As Cynicism Goes, It’s Hard to Keep Up These Days

In this pre-election period, it’s much the same. Over the past month, we might refashion the comment to say, “no matter how surprised you are, it’s never enough to keep up.” 

When, a couple of weeks ago, I pointed out that professional journalism was locked and loaded, ready to fire out all of its Trump revelations, I figured that we might see as many as one big story every week or two. Right now, it seems to be one every other day. 

The latest: Trump hasn’t been paying federal income taxes, at least not as much as a lawyer or insurance agent might. For a guy who claims to be a billionaire who makes scads of money, paying $750 for a year’s federal income taxes doesn’t quite smell right. And that was just yesterday’s bombshell story. I wonder what we will see by Friday? 

Then, on Sunday night, the CBS show 60 Minutes detailed the scandal of the 3 miles of border wall that a Trump-endorsed contractor built. That fence is starting to be undermined by ordinary rain storms, and this almost immediately after it was built. 

Whether these breaking stories are intended to get Trump off his game or are just the way journalism is practiced nowadays, it ought to be having an effect, in the same way that the story about Hillary Clinton’s emails right before the election had an effect. 

Admittedly there are not a lot of undecided voters remaining. How could anybody still be undecided? But the scandal-a-day juggernaut would be expected to shore up the feelings of the moderately anti-Trump voters as the election period ramps up. In other words, if Biden should have an off-night in any of the three debates, there will be enough extra material floating around to keep his voters on the straight and narrow. 

And to some extent, this all depends on the scandals being played up sufficiently during Tuesday night’s debate. 

But this will depend on the moderator making something happen out of the Trump income tax story, or his refusal to agree to a peaceful transition of power, or any of the other crazy-making behaviors he has engaged in. 

For example: We already know how Trump reacted the first time he was confronted over the income tax report: He just said that it was “fake news.” It’s about time that a debate moderator and Joe Biden take the opportunity to explain to viewers what nonsense Trump’s defenses are.

(We can also expect the Republican side to come back with the usual argument that the New York Times is basing its story on sources that it will not name. The retort to that is the same as it has been for the past 4 years: Let’s see the tax returns if you insist on us believing you.) 

If you insist on arguing for federalism, doesn’t it include state elections too? 

There is one point that the pundits and the media have been missing out on. It’s a great huge whopper of illogic underlying the Trump whining about the dangers of a “rigged” election. 

Trump and his offspring have been arguing that the president doesn’t have to accept the presidential election results unless the elections are fair and honest. They float all sorts of rumors and innuendos about how the election could be corrupted. Donald Trump has made arguments that imply that he, alone, should be the ultimate determiner of whether the election has been rigged. And that determination apparently would give him the right to nullify the results from one or more states. 

What’s missing from the discussion is the actual Constitutional structure of presidential selection. The Constitution and 230 years of precedent say that the presidential election is actually the sum of individual determinations made by the separate states. The results of 50 statewide elections and the District of Columbia add up to an electoral college of 538 electoral votes. And the statewide elections are created by individual states which set up their own methods for counting the votes. And those methods may potentially involve counts that go on for days or even weeks. Some of our congressional tallies did in fact go on for weeks the last time around due to lots of mail-in ballots, and in this year of the epidemic, we can expect an even higher total resulting in a longer counting period. 

But this is our right as a state, just as Virginia or Pennsylvania have the right to set up polling places, mail-in ballots, and a system for counting the votes that may end up taking a few days or even longer. 

It’s curious that Trump and some of his supporters have become obsessive over the difference between the election night tally vs. the continuing vote counting. I’ve already discussed how silly this argument is – there is no particular reason to believe, and much evidence to the contrary, that there would be any particular corruption that comes with mail-in ballots – but that’s not even the main point. If you want to pretend to some version of federalism, then you ought also to admit that California and Pennsylvania and North Carolina are the entities appointed to carrying out the process of the presidential elections. 

It’s simply absurd to argue that any oversight power also is lodged in the president himself. 

And by the way, one reason that counting mail-in ballots takes a while is that the people who count them have to check that the ballot is coming from an actual registered voter and that the signature matches the one on file. Arguments about pre-marked ballots from overseas coming in and flooding the system don’t make a lot of sense, unless you believe that the state election authorities are co-conspirators. And remember that Trump has personally concocted this story in spite of the fact that the Covid-19 epidemic is the underlying reason for going to mail-in ballots. 

Another way of looking at the Trump prattling 

You can, if you like, set aside the legalisms of Trump’s arguments about the potentiality of a rigged election. Just take it for the juvenile prattling that is characteristic of the Trump personality. It is just excuse making. It is the whining you hear from somebody who knows he is behind and is looking to bolster his fragile ego. In other words, it is the oh-so-predictable response of the loser who has been caught. 

What it all comes down to 

Ultimately, the validity of the election will come down to what it always has – the willingness of the local election boards and secretaries of state to run honest elections in their own towns and states. Even in those states which try to suppress the turnout of poor people, there should be a reasonably honest count of all the ballots that actually get cast. And doing an honest count is not rocket surgery. Local polling places and the offices where the ballots are counted will have representatives of the major political parties as observers. The ballot boxes have to be transported in a secure manner. Every other part of the process higher on the chain will be under the observation of countless reporters and elected officials and volunteer observers. 

So when Donald Trump whines that it is going to be a rigged election, he is projecting his own inner dishonesty rather than the reality on the ground. It’s not that there is never any chicanery (LBJ comes to mind) but that in a national election where the difference between the leader and the second place finisher is measured in percentage points rather than in dozens of votes, it's hard to change the outcome by stealing a couple of dozen votes.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)

-cw