Trump and His Response to Losing

By gillian b. ‘21

No one anticipated that Donald Trump would accept a loss of the presidency well. Even back in 2016, Trump had stated, "I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win.” Clearly, this did not change in 2020. After losing to Joe Biden in November, Trump began aggressively attempting to find any way to overturn the results in a truly “Trumpian” grand finale that put democratic structures in danger.

Donald Trump began his crusade by blaming his loss on blatant voter fraud. One attention-grabbing form of such alleged fraud is claims of dead people voting. The argument here is that people are voting on behalf of people who have died, rigging the election in Biden’s favor. The first flaw in this claim is that America’s systems should prevent this from happening. To successfully vote on behalf of a dead person, that would require someone to know a person who had died but not been reported as such, know extremely private personal information like the person’s social security number, and be able to match their signature exactly. Given these challenges, the idea of this being a common occurrence seems unlikely.

In fact, according to the Associated Press, one voter did attempt to achieve this, but was quickly discovered and stopped. According to the AP, “a registered Republican reportedly attempted to apply for an absentee ballot in his deceased mother’s name, but he didn’t make it past the application phase. ‘This case is more proof our election will be protected by state and local officials alike,’ [Pennsylvania] Attorney General Josh Shapiro tweeted in October.”

Additionally, back during the vote-counting process, there were claims that Democratic poll workers gave people who seemed likely to vote for Trump Sharpies, knowing votes written in Sharpie would not be properly counted. This is not true. Votes written in Sharpie did count, so there was no reason to believe that it caused illegitimate counting.

Outside of claims of voter fraud, Donald Trump has attempted to bring his case to the Supreme Court. Initially, the public reaction to this plan was to explain that the Supreme Court does not work in the way Trump would like it to. He would need to bring his case to lower courts first, and then appeal repeatedly before the Supreme Court would even consider hearing it. But, Texas found a loophole. According to the New York Times, “the suit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, sought to bar Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from casting their electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.” By making it a conflict between states, Texas had the ability to bring the case directly to the Supreme Court, skipping the lower courts and appeal processes. On December 11th, however, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, reasoning in an unsigned order that “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

It is comforting to know that America’s institutions are strong enough to withstand the loopholes and lies of the Trump administration, as seen by the Supreme Court’s dismissal of Donald Trump’s case. Moving forward, America truly has an opportunity to further demonstrate its strength. If the country and its institutions can withstand whatever the Trump administration attempts to do over the coming months, then this country can truly call itself great.