How to prepare to lose an election: Abraham Lincoln vs. Donald Trump

In August 1864, the first Republican President, Abrahas Lincoln, was convinced that he would lose re-election that November. The Civil War against the Confederacy was heading into its fourth year, and the Union had suffered a series of demoralizing setbacks.

Lincoln wrote what has come to be called the “blind memorandum” in which he committed to an orderly transition to the new president, a Democrat who would seek peace with the secessionists short of their unconditional surrender—and even abandon emancipation of the enslaved. Lincoln had his members of his Cabinet sign the memorandum without reading it.

Only weeks later, the Union armies conquered Atlanta, turning the tide in the war in the North’s favor. In the months that followed, Lincoln won a landslide re-election. And by April 1865, the Southern armies had collapsed, and the Confederacy surrendered. The “blind memorandum” became an artifact of history.

Trump is not Lincoln

In 2020, the last Republican president, Donald Trump, knowing that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, concocted a scheme to remain in office. It involved disrupting and corrupting the process for certifying Joe Biden’s victory, and robbing American voters of their franchise in the already indirect and undemocratic way that the Constitution stipulates that voters choose the president through the Electoral College.

That’s the essence of the federal grand jury indictment of Donald J. Trump, unsealed on August 1. Justice Department-appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith persuaded the grand jury to indict Trump for crimes under three federal statutes. The grand jury indicted Trump for his vital role in a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, to obstruct an official government proceeding, and to deprive U.S. citizens of their rights.

The 45-page indictment narrates the story of Trump’s multi-phase campaign, between early November 2020 and the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that temporarily halted the certification of Biden’s win. Trump and a motley crew of “unindicted co-conspirators” including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, crackpot lawyers John Eastman and Sidney Powell, Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark and others conspired to undermine the certification of votes in six contested “swing” states, according to the indictment.

In the states, Trump’s team found itself chasing rabbits of fanciful claims of vote fraud that they couldn’t sustain. The indictment quotes a “senior campaign adviser” expressing frustration over the Trump team’s inability to stop the Georgia vote certification: “When our research and legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our [court] cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

And when these first attempts failed, they organized slates of “fake electors” for Trump in states Biden won. The plan was to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to set aside Electoral College vote counts from those states at the official tabulation on January 6. If Pence had accepted the pro-Trump fake electors as real or had ruled those states in dispute and discounted their votes, Trump would have tried to claim victory. Pence didn’t go along with the scheme, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t elected Republicans prepared to back it.

The majority of House Republicans on January 6/7 voted to sustain completely fabricated objections to state election results, and Republicans in the U.S. Senate refused to convict Trump when the House impeached him for his role in fomenting the January 6 riot.

It may have been expedient for Smith to focus the indictment solely on Trump, while not indicting his key collaborators in the conspiracy. Indicting multiple defendants would have complicated the case and increased its odds of being delayed until after the 2024 presidential election. While Smith may have increased his chances of trying Trump early next year—by no means, a foregone conclusion! —he’s also avoided taking on the broader conspiracy.

It’s easy for Trump critics to point to the venal, twice-impeached ex-president as the root cause of this effort to “destroy democracy.” In fact, the indictment prominently features quotes from conservative, pro-Trump, Republican leaders like Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the House of Representatives in Arizona in 2021, affirming their oaths to the Constitution while refusing to bend to Trump’s schemes. Many liberals, like those who host the MSNBC prime time shows, assume “good” Republicans will join with them in an anti-Trump “popular front” to “save American democracy.”

