THE TWO "TWO AMERICAS" OF TRUMP AND ROMNEY

• Published in: Law and contemporary problems 2022-06, Vol.85 (3), p.87
• Main Author: Zelenak, Lawrence
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Democracy; Election results; Electoral College; Income tax; Legislators; Legislatures; Legitimacy; Political aspects; Political majority; Polls & surveys; Presidential elections; Respondents; Romney, Mitt; Trump, Donald; Trump, Donald J; Voter fraud; Voters; Voting
• ISSN: 0023-9186; 1945-2322

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when we talk of two Americas, different people may have different ideas of the dividing line. Most simply, the two Americas might consist of Biden voters on the one hand, and Trump voters on the other. But every presidential election features two Americas in that sense. The more important dividing line in 2021 is the one suggested above by David Blight—between those Americans who acknowledge that Joe Biden legitimately won the election (regardless of whether they supported Biden), and those Americans who believe, or claim to believe, that Biden stole the election from Donald Trump through massive electoral fraud. Given the utter lack of evidence to support this claim of a stolen election, Trump and his to-the-bitterend followers have either given up any commitment to objective reality, if they are sincere in their belief, or their commitment to democracy, if they are disingenuous. I will not attempt here to disentangle the anti-reality Trump followers from the anti-democracy Trump followers; certainly, the camp includes both types, as well as individuals who are difficult to classify as either more antireality or more anti-democracy. One of our current two Americas consists of adherents of what some call Trumpism; the other America is everyone else. Whether Trumpism is understood as primarily anti-reality, or primarily anti-democracy, as long as it thrives it poses an existential threat to the nation. By this standard, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Liz Cheney, for example, are all in the pro-reality, prodemocracy America, despite their enthusiastic pre-election support of Donald Trump.3 Who are the Trumpism adherents? Among members of Congress, the obvious place to look—not so much a proxy as a measure of the thing itself—is the January 6 voting on challenging or accepting the Electoral College results from Arizona and Pennsylvania. In the Senate, only eight of fifty-two Republican senators—and, of course, no Democratic senators—objected to the results from Arizona, Pennsylvania, or both.4 As a fraction of all senators, and even as a fraction of all Republican senators, the objectors might seem too few to worry about. Things were very different, however, in the House, where 139 out of 196 Republican members voted against the results from at least one of those two states.5 What about the general population? In a post-election national survey, the Pew Research Center asked respondents who they thought wa