3 Minute History: The 2020 Presidential Election
A possible transcript of a future YouTuber’s recap of
the 2020 presidential election
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Today we’re looking at a recent event: the 2020 American election, which most historians point to as the culminating event in the breakdown of American democracy. Of course, we can go a lot farther back, to the rise of Trump in 2016, or to the power of corporate lobbying unleashed through Citizens United, or even earlier with the rise of social media forever changing political discourse. But you’ll have to click on the links below to go to those videos.
Here, we’re going to start in the election year itself since we only have 3 minutes. We have to start with the infamous COVID-19 pandemic. The conspiracy theorists like to say a virus from China brought down American democracy, but the truth is…the real virus that caused America’s downfall came from Russia…but let’s not skip ahead.
There were a lot of issues beforehand, but COVID-19 threw gasoline on the fire. An economic shutdown. Debates about the science of the pandemic. Issues of racial justice rising to the forefront of American consciousness.
In the midst of this, we had an election cycle where two 70-something-year-olds competed for a Presidency amidst a virus whose effects were particularly severe amongst that age group. These pictures are airbrushed, but there’s no hiding it - these guys are old.
Oh, and then, the President contracted COVID-19! And somehow, that was not even close to the top of the list of the biggest worries facing America at the time.
The pandemic’s biggest effect was on the integrity of the election itself. Historically, mail-in voting and absentee voting had not been a particularly important political issue. But, in 2020, as more people than ever chose to vote in unconventional ways due to the pandemic, the issue rose to the forefront. The Republican President, Donald Trump, was at the vanguard of a movement questioning the integrity of mail-in and absentee ballots. Most agree his fears did not reside with the institution (fun fact: here he is actually voting absentee in a prior election). Trump feared who mail-in voters might be voting for – that man, his opponent Joe Biden.
While most worried about whether ballots would be fairly counted, too few were worried about when they would be counted. On election night, most Americans were surprised to find that we were nowhere near a result. It looked promising for the challenger Joe Biden, but the incumbent Donald Trump had a small lead in some critical states and was within striking distance in a few others and there were many votes still to be counted.
With an election in the balance and votes still to be counted, that’s when the chaos really unfolded. Misinformation started flooding all forms of media, including reports of data breaches at election sites. Facebook and Google attempted to fight the spread of misinformation, but they barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. The headlines were ominous and everywhere you looked, there were reports of tampering, fraud, or a conspiracy.
Now, in retrospect, the strategy was obvious: getting Americans to debate the facts was exactly what Russia intended through their well-orchestrated misinformation campaigns. It’s impossible to hear a whisper of truth amidst a thunderstorm of possibilities. Now that the storm has passed, it’s easy to find the truth and assess the damage, but it’s too late to undo it.
Oh, and the debate was far from cordial. Protests on both sides sparked around the country, with people in the streets claiming victory and demanding the other side acknowledge defeat. None of these people look like people who just won something….
Things looked dire. President Trump openly and loudly embraced a conspiracy theory that pointed to China as the likely culprit – first bringing the coronavirus and then targeting our election by hacking our system and manipulating the results. Still, at this point, it still seemed that he was mostly complaining about the eventual likely outcome and laying a foundation for life as a successful media mogul afterward.
Two weeks after the election, something changed. President Trump formally questioned the integrity of the election in a now-infamous press conference. Trump announced:
A state of martial law across the US due to the protests. Along with that declaration, he said he would be deploying federal troops in cities where the protests were, in his words, “out of control.”
He also said there would need to be an independent review of the presidential election results (he declared Palantir, chaired by the infamous Peter Thiel, would be leading that review) – links below on Palantir, Thiel, and the infamous review itself.
Finally, he said Inauguration Day would be postponed until the completion of the review.
Why did Trump do this? This is a matter of deep historical debate. We do know that President Trump had a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin the day before his press conference. Many accounts of that call seem to suggest that Putin attempted to explain how Trump might contest such an “unfair result”. Many believe Putin convinced Trump that fighting proactively instead of complaining passively would be both easier and more profitable. In the end, Putin was right.
DC and other liberal cities were held hostage by federal troops until the resistance faded. The review came out, unsurprisingly, with the conclusion that the election was compromised. Whether or not that’s true is questionable, but now largely beside the point. While Trump promised to do a new election in four years, most observers knew he was paying lip service to democracy at that point.
Where was Congress? The courts? The states? The armed forces?
Those are questions that deserve more time, but our 3 minutes is up, so I’ll leave you with this: none of those institutions were enough to preserve the American empire.
Thanks for watching, and next time, I’ll be reviewing the fall of Caesar and the rise of the Roman Empire!