Elections

In Nancy Mitford’s comic 1960 novel “Don’t Tell Alfred,” the wife of the new British ambassador to Paris arrives at the embassy to find that she has a vexing problem: Her predecessor has refused to move out.Indeed, Pauline Leone, the wife of the previous ambassador, is so unhinged by the prospect of a status-free future that she has set up her own rival court, grandly receiving a stream of visitors as if for all the world she were still Madame L’Ambassadrice, the social arbiter of Paris.“At the beginning one thought it was a lark — that in a day or two she’d get tired of it,” a British official says crossly. But no. “She’s having the time of her life,” he adds, “and quite honestly I don’t see how we shall ever induce her to go.”As the nation ponders the awkward case of Donald J. Trump, a president who will not admit that he has been fired, it is helpful to consider him through the experiences of other people, fictional and otherwise, who have been unable to accept the arrival of unwelcome developments in their personal and professional lives.Is Trump like King Lear, raging naked on the heath and desperately hanging on to the increasingly diminished trappings of power even as they are stripped from him? Or is he more like Bartleby the Scrivener, the inscrutable model of passive resistance who one day declines to do any more work or indeed leave the building, declaring: “I would prefer not to?”Is he like Nellie, the character in “The Office” who installs herself at the desk of the regional manager when he is out of town and unilaterally appoints herself boss? Or how about George from “Seinfeld,” who quits one of his many jobs in a huff, unsuccessfully tries to get it back, and reports to work anyway, as if nothing had happened?Timothy Naftali, a history professor at New York University, said that one way to view Mr. Trump would be as a version of Miss Havisham, the jilted bride from “Great Expectations” who lives forever in the past, never taking off her tattered wedding gown even as her house decays around her.“He’s wearing the cloak of the presidency and he’s stuck in his room, getting dusty, while everyone else has moved on,” Mr. Naftali said.No president in American history has ever before refused for so long to concede an election he has obviously lost. But when it comes to hanging on to an alternative version of reality, Mr. Trump has plenty of nonpresidential company.There was Eteocles, a son of Oedipus in Greek mythology, who remained on the throne of Thebes, reneging on his promise to share it with his twin brother, leading to a battle in which they killed each other.There was Gov. Edmund J. Davis of Texas, a Republican, who refused to leave office after losing the election of 1873, claiming that he had several months left in his term and barricading himself on the ground floor of the State Capitol. (The newly elected governor and his supporters installed themselves on the first floor, using ladders to enter through the windows.)There was the Hiroo Onoda, the Imperial Japanese Army officer who would not surrender after the end of World War II, remaining in combat-readiness in the jungle for 29 years until his by-then elderly former commanding officer arrived and rescinded his no-surrender order.And there was the entire government of Moldova, which in 2019 decided not to make way for a new government, leading to a bizarre situation in which both groups claimed for a time to be in charge of the country. The impasse finally ended when the former prime minister grudgingly stepped down in the face of growing national outrage and international pressure.While American presidential transfers of power have traditionally been smooth, well-run affairs, world history is replete with examples of dictators and strongmen employing nefarious means to remain in office. Sometimes such rulers refuse to accept the results of honestly conducted elections. Sometimes they throw out term limits, and just keep on governing. Sometimes they jail, torture, kill or disappear their political opponents. (Sometimes they do all of those things.)Mr. Trump has spoken admiringly about at least some of these practices, saying, for instance, that he was “probably entitled” to a third term “based on the way we were treated.” (That was before he lost the election.)But given the news wafting like the occasional smoke signal from the White House, where some of the president’s advisers and relatives are reportedly attempting various psychological techniques to get Mr. Trump to accept the fact that he is now a lame-duck president, his behavior seems less like a putsch and more like an extended whiny tantrum. As Dan Rather, an elder statesman of American journalism, said on Twitter: “Dude. You lost.”“He cannot bear being the loser and so now is doing everything within his power to assault the reality he hates,” said Joseph Burgo, a clinical psychologist who has studied Mr. Trump and written about his appeal to voters.“Once he has exhausted all possible avenues to challenge the election, he will spend the rest of his life insisting the system conspired to deprive him of his victory,” said Dr. Burgo, the author of “The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age.” “He will take refuge in blame, self-pity and righteous indignation to shore up his sense of self, thereby warding off the humiliation of true defeat.”Meanwhile, many Republican legislators, loath to upset Mr. Trump, are helping to prop up the illusion that he is still somehow in power, in a way reminiscent of the courtiers who flattered, lied and enabled their way through the final days of Emperor Haile Selasse’s reign in Ethiopia in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “The Emperor.”Interestingly enough, there appears to be some precedent for this within the Trump family itself. When the president’s father, Fred, developed Alzheimer’s, the family reportedly conspired to help him believe that he still ran the Trump organization. According to Vanity Fair, the elder Mr. Trump would show up for work every day, signing blank papers and using an office phone connected only to his secretary’s line. “Fred pretended to work,” a family friend told the magazine.With his vast coterie of enablers willing to believe his baseless assertions about the election, Mr. Naftali said, Trump might be better compared to the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz.”