Will Democrats stand up for democracy?

Crossing your fingers and hoping the Trump coup will go away is not a strategy

President Trump and Rudy Giuliani.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

President Trump and his allies are now officially seeking to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States. Even though Trump's pitiful lawyers have spent two weeks getting skunked in court, failing time and again to provide even the tiniest shred of evidence to support their ever more outlandish conspiracy theories of election fraud, they just won't quit. Friday afternoon, Republican leaders of the Michigan state legislature will reportedly meet with President Trump to discuss his illegal plot to steal the state's 16 electoral votes. Presumably an effort to badger Republican legislators in other battleground states into submission will be next. The Republican Party is all on board with this plot against the very foundations of American democracy.

What have national Democrats been doing and saying about all of this? Like most pundits and reporters, they seem to regard the threat of a post-election putsch by the president as dark comedic theater rather than a mortal threat to the republic. President-elect Joe Biden, seemingly unaware of how close Republican elites are to executing this democracy-ending scheme, keeps calling the president's conduct "embarrassing" and "irresponsible." In his victory speech nearly two weeks ago, he didn't say a thing about any of it. His Twitter feed has been a reliably delusional encomium to long-dead bipartisan unity, mixed with more of the "Trump's COVID response is very bad" messaging that failed to deliver a truly decisive repudiation of the GOP on November 3. His team throws cold water on even tepid plans like suing the government to cooperate in the transition process.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.