A Verdict on Whether Trump Cheated

That way madness lies.

About suffering, they were never wrong. “A View of Lake Sortedam,” by Christen Købke.

Hello from Copenhagen, where I’m on a short, long-planned work trip. The woman at reception—a flame-haired former jockey who raced at Belmont—greeted us by saying Denmark is changing its laws to “welcome more Americans” who are exiting the U.S. for political reasons. 

“We’re in a very good place to recruit now,” she added. 

I was hoping to detach from America’s tenterhooks, being here.

Maybe I’d discover that the problems of 346,093,557 million Americans and our allies don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.  

Alas no. From these Danish shores, America appears more frightening than ever. Setting aside the high-velocity harm accelerant that Trump represents for most Americans, including those who voted for him, the fact is that Americans resoundingly elected an autocrat, a fascist, a tyrant. If those sound like buzzwords, let’s just say we elected a proponent of illiberal policies and an opponent of the system of government called democracy. 

When means that if you see America as a liberal democracy—and not as blood and soil, meaning whiteness and land—then the vote for Trump was a vote against America. So here we are. 

When, in the last post, I proposed questioning the fairness of the election, my friends, neighbors, and you astute readers warned me gently against it. 

At first, this bugged me. In fact, I spent the flight to Copenhagen, sleepless, shifting in my seat, remembering how Justice Scalia used to lash out at people who so much as mentioned the mayhem of the 2000 election and especially the hinkiness of Bush v. Gore. He’d snap at audiences: “Come on, get over it.” 

Was everyone likewise just snapping at me to move on, to be classier, to face defeat like a gentleman? I hate to be told to get over things. Dontmoveon.org is my mind’s civic action group. 

But. Not only do election “questions” tilt into denialism but they wreck solidarity because they sound so tinfoil-hat.