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Source: Washington Post
Roundup
11/5/2020

Trump may Lose, but Trumpism Hasn’t Been Repudiated

by Max Boot

Max Boot, a Post columnist, is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global affairs analyst for CNN. He is the author of The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

It wasn’t as good as I had hoped or as bad as I had feared.

By Wednesday morning, Joe Biden had taken a lead in enough states to produce an electoral college majority. President Trump is trying to change the likely outcome by screaming about voter fraud — which so far appears nonexistent. But as things stand now, the odds are that Biden will become president-elect after having won more votes (more than 69.4 million and counting) than any previous presidential candidate. He is on track to surpass 50 percent of the vote and exceed Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin in 2016.

I am immensely relieved that Trump is likely to leave the White House given how much damage he has already caused and how much more he could cause in the next four years. But I have to admit, with a heavy heart, that this wasn’t the blue wave election that I wanted or the nation needed.

It should not have been this close. Trump is on track to become the first president since World War II to see a net loss of jobs during his term. He has presided over the deaths of more than 232,000 Americans from covid-19 — a figure projected to reach nearly 400,000 by Feb. 1 — making this one of the worst mass-casualty events in U.S. history. He is only the third president to have been impeached for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” He has spread lies and conspiracy theories at a record-breaking pace. He has flouted democratic norms and quite probably broken the law; indeed, by calling into question the legitimacy of the election he is continuing to undermine our democracy at this very moment. He will surely be rated by historians among the worst presidents in U.S. history — and quite possibly the absolute worst.

If there were any justice, Trump would have suffered the kind of historic repudiation inflicted on President Herbert Hoover, who in 1932 carried six states and got less than 40 percent of the vote. Or on Barry Goldwater in 1964, George McGovern in 1972 or Walter Mondale in 1984. All of those candidates were vastly more competent and moral than Trump. Yet he did much better than they did. So far he has won more than 66.5 million votes, roughly 48 percent of the total, and, even if he ultimately loses, he will have come within a whisker of winning an electoral college majority.

Read entire article at Washington Post