Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Trump's Obsession With Undoing His 2020 Defeat

https://lucid.substack.com/p/trumps-obsession-with-undoing-his


Every authoritarian leader has a core obsession, one that is often linked to some grievance or other negative emotion or cause. For autocrats, holding office is a way of solving their personal, political, legal, and financial problems, and so government institutions are repurposed to prioritize whatever core emotional and practical situation consumes the leader, keeping him up at night.

For President Donald Trump, that situation is the 2020 election. The Big Lie is back because Trump has a psychological and practical need to “prove” that his devastating loss never happened, because the election was rigged against him. The desire to undo the reality of his rejection by American voters has translated now into an all-hands-on-deck approach: rerouting the business of governance to satisfy his need for vengeance and the creation of an alternate reality he can live with.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard passed the loyalty test, going in person to Georgia, and the head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is racking up sycophant points for declaring the 2020 election probe an FBI “priority” that requires an “immediate surge” of hundreds of personnel to Fulton Country, the scene of the alleged crime.

Patel likely got extra credit for firing two analysts who dared to point out that the investigation was thin on evidence. The Party Line, i.e. Trump’s personal fantasy, must be maintained!

Trump has been remarkably thorough in seeking to discredit every link in the chain of voting, as I pointed out in a 2021 CNN essay that displeased MAGA and was cited in Trump’s 2022 lawsuit of the news company:

It’s not surprising that Trump’s lying had a dramatic uptick in 2020, when he was campaigning for reelection during a pandemic that he mismanaged with lethal results. He needed to discredit the main thing that threatened his power – the vote. He worked overtime to throw doubt on every single aspect of voting. He told lies about dead people voting, about fraudulent mail-in ballots, about votes illegally counted, not counted at all, or invented.

*snip*