This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 12 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are in something of a weird period these days. On one track, the daily news out of Washington is the normal process of American governance, specifically the transition from one presidency to another. It’s the kind of thing you might expect after any election when the White House changes parties.
Some elected Democrats are out there acting like everything is normal. You may recall that President Joe Biden hosted President-elect Donald Trump for a friendly fireside chat in the Oval Office last month.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania now says he supports Elise Stefanik to be Trump’s United Nations ambassador because he supports her position on Israel. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado praised Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Trump’s choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. And a whole bunch of Democrats are paying lip service to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to slash spending.
I’ve seen this movie before: rich people currying favor with a powerful president. But this isn’t before, and Trump is different.
Basically, the message from some national Democrats and other public figures is, “Well, the people have spoken and now we’re going to get about the business of governing under Trump.”
There’s a similar vibe from the titans of industry. Tech billionaires are popping up all over the place trying to curry favor with the once and future president. We learned that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund after meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago.
Not to be outdone, we learned that Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is also donating a million dollars to the inauguration. Bezos says he looks forward to working with the president-elect. “If we’re talking about Trump, I think it’s very interesting,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit last week. “I’m actually very optimistic this time around. ... I’m very hopeful about his — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. My point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m gonna help him.”
Again, I’ve seen this movie before: rich people currying favor with a powerful president. But this isn’t before, and Trump is different. What’s so disturbing, enraging and alienating about the capitulation to Trump is that it ignores the gaping wound in American democracy. It’s just sitting there — festering — while everyone just goes about business as usual.
Just four years ago, one of the two major parties in this country largely withdrew from the consensus of democratic governance and rejected the peaceful transfer of power. But right now, it looks like that wound has healed because the party that has withdrawn, the Republicans, happened to win this last election and, because Democrats believe in preserving democracy, they accepted those results.
But the wound has not been healed. The problem has not been solved. Trump is just as committed to the big lie and the insurrection as he ever was. In his interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press,” Trump refused to concede the 2020 election and once again pledged to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters.
What’s more is that Trump is instituting loyalty tests to make sure that the folks working in his administration also support his election lies. A recent New York Times report details the interview process at the Trump transition offices:
The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.
For at least one of Trump’s would-be employees, you don’t even need to ask those questions. Kari Lake, who Trump wants to lead Voice of America — the government’s state media network — is perhaps the politician most closely linked to the big lie outside of Trump himself. Lake not only insists that Trump won the 2020 election, but she also insists she won her own 2022 race to be governor of Arizona — which she lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs.
It's not exactly clear if Trump can install Lake as the head of VOA, but he is certainly going to try. And Lake would most likely use every facet of her power to push election lies and create a domestic version of Russia’s infamous state media apparatus.
Lake believes, perhaps more than anyone else, in the core tenet of the modern Republican Party: Elections only count when we win them.
We’re actually seeing this play out right now in North Carolina. Last month, Trump won at the top of the ticket there but Democrats did pretty well down-ballot. Democrat Josh Stein won the gubernatorial race by 15 points, defeating Republican Mark Robinson. (The guy who reportedly frequented a porn forum called “Nude Africa,” where he allegedly referred to himself as a “black Nazi.” Robinson denies the allegations.)
Democrat Jeff Jackson, a congressman who was gerrymandered out of his seat, also won the race to be the state’s next attorney general. That means Democrats won two of the top jobs in North Carolina politics, fair and square. But North Carolina Republicans aren’t happy about it.
Lake believes, perhaps more than anyone else, in the core tenet of the modern Republican Party: Elections only count when we win them.
Republicans lost their supermajority in the gerrymandered state legislature last month. They are in a lame-duck session right now, before that supermajority goes away. In these waning days, they just overrode a governor’s veto to force through a bill that strips power away from those newly elected Democrats and hands it to Republican officials instead.
Republicans lost the election in North Carolina and then they gave themselves power anyway. Believe me, if they had lost the presidential race in November, Republicans would likely be trying to overturn the election at the national level, too.
That’s the gaping wound. The rejection of democracy is still alive and well. Democrats bending the knee to Trump because they agree with him on Israel or cutting government spending is not going to address the problem. My strong belief is that everyone trying to will us toward normalcy by acting like everything is normal is in for a rude awakening.
Allison Detzel contributed.