What Is Trump Playing At?

As newspapers and media across the country and around the world reported Joe Biden’s victory and Donald Trump’s defeat in last week’s election, Trump himself — along with his Republican allies in Congress, including the entire Senate majority leadership and the Republican House minority leadership — remained defiant.

I queried a number of American historians and constitutional scholars to see how they explain what should be an inexplicable response to an election conducted in a modern democracy — an election in which Republican victories up and down the ballot are accepted unquestioningly, while votes for president-elect Biden on the same ballots are not.

Many of those I questioned see this discrepancy as stemming from Trump’s individual personality and characterological deficiencies — what they call his narcissism and his sociopathy. Others offer a more starkly political interpretation: that the refusal to accept Biden’s victory stems from the frustration of a Republican Party struggling to remain competitive in the face of an increasingly multicultural electorate. In the end, it appears to be a mixture of both.

Many observers believe that the current situation presents a particularly dangerous mix, one that poses a potentially grave danger to American democracy.

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Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of “The Counterrevolution of Slavery,” pointed out in an email that there was onetime when there was a substantial rejection of the outcome of a presidential contest:

Indeed it happened in 1860 when most Deep South states refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency on an antislavery platform and seceded from the Union.

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Over the short term. Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale, sees the Trump challenge petering out, but he argues that the challenge represents a long-term threat to American governance:

I think it is dangerous, less for what is going to happen in this moment — I imagine Trump will give up, in some form, and we will have a series of “bent not broken op-eds.”

Over time, however,

we see a pattern. First, in terms of ever more extremist right wing presidencies, there is an evolution: Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and now Trump. Each would have been unthinkable were it not for the precedent and policies of their predecessor. Second, I think Trump and Trumpism signal a weakening, or a collapse, of the two-party system’s ability to absorb tensions and conflicts.

A few decades from now, Grandin wrote in his email, “Trump will be seen as significant, but really just a minor blip compared to the crisis that lay ahead.”