It hasn’t even been a year since President Donald Trump, the temporary resident of the White House, unilaterally announced he was adding a $200 million ballroom. (He didn’t mention he’d be tearing down the century-old East Wing to make room.) In the 11 months since, the estimated cost of the project that he repeatedly boasts is “under budget and ahead of schedule” has grown by a factor of seven. So has Trump’s list of capital vanity projects: a renamed, redesigned Trump-Kennedy Center, a 250-foot triumphal arch, a so-called heroes garden of 250 statues, a $13 million resurfaced Reflecting Pool, gold-leafed equestrian statues, and a new plan he sprung just last week for a “Trump promenade” from the Lincoln Memorial to the Potomac River.
At least Trump’s name is coming off the memorial dedicated by law to the assassinated President Kennedy, thanks to a court order with which officials actually seem to be complying. Other Trump projects also face legal and political challenges that, polls suggest, most Americans hope will end or at least greatly shrink his self-branded capital makeover.
But there’s an extra noxious irony of Trump’s imperial building spree. It’s underway even as he continues his decade-plus teardown of the metaphorical foundations of democracy: trust in free and fair elections.
Trump’s Big Lie about rigged elections and Democrats’ supposed cheating — California being his latest target — is by now so familiar that many of us are all but inured to it, and have been for a long time. That’s understandable, and arguably good for our mental health, but collectively dangerous for the nation. The majority of Republican voters accept the lie as truth.
What better time than the summer of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence to reflect on how Trump’s years of lying have corroded the citizenry’s essential belief in the integrity of elections? Attention must be paid, especially ahead of midterm elections in November.
With Republican candidates expected to get a drubbing given Trump’s unpopularity, the president is expected to cry fraud in response — or, worse, employ the powers of government, even the military, to contest the results. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has warned as much.
“I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections,” Warner began an op-ed in late March in the New York Times. “It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government.”
What might lie ahead is of course well worth contemplating and guarding against however we can. But let us not overlook the damage Trump has already done to the body politic.
Not so long ago, Americans generally took for granted that elections were on the up and up. With each year, more Americans don’t even recall such halcyon days. If I had a dollar for every time Trump has baselessly cried “rigged election” since 2015, I could build my own ballroom.
When trust in voting falls — as it has in the Trump years, especially among Republicans — so does voter turnout. Worse, millions of future voters are growing up not believing as I did that U.S. elections were a model for the world. Instead too many accept as a given of public discourse that our elections are suspect and an embarrassment to the world. Because no less than the president of the United States says so.
Just last month in the Oval Office, Trump was surrounded by young students as he slumped in his chair at the Resolute Desk (for an event on physical fitness), and his meandering remarks included yet again a denial of his 2020 defeat: “Bad things happened. It was a rigged election.”
What an education for those youngsters. Directly from the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to reject an election result and refuse to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power to another. A role model he’s not.
Trump’s tirades against California have predictably come in response to the state’s usual slow count after last week’s elections of the overwhelming number of mail-in ballots (which Trump also calls fraudulent, and wants to ban, though he votes by mail himself). On Tuesday evening, his baseless case was further undercut when Republican Steve Hilton won the second spot on November’s ballot for governor, up against Democrat Xavier Becerra.
On NBC’s“Meet the Press” June 7, Trump was so irate at being told that he had no evidence, none, to support allegations that both the California elections and his 2020 loss were rigged that he ended the interview. “We’re like a third-world country. Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked,” he told moderator Kristen Welker (condescendingly calling her “darling” as he stomped off, crushing the dropped mic).
Current Trump-fearing Republican officeholders and office-seekers — including Hilton; Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California now obsequiously probing for fraud; and Trump nominees for judgeships and high-ranking executive posts — all refuse to call the president on his lies. By contrast, it was eight former Republican officeholders, including former senators and federal judges, who in 2022 issued a report, “Lost, Not Stolen,” debunking Trump’s 2020 election myths by examining the scores of failed pro-Trump court cases.
But for Trump’s narcissism and insecurity it would be inexplicable that, reelected in 2024, he’d still be lying about 2020 and undermining Americans’ faith in democracy. He may succeed in building monuments to himself, but here’s hoping the American people refuse to let him do to democracy what he did to the East Wing.
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