The electoral college votes are cast. It’s all over — and it turns out Trump wasn’t an evil genius after all

Remember all those terrible things Donald Trump was going to do? On November 3rd, he was going to foment violence at the polls; he was going to get Russia and China to launch cyberattacks on his behalf; he was going to get rogue state legislators to sabotage the electoral college; he was going to take his voter fraud case all the way to the Supreme Court, and he was going to win.

And then he didn’t. To the shock of many — myself included — the 2020 election went smoothly. The results were clear and decisive. Trump cried fraud, as expected, and then lost nearly 40 court cases trying to prove it. Election officials did their jobs. States certified their results. And today, after six weeks of Trump’s best efforts to sabotage democracy, the electoral college is voting to confirm his defeat.

And yet so many of us still fear this person as if he’s invincible. If he fires a Pentagon official, we worry he’s plotting a military coup. If he tweets angrily at an election bureaucrat, we worry he’s overturning the election. Since his defeat, Trump’s supporters have retreated into a world of denial and conspiracy theories. But if we on the left are going to mock them for their delusions, we should take a look at how we think — and obsess — about the president ourselves.

Trump is exactly as weak as he appears. He has no surprise tactics up his sleeve. He does all his scheming in public. During the Russia investigation, many of us assumed there must be some secret dealings beneath the surface of what he clumsily said and did on television. There were none. The same goes for his incoherent, hapless court cases. This really is all he’s got.

Until the transition began, I myself worried that Trump would somehow get the Supreme Court to reverse the election for him. I never dreamed he’d bring a case so half-baked, and bungle it so badly, that the Supreme Court wouldn’t even hear it. He’d been bluffing all along — he was never a powerful fascist who had bent the judiciary to his will. Even on the left, he had us all conned.

As we try to make sense of what happened these past four years, maybe it’s more comforting to think of Trump as an evil wizard than as a pathetic faker with debatable mental health problems. Maybe it makes it less embarrassing that our country ever succumbed to him in the first place if that is so. But in the end, he appears to be exactly the same person who rode down that tacky golden escalator five years ago — shrill, ignorant, unprepared, ridiculous. The fact that we elected this person president even once is a national humiliation.

On the other hand, it turns out America has some more strength left in its institutions than we thought. Trump did everything he could to attack our democratic system, but the system held — in some cases thanks to members of his own party. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, oversaw his state’s election with honesty and integrity, despite receiving death threats from the right. Pennsylvania’s Judge Matthew Brann, a Republican, delivered the most epic takedown of Rudy Giuliani’s “not a fraud” fraud case. There are many others. They all deserve credit and commendation. 

So maybe we’re readier than we think for whatever Trump does next. He may try to start a TV network for his own propaganda — if he has time between the lawsuits he’ll be fending off. And he seems likely to run for president again in 2024, which means he’ll have four years to prepare. So will we.

There’s an old quote from Ulysses S. Grant, during his time as commanding general in the Civil War, that’s been making the rounds on social media lately. When a nervous officer fretted over what Robert E. Lee might do next, an exasperated Grant supposedly replied: “Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.”

I am heartily tired of hearing about what Trump is going to do to stay in power. The answer is nothing. He is going to grumble nonsense about voter fraud to anyone who will listen, and then, on January 20, he is going to leave the White House. The question we should be asking is what Biden is going to do.