stopped at nothing in his attempts to make sure they would.
Brad Raffensperger wasn’t only a Republican. Georgia’s secretary of state was a Trump supporter. A man of MAGA. And he was “proud” of it. Now, because he was in charge of running the state’s elections—and didn’t want to pierce the veil of impartiality—he declined to make a public endorsement in 2020, but he had vocally stood by Trump in 2016, and he had been rooting hard for the Republican candidate to win another four years in the White House.
But when it came time to tally up the votes, there was a problem: Raffensperger saw himself first and foremost as an engineer who lived by the motto that “numbers don’t lie.” And the data couldn’t have been clearer: Joe Biden had won the presidential election in the state of Georgia.
This, naturally, was not what President Trump wanted to hear—so after seeing Secretary of State Raffensperger announce the election results on television, the commander in chief decided to ring him up. “I didn’t lose the state, Brad,” he fumed, before diving into a cacophony of conspiracy theories outlining why he believed he had really won.
“Mr. President,” Raffensperger insisted, “the data you have is wrong,” responding to Trump’s claim that there had been hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes. But the president refused to be dissuaded. And by the end of the call, he had dubbed the secretary of state a “criminal,” before making him an offer so blatantly over the line that if Chris Moltisanti had proposed it, Tony Soprano would have said: “Are you sure about this, Christopher?”
“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” President Trump told the secretary of state, a number that would have closed the 11,779 vote gap that separated him from Biden. “So what are we going to do here, folks?” he continued. “I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
Of course, in a democracy, you don’t find votes. You count them. And the numbers didn’t add up for President Trump. But that didn’t stop him from trying to pressure everyone he could into flipping the election his way.
It wasn’t only Raffensperger. In Georgia, Trump had already tried and failed to strong-arm the governor, notorious vote suppressor Brian Kemp, into changing the results. He had also called Frances Watson, the state’s chief elections investigator, and attempted to goad her into coming to “the right answer” in her inquiry. Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney from Atlanta, Byung Pak, faced so much pressure to back up President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in Georgia that he decided to resign before he could be fired. Across the state, election officials received so many threats to their safety that Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting systems implementation manager and himself a Republican, begged the president to lower the temperature. “Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language,” he pleaded. “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone is going to get hurt, someone is going to get shot, someone is going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
Trump’s attempts to intimidate election officials went well beyond the Peach State. In Michigan, he hounded Republicans on the certification board, telling them to question the results of the election—an effort that might have succeeded but for the bravery of Aaron Van Langevelde, an ardent Republican, who certified the tally because he believed it was his duty to our democracy. “Time will tell that those who spread misinformation and tried to overturn the election were wrong,” Van Langevelde declared, “and they should be held responsible for the chaos and confusion they have caused.”
This didn’t stop President Trump. In fact, two days later, he flew Republicans from the Michigan state legislature to the District of Columbia—hoping he could convince them to join his effort. Alas, “We have not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,” they wrote, “and, as legislative leaders, we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”
Over the following weeks, President Trump hit the phones with the verve of Gordon Gekko trying to corner the market on Teldar Paper. He was even seemingly caught calling Arizona governor Doug Ducey while the governor was being interviewed on television as the state’s election results were being certified. And behind the scenes, he was orchestrating the ouster of Jeff Sessions’s successor, a truly disgraceful attorney general named William Barr, one of the president’s most loyal allies, because the AG had the audacity to say he hadn’t seen “fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
By the end of the year, it had become clear that President Trump could not stop the certification of the election in the states—and as a result, he couldn’t block the Electoral College from awarding a majority of delegates to Joe Biden. This meant he had only one move left: interfering with the counting of the electoral votes in Congress, which was scheduled to take place on the sixth of January, 2021.
The stars and bars of the Confederacy waving, for the first time, on the floor of Congress. A noose and gallows, erected outside, swaying back and forth with the wind. A police officer, beaten over the head with a Betsy Ross flag, one of 140 injured that day, while rebels in Viking horns and “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirts desecrated the Citadel of Democracy—encouraged by the president of the United States to “walk down to the Capitol” and “fight like hell.”
