DETROIT — For the last five years, I’ve heard from readers who complain that I’m unfair to former President Donald Trump.
They say things like, “you used to be even-handed, but you seem to treat Trump differently. Why do you hate him?”
Most journalists, columnists in particular, soon get used to being called biased and unfair. One prominent reporter who was based in Israel once told me that he figured he was doing a good job when he got an equal amount of hate mail from Jews and Arabs.
Normally, I privately answer any reader who asks a question or who politely takes issue with what I write, so long as they aren’t spouting threats and obscenities. Sometimes they have changed my perspective, and sometimes led me to decide I was wrong.
But I want to address my attitude to Donald Trump publicly, because he is a special case, and yes, I do think he has disgraced and damaged the presidency and this country as no one else ever has.
That’s not because of his policies, or his crude behavior, or his incessant lying, but because he has falsely convinced millions that our elections are rigged, and so undermined faith in our democracy.
That, to me, is the most dangerous and un-American thing any leader can do, except for starting a nuclear war.
No other leader of either party has ever failed to accept the final election results. Richard Nixon was never a paragon of virtue; he bugged his enemies and his friends, slandered, lied, cheated on his taxes, and was eventually forced to resign. But when he lost the presidential election in 1960 to John F. Kennedy in a race far closer than the 2020 race, he didn’t hesitate. Nixon was fast closing in the popular vote in the wee hours of the next morning, and sweeping almost the whole west. However, he trailed badly in the electoral vote.
Shortly after 3 a.m., he concluded that even if he won his native California (as he indeed did) he would need to win Pennsylvania and Michigan or Illinois, and he was behind in all three states.
“While there are still some results to come in, if the present trend continues, Senator Kennedy will be the next President of the United States,” he told a ballroom full of dismayed supporters.
Sixteen years later, President Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in a race that was even closer in the Electoral College. The morning after, he looked at the returns. He was behind by only 11,116 votes in Ohio, and 7,372 in Hawaii; if the result had changed in those two states, he would have been reelected.
He looked at the numbers closely, picked up the phone, and called Jimmy Carter, and conceded defeat.
They both knew what Donald Trump refuses to admit: We have remarkably clean and accurate elections almost everywhere in this country. Yes, there are sometimes small arithmetical errors.
It made perfect sense for Lenawee County’s Ryan Rank to ask for a recount in last month’s Republican primary, in which he finished seven votes behind Dale Zorn, 4,774 to 4,767, in a race for a nomination to a state legislative seat.
It also was reasonable for Al Gore to ask for a recount in Florida in 2000, when he was behind by only a few hundred votes out of six million cast, when it was clear that Florida would decide that year’s presidential election, and there were all sorts of mechanical and other irregularities (remember the “butterfly ballot?”)
However, in the end, the recount, controversial as it was, didn’t change the result. That same year, Michigan Democrat Dianne Byrum asked for a recount after she lost a congressional race by 160 votes out of 290,00o cast. But she called it off halfway through when it was clear nothing was changing.
There have been rigged elections in this country, but very few, if any, in modern times. Belief in the honesty and accuracy of our elections is essential to democracy, and until now, we’ve had that.
However, by refusing to concede defeat in an election he clearly lost, Trump and those in the media who give him a megaphone have endangered our democracy’s key institution.
In Michigan, for example, he successfully insisted that the GOP nominate candidates for attorney general and secretary of state because they endorsed the “big lie” that the election was stolen.
That is not only harmful to democracy, it probably will cost the Michigan Republican Party the attorney general’s office, which the establishment Republican candidate could well have won.
It is also ridiculous. Michigan has long had extremely clean elections. There was a recount of the governor’s race in 1950, when G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams won by 1,154 votes, and again two years later, when he won by 8,628. Neither changed a thing.
President Biden won the last presidential vote in the state by 154,188, and his increased margin did not come from poor and heavily minority inner-city votes. It came from formerly Republican voters, primarily women, in prosperous suburbs.
American elections are overwhelmingly clean when it comes to counting and reporting the vote. Those who say otherwise without proof are irresponsibly and dishonestly hurting the cause of freedom.
Footnote: It has long been an article of faith among some that the 1960 election in Illinois was stolen from Nixon by then-Mayor Richard Daley. It wasn’t; in 1985, Edmund Kallina published an intensive analysis in Presidential Studies Quarterly that concluded that there were shenanigans, but not enough to affect the result. Kennedy, by the way, would have won even without Illinois.
Photo Credit: “Trump” by IoSonoUnaFotoCamera, Flickr CC.
