We have no cause to doubt Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, there. We have compelling evidence to distrust Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, on that vital score.
By now, anyone paying even cursory attention should be familiar with Trump’s transgressions on those fronts. Those trespasses began with Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But since repeated patterns of prevarication make intentional dishonesty easier to recognize, it’s important to realize that 2020 wasn’t the first time Trump pushed a stolen-election claim. He initiated that particular falsehood after the very first political contest in which he participated, the 2016 Iowa caucuses.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it,” Trump declared after the Texas Republican senator beat him there.
He resorted to a similar lie in November 2016. After winning a legitimate Electoral College victory but losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, Trump claimed: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” There weren’t, of course, millions of illegal votes.
Thus no one should have been at all surprised when, faced with a clear Joe Biden victory in 2020, Trump quickly returned to his rote claim of election theft. Now, it would be one thing if Trump had simply made that claim to assuage his own bruised ego, but then, when his legal challenges were exhausted, conceded defeat with no further ado.
Instead, he elevated his election denialism into an entirely new realm of democracy-disdaining recklessness. He and his team concocted multifaceted schemes to overturn Biden’s victory, the most prominent of which focused on pressuring then-vice president Mike Pence to completely overstep his ceremonial presiding officer’s role in the congressional vote certification.
“President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes,” Pence told Fox News last year.
As part of his election-subversion efforts, Trump called MAGA to Washington, D.C., for vote-certification day, claiming that it was, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” saying there would be a “Big protest in D.C.” and urging them to “Be there, will be wild.”
When MAGA answered his call, he then kindled the flames of violence with his speech at the Ellipse. Trump points out that he said his supporters would be going to Capitol Hill “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” That is true. But that was a single cautionary note, sandwiched between long litanies of lies, and followed by warnings that if Biden were allowed to take office, “our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that”; urgings that “we’re going to have to fight much harder”; and the contention that the 2020 election, which his own team had told him was basically fraud free, was “the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.” And of course the ominous exhortation near the conclusion of his incendiary address: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Trump then watched on TV the mad melee that ensued for several hours before finally tweeting out a video that, after repeating his stolen-election nonsense and telling the MAGA marauders that “We love you. You’re very special,” finally urged them to leave the Capitol.
In his debate with Harris, Trump was pressed on whether he had any regrets about what he had done that day. “I had nothing to do with that, other than they asked me to make a speech,” he said. “I showed up for a speech.”
That is utter rot. Without his lies, scheming, and summons to MAGA, there would have been no angry mob, no attempted auto-coup, no police-pummeling assault on the sacred secular temple of our democracy.
Trump’s behavior was not just dishonest. It was disgraceful. It should disqualify him for anyone who truly values our democracy.
Sadly, too many of today’s Republicans put political power over what were once bipartisan civic principles and norms. That’s why those who still cherish our system must speak up for the overarching importance of democracy.
Without it, little else under campaign discussion really matters.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.
