Members of Congress who sustained the president’s lie, despite the available and unambiguous evidence, betrayed their constitutional mission. An elected institution that opposes elections is inviting its own overthrow. Yet for Congress to traduce its basic functions had a price. The most important among them, Mitch McConnell, indulged Trump’s lie while making no comment on its consequences. They have no interest in the collapse of the peculiar form of representation that allows their minority party disproportionate control of government. One group of Republicans is concerned above all with gaming the system to maintain power, taking full advantage of constitutional obscurities, gerrymandering and dark money to win elections with a minority of motivated voters. Rather than contradict Trump from the beginning, they allowed his electoral fiction to flourish. In this sense, the responsibility for Trump’s push to overturn an election must be shared by a very large number of Republican members of Congress. The point was not simply to ensure that no one branch of government dominated the others but also to anchor in institutions different points of view. Aware of these risks and others, the framers of the Constitution instituted a system of checks and balances. Aristotle worried that, in a democracy, a wealthy and talented demagogue could all too easily master the minds of the populace.

Plato noted a particular risk for tyrants: that they would be surrounded in the end by yes-men and enablers. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the powerful pull of believing what they already believe, or what others around them believe, or what would make sense of their own previous choices. People believed him, which is not at all surprising.

He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.Įven when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent - that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder