There Aren’t Serious-Enough Consequences for Those Trying to Break American Democracy

Donald Trump will not serve a second term. The litigation launched by his campaign and the Republican Party to overturn the election results has no chance of preventing Joe Biden from swearing the oath of office on January 20—as Trump himself seemed to haltingly recognize last week after his administration finally allowed the presidential transition to begin. But even though the worst has not come to pass, Trump and his team are doing lasting damage to American democracy as the president struggles to come to grips with the reality of his loss. And yet, these lawyers and officials will likely face no real consequences for their actions—and if they do, those repercussions will not be enough to address the scale of the problem.

The odds that Trump would accept an election loss were always slim. In 2016, he promised to accept the election results only “.” He showed no sign of changing his tune in the run-up to the 2020 election. “We’re going to have to see what happens,” he when asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power. As Election Day drew nearer, that he expected to take the vote’s results to the Supreme Court. If the vote had been closer, Trump’s efforts might have been enough to throw its results into doubt—a function, in part, of the rickety Electoral College system, which gives outsize importance to a handful of small-margin states. The country is exceedingly lucky that Biden won so definitively.