Gabriel Sterling was right: President Trump’s rhetoric did end up killing people—five, in fact, not to mention at least four police officers at the scene who took their lives in the months that followed.
In its aftermath, many have tried to erase the danger of the insurrection from our memory—framing the events of January 6 as the ending of President Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
And I can understand why that’s a tempting narrative to embrace. After all, it’s true that by the end of the night, once police officers had swept the Capitol for bombs a final time, Congress had reassembled, counted up the votes, and declared that Joe Biden would be the next president of the United States. “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win,” declared a triumphant Mike Pence, whom the insurrectionists had threatened to hang because he hadn’t been willing to overrule the Electoral College and install President Trump for another four years. (President Trump, unsurprisingly, sided with the insurrectionists. Ten minutes after the vice president had been evacuated from the Capitol with his life under threat, @realDonaldTrump laid into him: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”)
Over the weeks that followed, leaders in the GOP initially condemned President Trump in stronger terms than they ever had before—which, of course, isn’t saying all that much. “Count me out,” Senator Lindsey Graham declared. “Enough is enough.” Mitch McConnell admitted that President Trump had committed a “disgraceful dereliction of duty.” In total, ten Republican congressmen and seven Republican senators, though not Graham or McConnell themselves, voted to convict President Trump of inciting the events of January 6, a bipartisan impeachment the likes of which our country had never seen.
This is one way the history books could tell the story of January 6—as a moment when politicians put partisanship aside to defend our democracy; as a moment when our institutions overcame an insurrection.
But the real story of that day isn’t how our country came together to make sure this coup attempt failed. It’s how close it came to succeeding—and how quickly, in states across the country, Republicans began working to make sure that, next time, it could.
The first reason Donald Trump’s insurrection failed was simple: The election wasn’t all that close. Joe Biden had defeated the incumbent 306–232 in electoral votes, which happened to be the same margin by which President Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton in what he then called a “massive landslide victory.” And, notably, unlike Trump, Biden didn’t lose the popular vote; in fact, he won it by a whopping 7 million.
One of the reasons President Biden performed so well was that 2020 saw record turnout, as the pandemic forced states across the country to make it easier to vote—expanding access to mail-in ballots, setting up drive-through polling places, and increasing the number of early voting days. For anyone who believed in democracy, it had been one of the most promising developments in a year full of pain, proof that when you eliminate barriers to voting, Americans will make their voices heard. But for Republicans, aware that their agenda did not align with the interests of a majority of Americans—and that the country wouldn’t become any more favorable to their ideas in the years ahead—it was a nightmare.
After all, as I mentioned in the note at the beginning of the book, this Trumpified Republican Party just isn’t all that into democracy—regardless of its impact on their electoral prospects—because their priority isn’t exercising the will of the people; it’s accruing the power to implement their agenda whether or not it’s aligned with the will of the people.
And so within days of President Biden’s inauguration, in states across the country, Republican legislatures began rolling back the progress we’d made on turnout under the guise of protecting future elections from voter fraud—in the process, lending credibility to the “Big Lie” that President Trump had used to justify his attempted coup.
In fact, according to the Brennan Center, by June 2021, legislatures had introduced more than 380 bills that would have restricted access to the polls—dozens of which became laws across swing states like Florida, Georgia, and Nevada, as well as conservative strongholds like Idaho, Wyoming, and Kentucky. Many of these bills were designed to make it harder to vote by mail. Others made it more difficult to vote in person. One bill, in Georgia, criminalized offering food or water to voters waiting in line to cast their ballots, a seemingly random form of suppression that starts to make more sense when you remember how much longer lines are in predominantly Black neighborhoods across Georgia than they are in predominantly white ones.
By October 2021, thirty-three of these laws were enacted across nineteen states. And it’s hard to imagine many of them being struck down by the courts—not only because of the ruling in Shelby County, which continued to limit the Justice Department’s ability to fight voter suppression, but also because in the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act even further.
