Public opinion polls in the aftermath of the election (if you choose to believe them) have put me in mind of the Fighting Chicken Lips, a group of young men I encountered at a tender age.
More on The Lips, as they sometimes called themselves, in a moment. But first, a data point: About half of Republican voters still believe that Donald Trump “rightfully won” the presidential race. Some polls, in fact, show that more than three-quarters of Trump supporters think Joe Biden’s victory was a result of fraud.
This despite the fact that nobody has produced credible evidence to support Trump’s claim that he was deprived of a second term by a cabal of conspirators that includes a dead Venezuelan dictator, the current government of Cuba, election officials in many states (a lot of them Republicans), software designers and, of course, the president-elect.
As the president’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, explained to ABC News: “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it. Now if that’s true … We need to hire them at the CIA.”
No sitting American president has ever before tried to overthrow an election result. And since so few Republican officials have called out their leader’s behavior, it stands as the position of one of our two major political parties: The U.S. election wasn’t fair. That is, American democracy has failed.