4/9/2023 0 Comments Time cover wall white houseHe asserted at various points that the Constitution “allows me to do whatever I want” with the special counsel investigating him and that his “authority is total” to order states to follow his wishes. Orban, President Xi Jinping of China and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, evincing envy of their ability to act decisively without the checks of a democratic government. He expressed admiration for strongmen like Mr. Trump did little to disabuse those fears in subsequent years. “There is nobody less of a fascist than Donald Trump,” he insisted in 2016.īut Mr. From the earliest days of his campaign for the White House, critics suggested that he harbored autocratic tendencies that raised questions about whether he would eventually subvert democracy or seek to stay in power even if he lost, questions that grew loud enough that he felt compelled to respond. Trump’s fidelity to the concept of American democracy has long been debated. McConnell of Stanford University, a former appeals court judge who was effectively repudiating the effort led by one of his former clerks, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “Yet in none of these elections did any losing candidate attempt to claim victory by brazenly sabotaging the electoral process as Donald Trump has done and continues to do,” said the letter, organized by Douglas Brinkley of Rice University and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University. Biden won as many or more Electoral College votes as the winning candidates in five elections since 1960 and larger popular vote majorities than in more than half of the presidential elections held in the past six decades. Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday, quickly drawing a fact-checking warning label from the social media firm.Ī group of 22 historians released a statement on Monday pointing out that the 2020 election was not even particularly close in historical terms. “The ‘Surrender Caucus’ within the Republican Party will go down in infamy as weak and ineffective ‘guardians’ of our Nation, who were willing to accept the certification of fraudulent presidential numbers!” Mr. The idea has disturbed even many senior Republicans and it is guaranteed to fall short, much to the president’s frustration. Biden’s victory when Congress meets on Wednesday, seeking to turn what has historically been a ceremonial moment into a last-ditch showdown over the election. Undaunted, the president has encouraged Vice President Mike Pence and congressional allies to do anything they can to block the final formal declaration of Mr. Trump’s erratic behavior has so alarmed military commanders who fear he might try to use troops to stay in the White House that every living former defense secretary - including two he appointed himself - issued a warning against the armed forces becoming involved. Biden’s inauguration, even though it is set in stone by the Constitution, and the president met with a former adviser who has publicly urged him to declare martial law to “rerun” the election in states he lost. Trump and his staff have floated the idea of delaying Mr. 20 does not mitigate the damage he is doing to democracy by undermining public faith in the electoral system. That he is almost certain to fail and that President-elect Joseph R. Instead, he has stretched or crossed the boundaries of tradition, propriety and perhaps the law to find any way he can to cling to office beyond his term that expires in two weeks. The president has gone well beyond simply venting his grievances or creating a face-saving narrative to explain away a loss, as advisers privately suggested he was doing in the days after the Nov. It is a scenario at once utterly unthinkable and yet feared since the beginning of Mr. In the 220 years since a defeated John Adams turned over the White House to his rival, firmly establishing the peaceful transfer of authority as a bedrock principle, no sitting president who lost an election has tried to hang onto power by rejecting the Electoral College and subverting the will of the voters - until now. WASHINGTON - President Trump’s relentless effort to overturn the result of the election that he lost has become the most serious stress test of American democracy in generations, one led not by outside revolutionaries intent on bringing down the system but by the very leader charged with defending it.
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