The Republican Mutiny and 2016 Whataboutism
Tags: Election 2020, Whataboutism, Trump, 2016 Election, Voter Fraud

The Republican Mutiny and 2016 Whataboutism

Left: Donald Trump (Al Drago/Getty Images); Right: Hillary Clinton (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Even after the Electoral College officially proclaimed Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election on December 14, Donald Trump has continued to insist that he won and that he still has a path to victory. Many Republicans, including elected officials, are continuing to play along and amplify outlandish election-fraud theories. To some “Never Trump” conservatives such as The Bulwark’s Mona Charen, this situation is a clear sign that the GOP is suffering from terminal Trumpism and cannot be saved. Yet other commentators who can hardly be classified as pro-Trump — or even compulsively anti-anti-Trump — have argued that what the Republicans are doing today is basically the same as what the Democrats did after the 2016 election.

Case in point: Noah Rothman’s December 14 Commentary post titled “The Last Time They Tried to Steal an Election.”

I should preface this by saying that I’m a fan of Rothman’s work. He generally doesn’t hold back on criticism of Trump and the Trump administration. His criticism of the Democrats and the left-of-center press is often well-deserved. On December 15, for instance, he correctly chided the media for rushing to compliment Vladimir Putin for finally acknowledging Biden’s victory on a day when breaking news about a massive hack of U.S. government agencies should have made for some very bad press for the man in the Kremlin.

But Rothman’s election-theft piece ultimately founders on moral equivalency.

Granted, it starts out with strong criticism of the Trump team’s attempt to overturn the election. But Rothman argues that, while Trump’s refusal to concede is indeed unprecedented, the effort to invalidate an election is not: “Follow the trail back four years, and we’re reminded of the unrelenting public and private campaign to block Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.”

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That campaign in 2016 was an effort to persuade Republican electors not to vote for Trump. As Politico documented, it took some ugly forms, with reports of death threats and other harassment, and a few electors saying they were bombarded with thousands of emails. (Some also complained of aggressive pressure from the GOP to make sure they did vote for Trump.) There was also, as Rothman writes, a push to provide electors with a classified briefing on Russian interference in the election prior to certifying the vote led by Christine Pelosi, daughter of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Rothman does not mention that the younger Pelosi made this request in her capacity as an elector and without any public backing from Pelosi mère.) This effort received support from Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, giving rise to speculation that the Clinton campaign was questioning the legitimacy of Trump’s victory.

Additionally, according to Rothman:

If this effort had only the tacit endorsement of some of the Democratic Party’s leading lights, it received unqualified support on many of the nation’s most prominent op-ed pages.

As evidence, he cites Washington Post op-eds by Kathleen Parker and Lawrence Lessig urging electors to go rogue, as well as a New York Times op-ed by Columbia Law School professor David Pozen which “noted that there were few state-level legal obstacles and no constitutional impediments before would-be renegade electors” and a column by Paul Krugman saying that the “tainted election… shouldn’t be allowed to cool.”

But that’s a fairly misleading description of both the Pozen op-ed and the Krugman column.

Pozen did not call for electors to nullify Trump’s Electoral College victory; he simply explained that such an action would be legal and difficult to prevent. He also pointed out its considerable dangers:

The fact that an elector can vote her conscience does not necessarily mean she should. The proper course of action depends not only on what Mr. Trump might be like in the White House, but also on what the effects of an Electoral College revolt would be. Mr. Trump’s critics may be overstating or misreading the danger he poses. The effort to thwart his presidency may be so unlikely to succeed, or so likely to cause destructive political alienation and social unrest, that the game is not worth the candle. A failed attempt might only feed Mr. Trump’s paranoia and aggravate his illiberal tendencies.

Pozen’s ultimate conclusion was not that electors should turn against Trump but that this controversy illustrates “the folly of the Electoral College.” If electors are supposed to simply rubber-stamp their state’s popular vote, the institution is pointless; if they can vote their conscience, it’s democracy-subverting.

As for Krugman’s column, “A Tainted Election,” it explicitly stated that “the vote won’t be overturned” (emphasis added). It did argue that Democrats should not treat Trump as a morally legitimate president in the sense of affording him the customary deference and benefit of the doubt.

And Krugman’s argument, in contrast to those made today on behalf of Trump, began from a factual premise: “The C.I.A. determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump.” That assessment was subsequently confirmed by reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee. On the other hand, Trump’s claims of mass voter fraud in 2020 are so baseless that his lawyers aren’t even making them in court.

In another misleading passage, Rothman writes that “Democratic campaign attorneys lost most of their many efforts to challenge state-level vote counts” and that “Politico determined that they were ‘winning on optics.’” But the link goes to an article published the day before the election, about Democratic challenges to voting procedures alleged to be unfair or unduly burdensome — not anything to do with the outcome. (The only post-election attempts to challenge the actual vote results came from Green Party candidate Jill Stein.)

So, when all is said and done, Rothman’s claim of an attempted “election steal” in 2016 amounts to ten electors pushing for the Electoral College to annul Trump’s victory; one or two high-level Democratic officials expressing cautious sympathy for this effort; Martin Sheen and some other celebrities making videos urging Trump electors to defect; opinion pieces in prominent publications making the same plea; and an unspecified number of people trying to pressure the electors, sometimes in ways that crossed the lines of civilized behavior. At a stretch, you could also include the Clinton campaign signing on to participate in the Wisconsin recount initiated by Stein.

