Trump advisers are telling him it’s slipping away. There’s poetic justice here.

Opinion | Trump advisers are telling him it’s slipping away. There’s poetic justice here.

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

November 7, 2020 at 8:42 a.m. GMT+9

“But they’re having a devil of a time behind the scenes trying to convince the president that this is slipping away from him,” Acosta continued.

Acosta also reported that this is leading to “chaos” inside the White House.

As we wait for the networks to call the race, it’s worth noting that there’s a kind of eerie poetic justice in how this is winding down.

Politics is hard. It’s profoundly painful to watch election returns when the candidate you support — one whose campaign you followed for many months and poured a good deal of intellectual and emotional investment into — is slowly and inexorably getting overtaken as more and more votes come in.

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This must be extraordinarily difficult to endure when you yourself are the candidate. But Trump himself is largely responsible for his experience of the way this is winding down. And that captures something essential about his pathologies, and about his corruption and contempt for democracy.

Trump began attacking vote-by-mail as riddled with fraud in earnest last spring. This dissuaded his own voters from using it, as Republicans themselves warned would happen.

Trump telegraphed the real intent of his corrupt endgame over the summer. He would get his supporters to vote in person, and then he’d seek to invalidate millions upon millions of mailed ballots on the grounds that they shouldn’t be counted for too many days after Election Day.

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Trump would rely on GOP state legislatures in places like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which refused to allow the counting of mailed ballots before Election Day, helping to create the delays that Trump would then exploit.

He would enjoy a big lead as the Election Day votes were counted first, allowing him to declare victory, and then insist that the counting of millions of other ballots constituted an effort to steal the election from him.

It all unfolded exactly this way. Trump’s broadcasting of his scheme surely helped persuade millions of Democrats to get their mail ballots in early. Meanwhile, in the days leading up to the election, he kept tweeting about a “GIANT RED WAVE COMING!”

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These were the Election Day votes that would be counted first, and on Election Day, things went according to plan in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Trump then did prematurely declare victory early the next morning. And he has since launched a legal effort to try to invalidate as many mail votes as possible.

But Trump never thought to imagine that all those mailed ballots actually would get counted, that the system actually would honor the votes of millions who opposed him, that election officials and volunteers across the country actually do believe in democracy and are willing to work extraordinarily hard to make it function on behalf of the American people, on behalf of all of them. He couldn’t simply make all of that disappear.

Many news organizations warned that those initially counted votes would constitute a “red mirage,” and that this would be followed by a “blue shift” as the mailed ballots were counted. But, because Trump has very deep contempt for the parts of the country that oppose him and has long regarded them as having no legitimate claim to political representation, their votes simply couldn’t end up counting.

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Meanwhile, the legal cases are falling apart because they’re baseless, and because they are targeting pools of votes that are too small to make a difference.

Trump couldn’t imagine that this would happen, either. He has long viewed large swaths of the government as little more than ready-at-hand tools to serve his own personal and political interests. And Trump assumed that the courts would just do his bidding. He simply declared that helping him by invalidating countless votes was what Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee to the Supreme Court, was supposed to do.

But it’s now getting away from him. And it’s precisely because of how Trump bought into this whole scheme all along that he is now suffering through the slow and prolonged shock of seeing his leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia bleed away over the course of days, to be replaced by Joe Biden leads. It must be a special kind of purgatory for him.