This time Trump’s abuse of public trust is wounding democracy

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Nov 13, 2020

Without trust, our representative democracy falls apart, opening all of us up to the dangers of corruption and autocracy.

Unfortunately, even as confirmed election fraud has declined, public trust has been severely undermined amid demagoguery, cynicism and actual political scandals in recent decades. The current president’s stubbornness doesn’t help.

Trump is waging his own little propaganda war by Twitter, even as one after another of his campaign’s lawsuits is rebuffed as groundless by the courts. In his quest to find support for his allegations, Trump has turned our judicial system on its head.

A notable example was the baseless whopper he tweeted this past week, quoting an allegation of tampering by a voting machine manufacturing company that supposedly “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”

That fiction, which scored a “pants-on-fire” rating from PolitiFact as “inaccurate and ridiculous,” was serious enough in its impact to be denounced Thursday by experts in a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, which also declared that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure” in history.

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a strong rebuke of Trump’s tweeted claims.

But what’s a statement from government experts at a time when the president’s paranoid allegations of “deep state” conspiracies routinely undermine the credibility of those government experts who dare to reveal truths inconvenient to Trump?

That leaves the nation — and the world — in the familiar position of wondering when, where or if other Republican leaders will call for an end to his excesses. For now, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others in his party would rather have Trump in their tent. They hope he will help the GOP win two runoff Senate elections in Georgia, which voted in a very close race for Biden.

McConnell is not wrong to say the president has a right to have his vote fraud charges investigated, even if the charges are just another con from an expert at the game. But the rest of us also have a right to a peaceful and orderly transfer of power in and out of our White House, regardless of who its current tenant happens to be.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)