Trump and Cummings: a glimmer of hope?

After a pleasant interlude to talk about more entertaining subjects, like some great TV series, it’s time to return to uglier business. Such as the weird but far from wonderful doings of Donald Trump and his little imitators littering the world today.

At least the outlook’s beginning to seem less bleak. Trump showed as much in his first public statement since his defeat was confirmed. Speaking of the need for Coronavirus lockdowns, he said:

I will not go – this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the – whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration will be.

He stopped himself in time, but he did seem to be on the brink of admitting that it might soon be another administration taking those decisions. 

Trump: is it beginning to dawn on him that he is, after all, a Loser?

That leaves the question of why he’s bothering to keep on flailing around and insisting that it isn’t over yet. A possible reason I’ve seen announced is that, just so long as he keeps fighting the result, he can go on raising money to support his efforts. Apparently, he’s diverting perhaps as much as half what he raises to fund the debts of the election campaign.

The other possibility is that he’s simply stuck in Denial, or one of the other five stages of grief. You’ll remember that one of those stages is Bargaining. I reckon that could include another ‘B’, Begging, like Trump in Pennsylvania early in October:

Suburban women, will you please like me? Please. Please.

Then there’s the Anger stage. Well, there’s plenty of examples to pick from. Take what he tweeted about Fox News, when that network, so slavishly supportive of his Presidency for four years, started calling a win for Biden: 

Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!

There’s plenty of Denial too. Remember Trump’s recent all-caps Tweet, “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!”? Over 5 million popular votes and 70 electoral college votes behind, but he won by a lot? Yep, that’s Denial all right. 

The next stage is Depression. Disappearing from public view for five days? Clearing off to play golf on two of them? Something between Denial and Depression, perhaps. There’s plenty for Trump to be depressed about, after all, above all that there’s no term in his lexicon more insulting than ‘Loser’, and he’s lost. 

So maybe he’s sliding towards the last stage: Acceptance. Perhaps that’s why he seemed to be starting to recognise that decisions about lockdowns may not be his to take too much longer. 

If he can persuade himself to go quietly, he’ll be doing everyone a favour. Above all the country he claims to care for so much. Because the alternative explanation of his behaviour today is chilling. 

It is that all those failing lawsuits he’s launched aren’t even intended to win, but merely to spread confusion and doubt about the election. That would reinforce the constant flow of misinformation coming out of the Trump camp. That’s because in an atmosphere of suspicion about results in a handful of key States that voted for Biden but have Republican legislatures, those legislatures might feel they have the grounds to override the popular will. Then they would appoint slates of electors themselves. Pro-Trump, of course. So those States would submit two rival slates for authorities to choose between.

Something like that happened in 1876. And, back then, with a Democratic candidate who only needed one additional elector to become President, the process adopted for deciding between disputed slates in four states, awarded every one of them to his Republican opponent.

I don’t say that Trump is deliberately following such a strategy, if only because I don’t think the man has ever shown the intellectual firepower needed to think strategically. But it’s possible that some of the people in his campaign have the brains to develop something along those lines. And they have the impetus given them by the strange silence of leading Republicans. 

These are people who must know Trump has been beaten but won’t say so. Why not? Because they know even Loser Trump has a huge following, and they don’t want those votes turning against them when they’re next up for election themselves.

Trump stealing the election would massively undermine democracy itself. It’s a move that Biden and the Democrats generally have to be ready to fight all the way. That’s why it’s so significant that Trump may be moving towards accepting defeat instead: that would spare his country a truly devastating event.

Getting Trump out would also benefit many other countries around the world. If he goes, then we may find that the wave of autocratic government by right-wing populists has at last crested. The likes of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orbán in Hungary or Duterte in the Philippines might all be under threat.

It’s already beginning to happen in one regime headed by a mini-Trump. That’s in Britain. The British government is ostensibly led by Boris Johnson, whose incompetence is rivalled only by his idleness. His richly undeserved reputation for decisiveness has repeatedly been undermined by his evasions or U-turns, reversing today a decision taken a few weeks earlier, often against the advice of experts, the Opposition and even members of his own Party.

Dominic Cummings: a baleful presence leaving Downing Street

Given Johnson’s extraordinary idleness, the chief architect of this shambles has been his principal adviser, Dominic Cummings. That’s a man who believes himself above the law, who can issue Coronavirus lockdown restrictions and then break them himself with no retribution from his weak boss, a man whose very reputation is based on a lie (the campaign for Brexit which claimed, spuriously, that it would release £350m a week for the NHS) and who’s known as a bully and authoritarian.

But Cummings has now gone. Not because he’s a liar and a bully, but for reasons much more characteristic of the chaotic government he was directing: the jousting for personal power within the coterie that surrounds the Prime Minister. And, finally, for having been offensive towards the Prime Minister’s girlfriend, another unelected figure who seems to think her views should matter in government.

The departure of Cummings, however belated and however badly motivated, is another weakening of authoritarian populists’ grip on power. It’s too early to say that these autocrats are on the retreat. But at least there’s now a glimmer of hope.