Despite the legitimate elections results, that the Trump administration, so far, has no intention of leaving the Whitehouse in January, is best illustrated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s response that “[t]here will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” when recently asked by reporters about the transition of power to president elect Joe Biden. So while the Trump administration holds the country hostage during a pandemic that it has done little to control, it’s no wonder CNN’s Anderson Cooper vented his frustration by stating: “That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. We see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over.”
In her book “Fascism – A Warning” former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright is more direct: “If we think of Fascism as wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.” Albright says that “we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”
The real concern for the future of democracy in the United States, however, is not Trump’s latest attention grabbing temper tantrum, but the fact that the GOP is not the same party it was before he took office. In fact, Senate Republican’s continued support for Trump’s current bullying behavior, signifies the party’s gradual move away from democratic principals that started long before the 2016 election.
In the summer of 2005, for example, President George W. Bush found that he had two opportunities to replace the U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Conner with conservative idealogues, the New York times warned that we should “[i]magine a country in which Social Security, job safety laws and environmental protections were unconstitutional. Imagine judges longing for that. Imagine one of them as the next Supreme Court nominee [and then] imagine the American public is powerless to stop them.”
Ever since 2005, in addition to continuing to stack the courts, the republican party has been steadily moving further to the right and slowly consolidating power as it moves towards autocracy. In fact, the extent to which the party no longer adheres to democratic ideals and morals is so dramatic that just before the Nov. 3 election, an international team of political scientists was able to quantify it. The V-Dem Institute interviewed over 600 political experts from around the world who made assessments of political parties from different countries adherence to key democratic values and developed a report that illustrates the GOP’s continued it’s decline during the Obama administration with the rise of the tea party whose members accused president Obama of being both a socialist and a Nazi at the same time and suggested that he was subverting the Constitution and then dropped substantially in 2016 after Trump won the presidential election.
According to the V-Dem Institute scientists, GOP’s hedging toward authoritarianism has only become more apparent in the days following the 2020 election. Anna Lührmann political scientist with Sweden’s University of Gothenburg says “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and attempts to declare himself the winner.”
If there’s one thing republican leadership learned from Trump, it’s that, as long as you’re the party in power, you can get away with just about anything. As a result, the not only did the republican party’s hunger for more power sky-rocket under Trump, but both Republican and Democratic rejection of the use of violence against political opponents changed starting with the 2016 campaign. At that time, Trump encouraged violence against opposition protesters and then as President, praised Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte who was convicted of assault for body slamming a reporter and defended right-wing violence in relation to Black Lives Matters protesters.
That Trump’s violent rhetoric during the 2016 election, inspired even elected officials is illustrated by right-wing Kentucky Governor, Matt Bevin’s statement that violence against political opponents may be necessary if Hillary Clinton won. Then in September 2020, Facebook removed a post by Georgia republican congressional, candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene for violating a policy against inciting violence. Regardless, Taylor Greene, who ran largely un-opposed, won and is now serving as Georgia’s representatives in the House.
The transformation of the GOP under Trump therefore, is the realization that as long as they are the party in power, they can get away with just about anything. If democrats, therefore, fail to take the senate in the last election and the main focus of Senate Republicans will be to disrupt Biden’s agenda, so that they can re-claim the presidency in 2024.
As stated by Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post the “V-Dem’s data underscores how much of Many of the GOP leaders going along with Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud will still be in office after he leaves.” Unless the Senate turns once all the ballots are counted, therefore, it best it will be difficult, for example, for Biden to obtain confirmation of cabinet, federal court and other nominees which must be approved by the increasingly authoritarian leaning senate. Similarly, with loss of seats in the House, Democrats lead will be slimmer there and many more will be reluctant to stick their necks out for democracy resulting in less decisive decisions on many issues. At worst, if the senate repulicans are not held accountable for embracing authoritarianism, the future of democracy is in jeopardy.