A Game of Thrones

 

Via ESPN, October 2011. 

People saying The Former Guy incriminated himself last week with his remarkable statement wishing Pence had "overturned the Election" 

"If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had 'absolutely no right' to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"

are misreading the way he and his ghostwriter are thinking: the "overturning" he's talking about would not be a crime at all, but simple justice, to his mind, because he's better attuned to sports than democracy. 

It's the way supporters of Mandaloun, the horse who finished second in last year's Kentucky Derby, believed Medina Spirit's victory should be "overturned"—people used the word—after it came out that the winner had failed drug tests for steroid use before and after the race. Nobody suggested Medina Spirit hadn't finished first, they'd seen it with their own eyes, but they believed his trainer, Bob Baffert, had disqualified him, and therefore Mandaloun should get the roses and the purse. (In the end, he kept the title, finished second in the Breeders' Cup Classic and third in the Preakness, and, sadly, died in early December after a workout, like a startling number of Baffert's charges—more than 74 deaths since 2000)

Trump, in the same way, wants the authorities to disqualify Biden, by the book, and recognize him as the winner. He's aware that Biden came out ahead in the vote counts, but who knows if it was legitimate or not? His understanding of the whole counting process is so weak that he can't believe anybody really knows, and moreover, in his long life experience, everybody cheats. Look at his buddies Belichek and Brady and those deflated footballs! So why shouldn't Trump be given a chance to catch Biden at whatever he did?

After all, he got more votes than any sitting president in history (there he sounds more like a baseball fan than a racing fan, coming up with the arcane statistic that proves he's the best), and look at all the people who showed up for the rallies! Given all the suspicion, if you can't prove Trump actually won, why can't the authorities declare the election a technical draw and let Trump keep the title, like Bernard Hopkins up there? Nobody caught Trump cheating, did they? I mean not really, right?

But the other thing I wanted to say is that this is really nothing less than a blindingly stupid version of the relatively sophisticated way Republicans, or conservatives, actually think, with their standard defense of the Electoral College and the maxim that the US is a "constitutional republic, not a democracy". They mean it's not the people who decide who wins, it's the officials: they too see electoral politics as a sport that you win, not by being the most "popular" (that would be so crude!), but by being the most creative and disciplined—by following the rules of the game cunningly, covering your fouls better than the other guy, and working the refs as hard as they'll let you.

The perfect Republican politician is Mitch McConnell, with his invincible contempt for popularity, winning race after race with a 38% approval rating, mouthing pieties about "what the American people don't want" when he means "what I don't want", and making no use of his power other than to keep being powerful. As I keep saying, their game is the 18th-century game of undoing democracy. And that's why they're stuck with Trump, because while his game is distasteful and extremely unorthodox, it did the job remarkably well and left them without another approach, but also because they really don't see, in a strictly moral sense, what's wrong with it.