Trump Vs McCain, How A Small Difference In Gesture Can Ruin It All.
By: Satchin Semage
Tags: Leadership, Trump, Election 2020, Elections, Biden

What an election we had. We got a new president-elect, and the former president does not look like he is willing to let go of his seat in the Whitehouse. As of this moment where I write this, Trump’s office has filed lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia against the election results. He kept on tweeting about corruption in the system.

Even before a month before the elections, the polls gave signs that Trump might lose his seat. Around the same time, the president started to talk about possible corruption. Especially with a recorded number of emergency ballots coming in, he knew most of that ballots must favor Biden. It was simple logic, most of the people who decided to go with the mail-in option were afraid of contracting the virus. Most Trump supporters did not believe in this.

I am not here to bash Trump nor praise Joe. But to point out a typical behavior that we have seen throughout history. Since 2000, we have had 5 elections if we omit the 2020 one. Out of that, 3 went in favor of Republicans while 2 went in favor of Democrats. In 2008, when John McCain lost his election, he came out to deliver his concession speech. There he mentioned that he called Obama to congratulate him. As soon as John said those words, the crowd started to boo. John McCain cuts his speech off to doze off the booing, singeing a rejection of that behavior from his end. That is one way to leave an election. That was the accepted way.

Donald Trump, who is famous for not following the common way at all, decided to go down a different path. Right now, we all know what that path is. Whatever the path they take to go down, in 3 months after the election, the losing candidate will be out of the picture. Therefore one could argue that it is not very impactful to talk about the way they accept it. Yet, I find it very important to analyze. This is not to understand the candidates but to see the residual impacts they leave among their supporters.

After every election, the supporters of the losing candidate go through the same process. Though it was the candidate who truly lost, all hardcore supporters go through a period of grief. From the times where the results start to look a bit unfavorable, they get into a phase of denial. They look for ways to prove themselves that this is not happening. When McCain was delivering his concession speech, his supporters were on that stage in grief. That is why when McCain showed signs of acceptance, they started booing the former president Obama. If you know a little bit about the stages of grief, you should probably know that this stage is the most vulnerable.

As McCain said he called Obama, they were expecting something that could feed into their denial. However, being an experienced politician himself knew better than that. He immediately understood the disappointment in the crowd. But instead of feeding into it, he was quick to point out the truth. They were all following him and looking up to him. When their leader showed them the direction, the whole crowd moved from denial to acceptance in seconds. All he had to do was to stop his speech for a second to calm the audience. It was as simple as that.

Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

Decade forward into 2020, Trump was facing the same challenge. His first bad decision came way before the election. When Covid 19 hit the country, he behaved in a very peculiar way. He deliberately undermined the recommendations of the scientific community and went on as if there was no virus. He made sure his followers do the same, and they took it from there. Trump’s followers refused to wear masks or even acknowledge that there is a deadly virus. They went to court against mandating everyone to wear the mask. His supports became very creative in supporting the virus to breakout. A few months later, people decided to vote for someone who can get the pandemic under control over any issue. Just like McCain, Trump only had to give one statement asking everyone to follow the guidelines and stay safe. If he did that, his followers would have been the ambassadors who fought the virus on the front lines.

Similarly, When the results began to be unfavorable to Trump, he started to play the last trump he had. He could have just taken the results as it is, and move on. But Trump being Trump, decided to call out fraud in the election. All his supporters who were at the denial stage in their loss embraced it in seconds. Now all of a sudden, half of the population in the country has lost their faith in the very system that is supposed to keep the democracy of the county.

All of that is because Trump didn’t want to go down as the bigger man. Yes, now people will talk about the election. Different conspiracy theories will surface. Trump himself might be able to live with those and believe he did not lose the election. But the damage he did to the minds of the general public will take years to heal.

I am sure that some of you have opposing ideas about this. I encourage you to see the point that I try to make instead of looking at it as another liberal article aimed at the President.