NYT - Edsall "What is Trump Playing at"?

[NRaleighLiberal]

Long but excellent - sorry about the paywall - plucking out 4 paragraphs with snips

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/opinion/trump-concession-transition.html


The president’s refusal to concede that he lost the election is taking us into dangerous territory.

Thomas B. Edsall
By Thomas B. Edsall
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality

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.

snip

last para - read the whole thing if you can.

The unpredictable danger Trump and his henchmen are putting the nation in has no antecedent. Trump’s irrationalism has become a contagion. As he presides over the destruction of reason, he exploits and electrifies his public. No one knows where this will lead. Delusion can become tragedy. It’s happened before.

[Mike 03]

1. Tangential observation:

It's time for the major news agencies to bring in psychiatrists to explain what we are seeing. Smaller news outlets have interviewed prominent psychiatrists (Lawrence O'Donnell and Chris Hayes haven't shied away from this), but major networks have mostly treated discussion of Trump's mental disintegration as a third rail.

This is a conversation that is long, painfully overdue. There is not the slightest doubt that Trump is mentally incapacitated, and America needs to discuss this openly.

[enki23]

2. Jesus. It's not just Trump. It's nearly the entire GOP.

They are gleefully fucking complicit. This is a lot worse than we are pretending it is. That doesn't mean it will work. But a huge and powerful faction wants it to.

[Mike 03]

3. This is a seriously important article

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, was outspoken:

It would be not simply a major departure but a deeply dangerous one were Trump to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. It would be a brutal renunciation of American democracy. It would create not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government, telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency. It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.

This lines up eerily with what Thomas Friedman has been saying, that our nation hasn't been in such peril since the days of the Civil War.

Thank you for posting.

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. I hope all DUers take the time to read it. thanks...my pleasure