Trump’s Brief Speech from the White House Made America’s Troubles Worse

When Donald Trump came out to speak just before 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, votes were still being counted in enough states—notably Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—to make it impossible to say whether he or Joe Biden had won the Presidency. But, whichever of them does, what Trump said in his brief remarks was a reminder of why he does not deserve the office. Trump, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, claimed that the vote count had been “called off” because he won; that is not true on either count. He said that his lead in those swing states was insurmountable, which is also false, and that when “they”—he didn’t really identify “they,” except as “a very sad group of people”—realized that he was winning, they had swooped in to perpetrate “a fraud on the American public.” In saying this, he was lying to the American public. And when he told the country that there was a conspiracy afoot to “disenfranchise” people who voted for him—adding, “We won’t stand for it”—he seemed to be willfully prodding his supporters toward violence. Trump’s statement was squalid; if the country is lucky, it is just a last indignity before he is defeated. But, in those few minutes, he caused America’s troubles to multiply.

Even before he spoke, he had attacked the election’s integrity with a tweet: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!” Twitter attached a warning that the tweet was “disputed” and might be providing “misleading” information about civic processes, which is a kind way of putting it. Trump sent that tweet after Biden had made a confident but cautious statement, noting, “It’s not my place or Donald Trump’s place to declare who won the election,” but that of the American people. Perhaps that idea is what made Trump mad.

There is nothing strange about the fact that these states couldn’t yet be called. Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump has failed to control, there were millions more absentee and mail-in ballots than is usually the case. When Trump spoke, Pennsylvania still had one and a half million of those ballots to count. Under the state’s rules, election officials could not begin to process them until Tuesday. Normally, Pennsylvania requires that mail-in ballots arrive by Election Day; because of Postal Service delays, the state Supreme Court issued a decision allowing ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive by Friday. Pennsylvania Republicans have been fighting that order, and the U.S. Supreme Court may yet intervene—but that is a separate issue from the mountain of ballots that have already arrived but have not been counted, and must be. Trump claimed that he was winning the state by “a tremendous amount. . . . These aren’t even close.” Not yet: although Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania in the early-morning hours of Wednesday was substantial, it was not insurmountable. The same was true of Wisconsin and Michigan, a state about which Trump said, “I looked at the numbers and said, ‘Whoa!’ ” The races in Georgia and North Carolina were extremely close as well. He may have won all of them or none of them. That is the mundane and glorious thing about democracy: you have to wait and see how it turns out.

And his speech was, as usual, a mess of contradictions. Trump complained that “everything just stopped,” while also declaring that he would be going to the Supreme Court, because “we want all voting to stop.” There is no principle here. What Trump wants is for election officials to stop counting votes that do not favor him, and to make sure to count the ones that do. He has spent the past couple of weeks insisting, during rallies and on Twitter, that vote-counting should stop on November 3rd—thus disenfranchising anyone whose duly cast ballot hadn’t been tallied by then. In his remarks on Wednesday, he said, “We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them”—and yet, at the same time, he objected to the decision that “somebody” had made to call Arizona for Biden, because there were still “a lot of votes out there.” (“Somebody” was Fox News.)

Arizona hurt because it is a state that Trump won in 2016. Biden was helped there by Mark Kelly’s successful Senate campaign. Kelly went into politics after his wife, the former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head and nearly died, in a mass shooting in 2011; she still bears the effects of her injuries. He defeated Senator Martha McSally, who was appointed to fill John McCain’s seat after his death and who has increasingly aligned herself with Trump. Her campaign relied on innuendo and invective, and Kelly’s victory was a bright spot in an evening that was more difficult than Democrats had hoped. John Hickenlooper also defeated the Republican incumbent, Cory Gardner, in the Colorado Senate race, but the Democratic incumbent Doug Jones lost to Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach, in Alabama, and, as of Wednesday morning, it seemed doubtful that Democrats could gain control of the Senate. Their remaining hopes may rest with a runoff in Georgia, in January.

But the most unsettling section of Trump’s speech, in thinking about the days and possibly weeks of uncertainty to come, was his rendition of a conversation he said that he’d had with Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas. Abbott, Trump said, “called me to congratulate me on winning Texas”—Trump’s anecdotes often involve people calling to congratulate him, typically unnamed foreign potentates or New York businessmen. But Abbott, Trump claimed, was puzzled, and said, “By the way, what’s going on? I’ve never seen anything like this.” Trump replied, “Can I tell you what? Nobody has.” He then gave his explanation: he, Trump, had been closing in on victory, “and all of a sudden I said, ‘What happened to the election? It’s off.’ And we have all these announcers saying, ‘What happened?’ And then they said, ‘Oh.’ ” One implication was that the “announcers” realized that action needed to be taken to snatch the election from Trump, and that they stood ready to do their part—the media being enemies of the people. But there is another message here that Abbott and other Republican elected officials need to take very seriously. In the days to come, Trump will be regaling the public with stories about how much this senator or that governor agrees with him, and how much they share his belief that the election process has been corrupted. This means that, if they don’t agree with him, they are, at last, going to have to say so. They will need to decide if they are still willing, at this most hazardous juncture, to be his props and enablers.

Why was it even in Trump’s own interest to say such things? When he spoke, there was a fair chance that he was the legitimate winner; by the morning, Biden’s chances had improved, but the results are much closer than the polling had suggested. (Trump’s continued hold on the votes and imaginations of so many Americans suggests that his Presidency represents not just a tragedy but a national crisis of character.) There is, no doubt, a tactical aspect to Trump’s rhetoric—he is trying to position himself for court fights, to intimidate local officials, and to create confusion that he can exploit. And he may have been confused himself; he has such a habit of lobbing accusations and encouraging divisions that he may not know how else to react. But part of the answer is that his petulance and narcissism are boundless. He complained, in his speech, that “we were getting ready for a big celebration” when it became clear that the closely contested states might not yet have a full count. He wanted a party, but some exhausted county officials in Georgia and Pennsylvania were pausing for a few hours’ sleep. Trump’s autocratic impulses and his impatience work together in disastrous ways. He needs to learn how to wait, and—if that’s what the voters say—how to lose.