Kelley Kidd March 2024
Many TV and print political sites continue to refer to ex president Donald Trump and the Republican party that follows him as “conservative.” That adjective has never described Donald Trump. And as his party is ceasing to be conservative as it becomes ever more dominated by his personality and policies. A reasonable definition of “conservative’ is “a person who upholds traditions and institutions, and who resists changes in those traditions and institutions.” Neither Trump nor the Republican Party now fit that description.
The 2020 national election year was characterized by the struggle of the Republican Party to re-elect then President Donald Trump, to maintain control of the Senate, and to achieve as much political clout as might come from the election of Republicans to “down ballot” offices in Congress and in state and local elections. Trump was defeated by exactly the same electoral college majority that he had amazed most observers by winning four years earlier. The Senate was lost by narrow runoff elections in my home state of Georgia. Otherwise the Republicans did very well, although not quite well enough to wrest control of the House of Representatives from the Democrats.
The most momentous result of the last presidential election, however, was not the identity of the winning candidates or the party of his affiliation. What makes the 2020 elections most significant is the fact that the losing candidate and many million of his supporters refused to accept the result. Trump took the position that he had actually won the election, and was being prevented from remaining the president because the electoral process had been “rigged, stolen and fraudulently manipulated by Democrats in at least the six states which he he had previously won but whose electoral votes were now being cast for his opponent. No presidential candidate in American history had ever taken such a position. Trump and most of the leaders of his party not only took that position, but have continued to maintain it for nearly four years.
Although virtually all of the previous 58 presidential elections were contested. Only George Washington was chosen by the electoral college after an election in which the winner was swept into office without a process in which at least one other aspirant received widespread support. But after the reenactment of the constitutional electoral process in every instance the losing candidate or candidates acknowledged the winner certified by a peaceful meeting of Congress for the purpose. In two elections there was a tie vote in the initial certifying meeting, and the tie necessitated further processes stipulated by the constitution. But there was no overt violence within the Congress nor any outside effort to use violence to prevent the final outcome. In 2000 the crucial electoral votes of Florida were held up by the Florida courts until the Supreme Court of the United States decided the result. Several times the electoral college vote reached the opposite conclusion than that which would have prevailed if the nationwide majority vote had been decisive. And in 1860 after acknowledging that Abraham Lincoln was the newly elected president, eleven states rebelled against the United States by declaring that they had seceded.
What makes the 2020 election unique is that the sitting president claimed that he had be cheated out of reelection by the fraudulent activities of his opponent. He followed up on that claim by efforts to persuade the chief of U.S. military forces to seize ballot boxes, asking his Attorney General to begin immediate prosecution of electoral process supervisors, encouraged the filing of baseless law suites intended to prevent states from completing their electoral responsibilities. The capstone of this defiance was the storming of the Capital to prevent Congress from doing its constitutional job of counting the electoral college votes and making an official announcement of the election of the elected next president. Trump has not only stuck to his false claim that he is the rightfully elected presidential candidate, but he has promised to free all of those who he inspired to attack the Congress. And the Republican Party has backed him by making him its choice for president again for the 2024 election. He threatens to retaliate against the sitting president and his supporters and to be “a dictator from day one” when he becomes the president again. This is anything but conservative.
Journal of Public Law 