Republican congressional co-conspirators

But this also ignores the fact that much of the Republican Party apparatus and Republican politicians and officials were crucial to the “fake electors” scheme. With an anti-democratic spirit pervading the top ranks of the Republican Party, is it any wonder that almost two-thirds of GOP voters believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump? Or that most of them think of January 6 as a “legitimate protest” rather than a “riot” or “insurrection”?—and that those opinions have actually strengthened over the last year. This radicalized Republican “base,” living in the conservative media’s alternate universe, is the product of years of propaganda and organization that mainstream GOP institutions, from Fox News to the Republican Governors’ Association, have pursued and billionaires like the Koch network have funded. These elite actors know that most Americans reject their views, and that goals they seek—from banning abortion nationwide to privatizing Social Security—are enormously unpopular. Accomplishing them means negating the democratic will of the majority, including countenancing the idea of throwing out the votes of 81 million Americans in 2020.

The January 6 mob—disproportionately composed of small business owners, professionals, ex-military and law enforcement veterans—may have been the tip of the spear on that day. But they were operating within a “permission structure” the U.S.’s conservative elite created, and that Trump broke open. Even more concerning, millions of Americans supported their actions. A Trump conviction, while more damaging to Trump’s political fortunes than Trump’s camp will admit, won’t “break the fever” of right-wing, authoritarian politics that still holds sway over about one in four Americans. They may represent a minority, but it is a loud minority with support in high places, and with amplification from an 18^th-century political system designed to empower conservative minorities.

Which brings us back to the historical reference to the Civil War era that opened this article. When Lincoln committed to accepting the results of the 1864 election, that 18^th century political system had collapsed. The Northern armies and what W.E.B. Dubois called “the general strike” of the enslaved would soon help to enforce the greatest advance for democracy in the U.S.’s history—the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of the formerly enslaved, and guarantee of equal protection of the laws to “any person” in the U.S. The struggle over the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the South continued for more than a decade later, until the U.S. political elite decided to end it with the rotten “compromise of 1877.”

It was no accident that Trump’s charges of voter fraud focused on cities with large Black and Latino populations like Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Nor was it surprising that hundreds in the mob that stormed the Capitol carried Confederate battle flags with them. That’s why the grand jury’s indictment of Trump for conspiring to deprive Americans of the right to vote, and to have their votes counted, is the most significant count in the indictment. The charge rests on the 1870 Ku Klux Klan Act that criminalized the Klan’s and other white supremacist militias’ campaigns of intimidation and murder against freedmen exercising their political rights.

When the deputy White House counsel told Clark that if Trump stayed in office on false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, “there will be riots in every major city in the United States,” Clark replied, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” the indictment recounts. In other words, at least some people in Trump’s inner circle were contemplating deploying the military and National Guard against protesters. And for what? In an interview published in June, Eastman cited the 1776 Declaration of Independence’s support for the right of the people to “alter or abolish” the government to prevent the “modern left wing” from remaking American society.

Biden/Harris are the “left wing”?

To most readers of this article, the idea that the Biden/Harris administration represents the “left-wing” is laughable. But to the likes of Eastman and his co-thinkers, “[the] left wing which is in control of the Democrat Party believes that we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated. This is an existential threat to the very survivability not just of our nation but to the example that our nation properly understood provides.” He rants about “50-year-old men naked being let into teenage girls’ showers at public pools” and “drag queens reading to six-year-olds.” He’s incensed by “OSHA telling me what kind of chair I can have in my home office.”

These ideas may seem far-fetched, but they have become a staple of right-wing rhetoric since (at least) the election of the first Black president in 2008. They’re reminiscent of secessionist rhetoric following Lincoln’s election. The New York Evening Post in 1861 slammed Southern pretensions to defending “liberty” for the sham they were: “reversing the wheels of progress…to hurl everything backward into deepest darkness . . . despotism and oppression.”

As of the time of writing, Trump is the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election. For him, winning the presidency is his existential goal. Lose, and any conviction he receives will subject him to financial ruin and prison time. Win, and he can remove the threat with a presidential pardon or an order to the Justice Department to stand down. Voters may hold the last word on whether Trump faces accountability for his crimes. But a re-elected Democratic administration won’t remove the threat that a revanchist right-wing poses to all of us.

Quotes from the Civil War era come from James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988).