It is well established that the road to power in the Republican Party runs past a toll booth named Donald Trump. Those seeking prominence and power have to offer the former president their fealty at a bare minimum; those seeking to travel further have to pay a higher cost.<\/p>\n
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) is happy to pony up. Burgum rose to attention a year ago when he announced his extremely long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. (He\u2019s rich, which always helps.) He fared poorly, but that was probably more a positive than a negative: He never had to hit Trump too hard but still came to Trump\u2019s attention. Now he\u2019s being discussed as a contender for his party\u2019s vice-presidential nomination.<\/p>\n
That brought him to NBC News\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d on Sunday, where \u2014 with a ping of his political E-ZPass \u2014 he offered a neat articulation of the Republican response to concerns that Trump seeks authoritarian power: No, Democrats do.<\/p>\n
Host Kristen Welker asked whether Trump\u2019s comments during last week\u2019s presidential debate didn\u2019t have the effect of \u201cundermining people\u2019s faith in \u2026 democracy itself by raising questions about the fairness of the 2020 election.\u201d It didn\u2019t, Burgum replied, because \u201cboth parties have done this.\u201d His evidence that Democrats had done so was both familiar and thin: asking for a recount in 2000 or grumbling about the outcome in 2016.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a country, if we want to move forward,\u201d Burgum said, \u201cwe have to have elections that both parties agree to.\u201d<\/p>\n
On paper, this seems noncontroversial. In context, though, it\u2019s anything but. The entire point of Trump\u2019s efforts to subvert 2020 was that he established and encouraged Republicans to reject the results of the election. A compromise to which both parties agreed, then, necessarily meant one in which the reality of Trump\u2019s loss was somehow undermined. Setting that standard moving forward means that partisanship should set the boundaries of acceptability, not math. That\u2019s precisely the sort of thing that is alarming to those concerned about Trump\u2019s approach to democracy.<\/p>\n
Welker pushed back, as you might hope she would: Wasn\u2019t Trump\u2019s failure to concede alarming?<\/p>\n
Burgum didn\u2019t think so, given that, \u201cTrump, at the end of this term on January 20th, left the White House. We had a smooth transition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Welker offered Jan. 6 as a counterpoint to that argument.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I think we have to say that there was a smooth transition,\u201d Burgum replied, which we certainly don\u2019t. A second later, he got to the central point.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoing into 2024, I think both parties are going to be very focused on [the election],\u201d he said. \u201cI think the threat to democracy, as a governor in North Dakota today, I\u2019ve been living under what I call the Biden dictatorship because of all the rules and regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Welker noted that Biden had introduced fewer executive orders than both Trump and Burgum himself, asking whether that made Burgum \u201cdictator of North Dakota.\u201d Burgum claimed that he was simply \u201ctrying to get rid of red tape\u201d and changed the subject.<\/p>\n
Again, though, this is the rhetoric: Democrats are the real threat to democracy. It\u2019s not always articulated in the manner Burgum used, but it\u2019s routine. Violence that followed some protests against police brutality in summer 2020 was worse than the Capitol riot. The arrest of those who participated in the riot was not a response to an effort to subvert democracy but itself such a subversion. It isn\u2019t what Trump does that\u2019s the problem; it\u2019s Biden and the Democrats and being \u201cwoke\u201d and labeling social media posts as false and changing the rules around elections and so on. The problem isn\u2019t us, and it isn\u2019t Donald Trump. The problem is them, and it is Dictator Biden.<\/p>\n
That Democrats and Republicans point to the threat to democracy as a significant problem has been established in polling for some time now. Last month, a Fox News poll found that members of both major parties saw the threat to democracy as being a function of restricted freedom rather than impaired elections, for example.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, polling from CBS News, conducted by YouGov, showed how pervasive the sentiment is. Most Democrats said democracy would only be safe if Biden wins in November. Most Republicans said it would only be safe if Trump did.<\/p>\n
The net effect is that Americans overall are divided. A majority think that democracy will not be protected if Biden wins, and a (mostly different) majority thinks it will not be protected if Trump does.<\/p>\n
As Welker noted to Burgum, the presentation of Biden as a \u201cdictator\u201d because he implemented executive actions is flatly ridiculous. It became only more ridiculous after the Supreme Court on Monday determined that Trump\u2019s efforts to subvert the 2020 election had broad protections against criminal prosecution. It\u2019s not even clear the extent to which Burgum believes it.<\/p>\n
But it is clear that this is the sort of thing Trump wants to hear from a possible running mate. It is also clear that a lot of Republicans believe it, that they see Biden as dictatorial centrally because he uses the power he was granted by the 2020 election to enact his agenda.<\/p>\n
If you think that election was illegitimate because Trump convinced you that it was, it\u2019s not hard to see how this perception of Biden follows.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It is well established that the road to power in the Republican Party runs past a toll booth named Donald Trump. Those seeking prominence and power have to offer the former president their fealty at a bare minimum; those seeking to travel further have to pay a higher cost. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}