How Amy Coney Barrett Killed Trump’s Reelection Chances
By: Carl L Lane
Tags: Supreme Court, Trump, Election 2020, Politics, Life

How Amy Coney Barrett Killed Trump’s Reelection Chances

Her appointment gave republicans the freedom to abandon him

Photo by Galen Crout on Unsplash

Donald Trump is not a republican. Donald Trump himself is a Trump loyalist. He only started calling himself a republican for the first time in his life when he realized there were black people living in the White House who weren’t being paid to clean up the place, or serve dinner to visiting dignitaries.

While in the aftermath of his election loss President Trump claims that votes were stolen or that voting machines were rigged to turn millions of votes for him into fraudulent votes for President-elect Joe Biden, this is not the first occasion where he has made such claims. In the presidential election of 2012 Trump claimed that rigged voting machines had switched millions of votes for republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney into votes for then incumbent democratic President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump made several big mistakes that led to his most recent defeat. Spending months telling republican voters that mail in ballots couldn’t be trusted was certainly one of his biggest. His failure to pivot to less extremist views was also hurtful. It simply left too little room for error. But the nail in Trumps political coffin was when he allowed himself to be talked into nominating Justice Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the election.

As mentioned earlier, Donald Trump isn’t really a republican. And though the average republican voter has clearly been fooled into the idea that Trump is indeed a republican, the republicans who run the voting apparatus have not been so fooled. People like republican senators Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham, who once said that if republicans nominated Trump it would be the end of the Republican party itself, knew that Trump was merely a populist vehicle that they could use to deliver certain far right political goals.

Donald Trump should have held off on filling the seat. He should have told all the members of the republican establishment that if they wanted that seat filled by a republican they needed to make sure that he won reelection. He should have held the seat on the Supreme Court hostage.

Once Trump had filled the seat it allowed the republican establishment to quietly accept Trump’s likely defeat and shift their efforts to protecting republican candidates in down ballot races. The evidence of this shift is apparent in the number of congressional races where republicans running for the Senate or the House of Representatives won in states where the incumbent republican president, Trump, lost.

If Trump could have gone to republican voters and the republican establishment and told them that if he didn’t win the democrats would take over the Supreme Court, that might have been the shot in the arm that was needed for him to win. But with the Supreme Court secured for decades to come, and having already gotten their corporate tax cut, republicans would have liked for Trump to win, but he was no longer actually necessary. He was like a match that’s already been struck.

President Trump has long known that many republicans didn’t really like him, and he’d expressed his distrust for them on many occasions. So for him to trust them to really put their all into his reelection when he no longer had anything they needed, was a fatal mistake. He should have left the seat vacant until after the election. He should have held it over the heads of congressional republicans like a threat.

But he gave them the milk for free without making them buy the cow. Even now, if there was an open Supreme Court seat hanging in the balance, every republican alive would be backing Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud and conspiracy theories. Instead Trump is a carrot-less horseman.

If he had won, republicans would have likely started trying to get conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas to retire so they could fill his seat with someone younger. But with Amy Coney Barrett having been seated, republicans will likely control the court for decades to come. With the Affordable Care Act and Roe V Wade being primary targets of republicans, Trump is no longer their favorite necessary evil. He’s still very popular with republican voters, so republicans in congress are reluctant to be openly critical of Trump or his refusal to concede an election he lost an entire month ago.

Still, republicans in congress are much more focused on the two Georgia runoffs for control of the U.S. Senate than they are on recounting ballots in states where Trump lost and other republicans won. President Trump now curses the names of republicans that he championed just weeks ago, because he sees they have come to see him as something of a political corpse. The flies buzz around him, and the buzzards peck at his rotting flesh.

If Trump had instead been finishing a second term it might have made more sense to nominate Amy Coney Barrett before the election. If, as many suspect, he didn’t really give a damn about the political future of Vice President Mike Pence, he might have filled the seat so he could hear the crowds cheer for him once last time on his way out. They might have compared him to Reagan then. They might have named a conversion therapy clinic after him.

If Donald Trump would have gone into the election with an open Supreme Court seat hanging in the balance, he would have been the prettiest girl at the ball. Everybody would’ve wanted to dance with him. He wouldn’t have ended up begging people to be friends with him. He wouldn’t have been left alone to wonder why nobody is answering his calls.