How bad could it get? America’s ugly election

How not to be a loser

Nils Gilman of the Berggruen Institute, a

think-tank, one of the founders of the Tran-

sition Integrity Project, says one of the les-

sons he took away from June’s war games

was that “the aggression of the first mover

had a really decisive effect on how the

game played out”. If instead of just tweet-

ing that counts should be stopped, as he

did when he saw the blue shift in action in

2018, Mr Trump gave consequential orders

to that end, they might be followed. Nearly

80 left-leaning groups have joined what

they call the Protect the Results coalition,

which aims to push state election officials

to keep counting whatever the president

says or does.

If Mr Trump refuses to concede, Sean El-

dridge, who founded Protect the Results,

vows “an unprecedented presence on the

streets.” This year, when the presence of

politics on the streets in the form of justi-

fied peaceful protest has been used a pre-

text for rioting and looting, and when a

Trump supporter has been arrested for

murder after going to Kenosha, Wisconsin

as an armed vigilante, “unprecedented”

has a disturbing ring to it.

Mr Gilman’s other conclusion from the

war-game was “just how few boundaries

there are on a sitting president who is un-

bounded by democratic norms and unre-

strained by his own political party”. It is in

the fact that there is a sitting president, and

one who meets that description, that one

sees the most important difference be-

tween this year’s prospects and the previ-

ous contested election result. In 2000

George W. Bush and Al Gore were challeng-

ers on an equal footing. When the Supreme

Court decided, in a five to four decision

along ideological lines, that moves to re-

count Florida’s votes should be ended, giv-

ing victory to Mr Bush, Mr Gore stepped

aside. In the eloquent and graceful conces-

sion speech he gave on December 13th, 36

days after the election, he called on all

Americans to “unite behind our next presi-

dent”, and asked God to bless Mr Bush’s

stewardship. He also expressed a hope that

“the very closeness [of the contest] can

serve to remind us that we are one people

with a shared history and a shared destiny.”

Today those words sound like a dispatch

from another country.

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