A free and fair election

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is the famous first line of Joan Didion’s great essay “The White Album,” which is among other things Didion’s account of her struggle to make sense of the apparently nonsensical and surreal chaos of to so much of politics and culture in America in general and Southern California in particular in the last years of the 1960s.

One of the stories we’re telling ourselves at the moment, in order to make sense of America in 2024, is that Donald Trump won “a free and fair election,” which is why it’s understandable, and perhaps inevitable and even laudable, that Trump’s political opponents are doing what they’re doing, and more particularly not doing, in response.

I don’t have a specific plan of action for our purported leaders. I do have the following observation: If you are saying that Donald Trump won a free and fair election, you are lying to yourself. You are, as it were, gaslighting yourself, in a fashion vaguely similar to the ways in which Didion describes herself feeling gaslighted by reality — although she didn’t use that term at the time of course — in “The White Album.”

Donald Trump’s re-election wasn’t free and fair in a whole bunch of ways, including the fact that it was enabled by enormous amounts of mind-poisoning propaganda, foreign and domestic, but here I want to emphasize the most important such way, which is that a correct interpretation of the pre-existing legal rules, specifically those found in the US Constitution, would disqualify him from holding the office to which he was just re-elected.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government by staying in the presidency after he lost an election. That is the very definition of committing insurrection against the lawful government of the United States. The 14th amendment was adopted specifically to bar people like Donald Trump — insurrectionists — from holding federal office.

This little detail has seemingly gone down the national memory hole, so eager are we all to tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Now again, what specifically to do about that at the moment is a very good question. A very bad answer, however, begins with the observation that Donald Trump won a free and fair election, because he did not. He’s not going to be the legitimate president of the United States, because he’s an insurrectionist, and the most fundamental laws of this country say insurrectionists are not legitimate presidents, because they are not eligible to be elected to that office.

We — or somebody anyway — fought a whole war over that, for all the good it did, which at the moment seems not that much.

But the very first step on this road is to refuse to gaslight ourselves about what happened 15 days ago.