Commentary: Save Our Democracy!

by Roger Kimball

 

I have said all along that I thought President Trump would win reelection. The question was whether he would win by a big enough margin to insulate himself from the machinations of fraud, on the one hand, and litigation, on the other.

I believe that Donald Trump did win the election last night. By my count he had chalked up well over the requisite 270 electoral votes necessary to win reelection. That was a little past midnight. I repaired to the arms of Morpheus confident that November 4 would ratify what was essentially a fait d’accompli on the evening of November 3.

No such luck. No sooner had my head hit the pillow than the Democrats in the urban centers of states where Trump was leading—in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee—stopped counting the votes. Why would they do this? Because they wanted to stanch the flow of votes going to Trump and buy themselves time to determine how many votes they would need to win. Finding the votes later on is never a problem. That’s what we pay corrupt party apparatchiks to do. It seemed novel in 1960 when Richard Daley went to Cook Country to secure the election for JFK.  When I went to bed last night, President Trump was comfortably ahead in Wisconsin. Close your eyes: poof: 100,000 ballots suddenly appear in Wisconsin with Joe Biden’s name on them. Stand by for similar feats of magic. 

Although common, this outrageous practice is a direct assault on our democracy. Trump presumably will fight it in court. But I think he should take a page from his own playbook and hold rallies in those and maybe other hot spots (Phoenix comes to mind) over the next couple of days. Bring the fight to the people and, just as important, bring the people to the fight.

The Democrats are not sitting idly by, they are busy “harvesting” votes. Donald Trump needs to mobilize the public with a series of high-profile “Save Our Democracy” rallies. He was performing at 3, 4, or 5 rallies a day for the last couple weeks of the campaign. He should take the show back on the road one last time. If the Democrats complain that the campaign is over he can rebaptize the events as “peaceful protests.” That’s what Antifa and BLM do when they take to the streets. The contrast with the threatened scenes of mayhem, arson, and looting by the Left will afford a useful visual. As many people have observed, Trump’s followers wave American flags. Democratic supporters prefer to burn them.

I suspect that such Save Our Democracy rallies would attract tens of thousands of people, just as Trump’s campaign rallies did these past weeks. There is no way that Sleepy Joe Biden could compete with them. Not only would they dramatize the extent and enthusiasm of Trump’s support, they would also serve as a salutary reminder that Trump, unlike so many Republican politicians, is willing to fight to assure a free, open, and fair election. They would have the additional attraction of driving the Left even more beyond the pale than than they already are. It’s not nice to take pleasure in the sufferings of others, but I am willing to make an exception in the case of the anguish such rallies would cause among the people who have spent the last four years trying to destroy the president and anyone who came into his orbit.

Save Our Democracy! It has a ring to it. I hope team Trump will consider organizing a bunch of them now, today.

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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee).

 

 

 

 

 

 

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