In his majority ruling, Justice Samuel Alito demonstrated a radical understanding of voting rights. Unlike in past decisions, where the court had consistently expressed a belief that barriers to the ballot should be looked at as suspect, Justice Alito’s opinion attempted to normalize them. Walking outside your house in order to vote is already an obstacle, he argued, so why should we punish state legislatures for making it even harder to cast a ballot? It’s a decision that will ultimately leave voting rights almost exclusively in the hands of the lower courts—and at this point, if they decline to strike down suppressive bills, I doubt the Supreme Court will overrule them.
The good news is, it remains to be seen whether these laws will achieve their desired ends—because studies have found that Republican attempts to strip people of the franchise can sometimes inspire Democrats to turn out in greater numbers. This isn’t to say the bills won’t flip some elections in favor of Republicans. They very well could, especially because reducing turnout at the margins by even a fraction of a percent can change the results of close races. Nonetheless, this isn’t a reason to despair. It’s a reason to organize, as Albert Turner would have.
Of course, Republicans understand these dynamics, too, which is why they have not been satisfied with simply trying to suppress the vote. They have also gerrymandered districts, so it’s functionally impossible for them to lose, no matter how many people turn out. And since 2020, they have also been working methodically to make it harder for the Democratic Party to win the next presidential election, even if its candidate does manage to bring home more votes than their opponent.
This initiative has two components—and the first is simple: stripping everyone who stood up to Donald Trump in 2020 of their power. Remember Aaron Van Langevelde, who certified the results of the election in Michigan, despite President Trump’s pressure campaign? He lost his seat on the board. Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach President Trump after the insurrection, also had her leadership positions taken away. Brad Raffensperger was targeted, too, faced with a primary campaign from a candidate backed by President Trump himself.
(Many of the other Republicans who criticized Trump in the aftermath of January 6, meanwhile, have repented by backing off their claims. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House, who initially admitted that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on the Capitol, ended up spearheading the effort to punish Cheney. Mitch McConnell has now pledged to “absolutely” support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Lindsey Graham, for his part, returned to regularly going down to Mar-a-Lago to golf with Trump.)
The upshot is clear: The reason President Trump’s coup failed wasn’t that Republicans were willing to stand up to him. It was that in most states, votes were still counted and certified by people who put their patriotism above their party—or weren’t political to begin with. Which brings me to the second aspect of the Republican attack on democracy in the aftermath of the 2020 election: making sure that in the future, they will be the ones running elections.
As a report from the nonpartisan nonprofit organization Protect Democracy found, states across the country have introduced bills that would provide partisan, gerrymandered legislatures with more authority over how presidential elections are conducted, allowing them to micromanage who is on the voter rolls, how ballots are counted, and, in some cases, whether the results get certified.
It’s unclear how many of these bills will become law, though in Georgia, one of them has already passed, transferring many of the responsibilities that were once in the hands of the secretary of state (read: Brad Raffensperger) to the Republican state legislature (read: die-hard Trumpers). But the fact that these bills are even being introduced is a terrifying prospect in itself. Because it’s proof that the idea of questioning the results of a democratic election is no longer fringe. It’s in the new Republican mainstream. And even with these bills still in limbo, conspiracy theorists who believed President Trump’s allegations about the 2020 election have risen to power across the country, winning positions as local voting judges and inspectors in Pennsylvania and seats on canvassing boards in Michigan. As President Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, declared on an episode of his podcast, “We’re taking over all the elections.”
And whether Trump ends up being on the ballot again in 2024 or not, it’s difficult to picture the next Republican candidate for president rejecting help from these elements of the party willing to do anything to make sure they come out on top, whether or not they win the most votes.
We could always get lucky.
In 2024, Republicans could decide to do the right thing and certify the results of the election regardless of which candidate comes out on top.
But should we bet our democracy on it?
If a Democrat is winning—especially if there is a tighter margin than there was in 2020—Republicans may once again spread the lie that the election has been decided by widespread voter fraud. Perhaps this time, Republicans will control the certification process in swing states, while also maintaining control of Congress, which has the final say on whether a presidential election is ratified; and perhaps they will use that power to overturn the will of the people.
That would be the kind of wound from which a nation never recovers.
Which leaves us with an existential question: How do we save our democracy before it’s too late?