Trump’s New Voter I.D. Threat Is His Gravest Attack on Democracy Yet
Trying to prevent or subvert or nullify an election, I would argue, is on another level. We’ve had presidents and other political leaders who tried to get their foes thrown in the clink. We’ve had loads of corrupt pols, though never anyone near Trump’s operatic scale. And we have, alas, treated a lot of people very badly, from the 400,000-plusAfrican people brought over as slaves to the millions of Native Americans we drove from their lands or herded onto reservations to the patriotic Japanese Americans during World War II.
But through all those moral calamities, we’ve had elections. A federal election has never been postponed or cancelled in the history of the United States. If ever one was going to be postponed, it obviously would have been in 1864. But Abraham Lincoln refused even to consider delaying it. And he was convinced he was going to lose! On August 23, 1864, he wrote this memo to his Cabinet members: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
He put it in an envelope and asked his Cabinet officers to sign the envelope without reading the memo. Note how there was no question in his mind that the election would be held—even though he was sure he was going to lose. That’s how a small-d democrat behaves. Can you imagine Donald Trump doing that? Never in a jillion years, and it’s precisely that difference that explains why Lincoln is our greatest president and Trump our worst.
