Molly Ball put together a fascinating look at the year long effort by various advocates to secure the election. It's quite long, so I'll summarize. It was apparent to everyone that Trump would try to disrupt the election, so they put into place mechanisms and plans to prevent that from happening. They created a bipartisan group that could bring unique pressure on people like the heads of the Michigan legislatures, whom Trump brought to the White House and tried to bully into thwarting the election.
There was one other interesting tidbit: they kept a tight rein on street protests in the days after the election and on 1/6. They deprived Trump of what he wanted, the street violence that dictators use to crush democracy. Hitler, deprived of it, burned the Reichstag himself and blamed it on his enemies. Trump hoped that his mob might clash with antifa or whatever. It never happened.
The sad question remains to me: did the righteous outpouring of anger over George Floyd, Breanna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery actually make the election closer than it otherwise would have been? Did Trump's apocalyptic message - beginning with the Golden Escalator, through his inaugural address, Charlottesville and on - resonate more with those white voters who turned out in record numbers to make things much closer than they ever, ever should have been?
There have been several days in the past week, where I haven't really checked the news. It's been nice. As we move on from Trump and Trumpism, as the crimes of 1/6 become increasingly catalogued and exposed, will that aura of American Carnage fade away? Will Joe Biden succeed in Making American Boring Again? I'm cautiously optimistic. The takeaway of Ball's reporting is that democracy didn't triumph over Trump without a strong bipartisan coalition. The assumption could be that we are simply waiting for a slicker, smarter Trump. Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe the moment of American Carnage has passed.
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