This is stacked up against :

the president of the United States repeatedly and consistently claiming that he won the election and that his victory was stolen through fraud

over 50 lawsuits trying to get thousands of votes thrown out in several battleground states Joe Biden won

the Republican Attorney General of Texas filing a lawsuit before the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as “unlawful and constitutionally tainted”

the attorneys general of 17 other Republican-led states signing on to the Texas lawsuit (which the Supreme Court ultimately refused to hear)

over half of the House Republican conference — 126 out of 249 members — signing on to a brief supporting the lawsuit

aggressive efforts by Republican legislators in several battleground states to overrule voters from their state and appoint pro-Trump electors by fanning baseless claims of fraud

harassment and threats toward Republican state officials whom Trump supporters accused of complicity in covering up supposed fraud, with at least tacit encouragement by the president, some of his attorneys, and campaign officials

Republicans in six states where Trump has groundlessly disputed Biden’s victory creating “alternate” slates of electors who met and cast their votes for Trump, with encouragement from senior White House advisor Stephen Miller in a Fox News appearance. (In Michigan, the faux electors actually showed up at the state capitol entrance during the certification with the ostensible intent of submitting their votes.)

In other words, there is simply no comparison between the Democratic mutiny in 2016 and the Republican mutiny in 2020 — whether in terms of scope, intensity, or participation by mainstream political figures.

Rothman asserts that, in terms of impact, the Democrats’ tactics in 2016 “were far more successful than what pro-Trump forces have attempted in 2020.” How so? Because there were “two faithless Republican electors in 2016 — more than in any other presidential election since World War II” and one of them, Chris Suprun, briefly enjoyed the spotlight. But it might be helpful to point out that more than twice as many faithless electors defected from Hillary Clinton: one in Hawaii and four in Washington. I’m not sure that qualifies as a Democratic success.

Rothman is correct, I believe, when he says that the effort to hand the election to Trump in 2020 was just as doomed from the start as the effort to block Trump’s path to the White House in 2016. To a large extent, the 2020 election mutiny is theater. When those fake Trump electors showed up at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing and were turned away, they protested verbally in front of the cameras but did not try to force their way in.

This explains the bizarre fact that while the president and a large portion of his political party are going through the motions of an attempted coup, few people seem very worried and life goes on. You might call it an attempted coup simulation.

But to frame panic about the 2020 election-subversion push and lack of panic about supposedly comparable Democratic efforts in 2016 as a case of double standards misses crucial differences.

It’s not only the size, scope, and support for election challenges, but also the reason for them. In 2020, attacks on the election’s validity have come exclusively from Trump supporters, and they are rooted in baseless claims of election fraud. In 2016, the situation was far more complex. Some of those who wanted the election results to be overturned were not Democrats but anti-Trump conservatives or conservative leaners (such as Parker). Some were not even rooting for Clinton to win: another Washington Post op-ed, by Cato Institute fellow Michael Cannon, argued that the best bet for an Electoral College upset was to get Democratic electors to back a “credible Republican alternative” to Trump (in which case it would take just 38 GOP defectors for that person to become president).

A major objection to Trump’s legitimacy stemmed from the belief that his victory was tainted by Russian interference (not actual vote-tampering so much as shenanigans that may have influenced enough voters to tip the outcome, particularly Wikileaks dumping illegally stolen emails, which fed the belief that Clinton had stolen the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders).

It’s true that many Democratic voters falsely believed Russian hackers changed vote totals. A 2018 Economist/YouGov poll found that only 31 percent of Democrats said Russia definitely or probably had not, comparable to just 29 percent of Republicans saying Biden won without fraud in a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. But an average voter saying something to a pollster is quite different from the sitting president saying something to the public as state attorneys general and sitting Congressional Representatives try to get courts to disenfranchise thousands of voters.

What’s more, some of the loudest claims questioning the integrity of the 2016 election came not from Democrats but from Donald Trump. Despite winning the election, Trump insisted — falsely — that millions voted illegally, in an attempt to prove that he actually won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. He went so far as to set up a special commission to find this alleged voter fraud. As with Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election, the commission investigating 2016 found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and disbanded in 2018.

In his “Tainted Election” column, Krugman wrote that one could move on from the Russian meddling and “normalize the incoming administration” if Trump would act as a “healer” or at least show himself capable of “responsible, restrained behavior.” No such luck, obviously:

What we’re actually getting are wild claims that millions of people voted illegally, false assertions of a landslide, and denigration of the intelligence agencies.

One may agree or disagree with Krugman. But it’s difficult not to admit that pretty much everything Trump foes said about his unfitness for the presidency after his victory in 2016 is validated by his behavior after his loss in 2020.

Did many progressive activists and journalists — and some Democratic politicians — embrace extreme rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy theories in their zeal to delegitimize Trump? No doubt. (Though, as I noted in a recent article, this sort of delegitimization of presidents from the opposing party began much earlier with Bill Clinton, and Trump himself was at the forefront of such an effort during the Obama Administration.) But the Republican “stolen election” mutiny of 2020, however performative, is different not only in degree but in kind.

To obscure this fact by pointing at the Democrats in 2016 is not only false equivalence; it also offers an excuse not to confront the uniquely toxic state of today’s Republican Party.