Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

"Let’s run a reality check. Trump did not win his war on American institutions; he lost reelection. He went to truly appalling lengths to try to overturn the results, but he never got close." https://t.co/inwkPdj28E

— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) January 25, 2022

We’re fast approaching the point where a subscription to The Atlantic is a risk factor for suicide. “January 6 Was Practice,” announces the cover of the current issue, flagging a story by Barton Gellman headlined, “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” The cover is yellow lettering against a pitch-black background, a design scheme that would appear at first glance to announce the assassination of an American president. 

It was the fourth pitch-black Atlantic cover in two years. The previous one (“We Mourn for All We Do Not Know,” March 2021) flagged, among other stories, one whose headline announced that American democracy was “hanging by a thread.” An earlier pitch-black Atlantic cover (“How to Destroy a Government,” April 2020) flagged a George Packer doom-’n’-gloomer headlined, “The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions.” (Packer meant Donald Trump.) 

I’m not the only one to notice The Atlantic’s depressive new cast. At Commentary (“The Atlantic’s Nervous Breakdown”), Christine Rosen describes the magazine’s “Eeyore-Meets-Nietzsche” vibe and suggests that just as The New Yorker’s mascot is a monocled Eustace Tilly, so perhaps The Atlantic’s should be Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

You get the idea. I mean, does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

Let’s run a reality check. Trump did not win his war on American institutions; he lost reelection. He went to truly appalling lengths to try to overturn the results, but he never got close. He and his allies filed 62 lawsuits. They won exactly one, a minor scuffle in Pennsylvania over whether voters could provide necessary identification after, rather than before, they mailed in their ballots. Not a single electoral ballot was changed. Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution tallied pro-Trump votes among individual Republican-affiliated judges in state courts and found they numbered 26, against 49 anti-Trump votes. None of these few pro-Trump votes prevailed. That’s why Trump resorted to supporting a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Trump’s irresponsible incitement before the riot and his refusal to stop it after it began remains a scandal for which he must be held accountable. Seven people died, including three police officers, and 150 police were injured. It was horrific. But nobody for a moment believed the attack would prevent the proper counting of electoral ballots, and as I wrote in November, the January 6 defendants, now babbling to judges about how sorry they are and how they were duped, are an insult to the very idea of revolution.

And apropos of what I mentioned earlier about mail-in ballots in Texas:

One reason voter suppression is a weak partisan tool may be that Republican state laws that enact it often backfire by provoking higher turnout from the very pissed-off targeted groups. Or they miss the intended target. There’s some evidence that Trump’s vocal opposition in 2020 to mail-in ballots actually cost him the election, given the greater propensity of elderly voters, who were likelier to support Trump, to mail in their ballots.

To all of this we could now add the special grand jury in Georgia, investigating specifically Trump’s efforts to change the outcome of the election. Not to mention the electoral college shenanigans which the National Archives started investigating the moment false certificates were received (which means that investigation has been underway for longer than we knew). Now we know the DOJ is investigating. There’s a whole lot going on here. Democracy is dying? No. Democracy is responding to criminal acts. As I’ve said before, this ain’t TeeVee. Cases aren’t started, investigated, prosecuted, and won, in the space of an hour. Just because they aren’t doesn’t mean the republic has fallen and we should be digging the State’s grave.

I especially like the description of the Jan. 6th defendants crying about being in court, about being responsible for what they did. Revolutionaries? No, children. Superannuated children. These are the people you are supposed to be afraid of.