The President's War on Democracy Is a War on the American People
The president's apparatchiks are now sealing up mailboxes and hauling others away. They're removing mail sorting machines from United States Postal Service facilities. They are destroying a core public service of this country—an agency pioneered by Benjamin Franklin and expressly laid out in the Constitution—in order to stop people from voting by mail. In the short term, they will cut some citizens off from a service they depend on, and deal serious damage to American companies. They will do this in order to attack the voting rights of American citizens. The president has admitted this openly. He intends to wage war on American democracy, because he does not believe in it. He is an enemy of democracy.
It's not just that the president has never commanded the support of a majority of the citizens over whom he exercises power. He comfortably lost the election that placed him in office, at least if you go on how many actual citizens' votes he received, and he has rarely ventured beyond 43 percent support in polling. He's well below that now, and he's noticed. His desperation is fueling more and more brazen behavior.
Beyond the numbers, he has also ransacked the Constitution's separation of powers, attempting to seize the power of the purse assigned to another branch of government—the Congress. He has rejected the notion, again as laid out in the Constitution, that the Senate must approve of his major Cabinet appointments. On Friday alone, the Government Accountability Office found that two of his appointees are serving illegally. One of them, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, has overseen some aspects of the president's crackdown on people exercising their First Amendment rights. As for the courts, the president has made it an express priority to pack them full of political allies with zero regard for their qualifications, and without even the pretense that they will rule according to established case law rather than political imperatives.
Other members of his party have matched his rhetoric on the courts, and it should be no surprise. The president's spasm of voter suppression, in his case targeting vote-by-mail during a pandemic, is a natural extension of the Republican Party's years-long assault on voting rights. After Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Republican state legislatures went to work closing polling places and enacting obstacles to voting—like voter ID—that claimed to remedy the nonexistent problem of voter fraud while targeting groups that do not traditionally vote Republican. This was matched to a comprehensive operation to implement extreme partisan gerrymandering, which packed Democratic voters into some districts or spread them out across many others. This had the effect of devaluing these votes, to make them count for less. In the case of North Carolina, a federal court found Republicans had targeted Black citizens with "surgical precision."
Underneath all of this is a baseline disdain for the will of the people, as expressed by a majority of voting citizens. The president communicates this in a number of ways, but none so comprehensively as through his rampant dishonesty. He lies all the time, about everything, because he does not feel he has any kind of obligation to the citizens he represents. He does not view his position as being imbued with legitimacy because it reflects the will of the people. He's in there now, and he's got the power, and that's that. He doesn't owe anybody anything. He owes us so little that when a reporter asked him Thursday whether he regrets his incessant dishonesty on matters relating to the lives and livelihoods of American citizens, he didn't even bother to answer.
Wow. A reporter (I'm not sure who he is) asks Trump, "after three and a half years, do you regret all the lying you've done to the American people?" Trump quickly moves on to the next question. pic.twitter.com/DHn3UvXHnN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 13, 2020
By the Washington Post's count, the president has made 20,000 false claims in office. The philosophers among us will suggest there's no way to know how many of these count as lies—that is to say, an incident where the president knows what's true and says the opposite. But this is not functionally relevant. The constant dishonesty serves as an assault on the concept of objective reality itself, to which the president does not subscribe. The truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. Beyond that, as Masha Gessen once laid out well, it is an attempt "to assert power over truth itself." In this, it is a rejection not just of reality, but of democracy.
Our system only functions if there is some shared set of observations about the world around us that we can agree on. The country can only be governed in a competent way if leaders grapple with and react to the world as it is, and accept that their constituents—as represented, if sometimes poorly, by the news media—will evaluate how well they respond. Without some anchor in objective reality, the public square begins to crumble. It is a return to the darkness, where power is its own justification and the people who hold it are accountable to no one.
This is the world as the president sees it. It is what undergirds his and his party's attempts to use the remaining mechanisms of democracy to maintain their grip on power in defiance of the popular will. Since democracy is our mechanism for communicating the will of the people into the laws and policies that govern our lives, this does not merely make the president an enemy of democracy. It makes him an enemy of the people. He ought to recognize the phrase.
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