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John M. Crisp is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service who lives in Texas.
My MAGA friends keep telling me to just get over it. Election 2020 is history, they say. Donald Trump has been reelected, and we should, as JD Vance put it when pressed on the 2020 election during the vice presidential debate, focus on the future.
But the 2020 election is as much about the future as it is the past. It’s a mistake to just forget it. Here are three good reasons why:
First: Democracy is a rare and fragile institution. Others have made this point, but it’s easy to forget. Our republic is probably the world’s all-time best example of practical democracy, but it’s naive to underestimate its fragility.
Our country depends on laws, rules, norms and traditions to keep our republic going, but laws and norms can take us only so far. The Founders recognized that a democracy depends heavily on the public commitment of citizens and leaders to the principle that the majority rules (usually) and that the will of the majority is determined by elections.
Rising authoritarians always resort to three tactics: Convincing the citizenry to fear an external or internal threat; demonizing the press; and undermining confidence in elections.
Trump checks all three boxes, but the third is the biggest threat to democracy. A democratic nation might be fearful. It might distrust the press. But it cannot survive if its citizens do not have faith in their elections. Trump’s persistent contention that the 2020 election was rigged might be the tipping point that undoes the nation. It should be refuted at every turn.
Two: I refuse to get over the 2020 election until Trump gets over it. Before Kristen Welker asked Trump about the 2020 election in last week’s “Meet the Press” interview, Trump himself brought it up, asserting that he actually won. (To be clear, he did not.)
Trump has a right to his private fantasy about the election, but its public expression isn’t harmless to democracy, and it’s especially threatening when he imposes it on others. Reporting from The New York Times indicates that applicants for high posts at the Pentagon or intelligence agencies in the Trump administration are required to answer a set of questions that represent a test of their loyalty to Trump. One of the questions asks if the applicant thinks the 2020 election was stolen. Evidently there’s only one right answer.
In fact, to be associated with Trump requires public or tacit acceptance of his victory in 2020, which, if we want leaders who believe in democracy, pretty much disqualifies all of his nominees.
Three: Finally, the 2020 election is indeed in the past, but there will be another presidential election in 2028. Donald Trump probably won’t be on the ballot, but another Trump might be. Or, more likely, Vance.
In 2024, the nation chose Trump; the Democrats accepted it. President Joe Biden invited Trump for a two-hour meeting in the White House. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will attend Trump’s inauguration. I suspect that most or all of the past presidents will attend, as well, in a public acknowledgment of the essential tenet of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. A spokesperson for Jimmy Carter said that even he would attend, if he weren’t in hospice.
But what if the nation changes its mind in 2028? Will the MAGA-fied Republican Party, thoroughly entrenched in power after four more years of judicial appointments, quietly accept a Democratic victory?
It doesn’t seem likely. The willing relinquishment of power by the Republican Party in 2028 is hard to imagine, but the end of democracy is not.
If this happens, historians, to the extent that they can speak freely in a Trumpified America, will someday date the demise of American democracy not to 2028 or to Jan. 6, 2021, but, rather, to Election 2020, when Trump began to convince too many Americans to either believe the Big Lie, to not necessarily believe it, but accept it anyway, or to just not care.
And that’s why we must never forget that Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.