“Many of us assumed that Trump’s behind-the-curtain moment — when Dorothy arrived and, thanks to Toto, found out that the Wizard was a humbug — would come because of his handling of the Covid emergency,” he said. “But one of the reasons the president is able to continue this fantasy that he won a second term is that 73 million people don’t agree that he was a humbug. Even though the Wizard is on his way out, Oz still exists.”Of course, angry people can be very dangerous when backed into corners, and Mr. Trump’s belief in his own falsehoods has already had damaging, real-life consequences. Some sympathetic right-wing media outlets and many Republican officials are refusing to acknowledge that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the president-elect. Millions of people appear to believe Mr. Trump’s assertions that the election was stolen and that the coronavirus, now raging out of control, is not a serious problem. His supporters are marching in the streets to protest the election result, and it remains to be seen under what circumstances he will finally leave the White House.All these things raise the question (asking for a friend): How do you get someone to face reality and get out of the White House?For clients who have lost their jobs during this unsettling time, said Megan Walls, an executive coach and career adviser in Chicago, she works to help them accept what has happened and move on. “The reality is that we can’t control Covid or jobs or business — we can only control ourselves,” she said.However, she added, Mr. Trump would not be a good candidate for the kind of coaching she offers.“I won’t work with people who are avoiding the situation or acting like a victim,” she said. “Anyone who is digging their heels in — I can’t help him until they help themselves. Maybe they don’t need a coach; they need a psychotherapist.”How about flattery?On Twitter, the Trump-admiring journalist Geraldo Rivera compared the president to a heavyweight champion who knows he has lost but grittily fights on in case he can eke out a victory. His lyrical description — “Still, he’s going to answer the final bell, looking for the knockout he knows is a long shot”— inadvertently brings to mind the delusional Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who won’t surrender even after his arms and legs have been hacked off. (“Tis but a scratch,” the knight declares. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?” King Arthur responds.)As for the former ambassador’s wife who overstays her welcome in “Don’t Tell Alfred,” embassy officials decide that the best way to evict her is to deprive her of the attention she craves. “We must bore her out,” an official says.Finally, reluctantly, she leaves, taking on a diva-ish air of wounded glamour as she encounters a crowd of guests arriving for a party to which she has not been invited.“She shook hands, like a royal person,” Mitford writes, “as she sailed out of the house forever.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More

WASHINGTON — At a chic cafe in the West End neighborhood here, a young waiter knew that the incoming vice president lived “upstairs,” as he noted by gesturing to an upscale condominium building overhead, but said he had not actually seen her lately.“The Secret Service sometimes stops me from taking out the trash, though,” he added, saying that agents closed off the building’s alley when their protectee came and went from its garage.Around the corner, two black Suburbans with federal license plates were parked by the building’s entrance — the only visible clue to the nearby presence of the California senator and vice president-elect, Kamala Harris.In the days since he prevailed in the election, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made several public remarks and released summaries of his calls with foreign leaders as reporters track his every public movement. But Ms. Harris has barely appeared on the public radar since her acceptance speech last Saturday in Wilmington, Del., where she declared “a new day for America.”She shared a stage again with Mr. Biden in Wilmington two days later, after a coronavirus briefing they had attended together. Ms. Harris stood silently several feet away while Mr. Biden spoke, without giving remarks of her own.It is not unprecedented for a vice president-elect to keep a low profile in an election’s aftermath. “You know, you’ve been fairly invisible since the election,” the ABC News host George Stephanopoulos told Mr. Biden in an interview more than a month after his own election as Barack Obama’s vice president.Mr. Biden replied by insisting he had “been in the room” for every one of Mr. Obama’s important transition meetings. Because of social-distancing restrictions related to the coronavirus, Ms. Harris has no such luxury, at least not in the physical sense.After spending election week in Delaware, she has returned to the two-bedroom Washington condominium she bought after she was elected to the Senate in 2016. From there, she is in regular touch with Mr. Biden, by text message or telephone, according to aides with the Biden-Harris transition team, and with other transition officials. Ms. Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, also has a close relationship with the incoming first lady, Jill Biden; the two campaigned together in the race’s final weeks.One focus of her time is the quantum leap Ms. Harris is soon to make from the legislative to the executive branch. Whereas Mr. Biden will have virtually no learning curve upon returning to the White House after eight years as vice president, Ms. Harris has spent little, if any, substantive time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (A transition official could not immediately say when she had last visited there.)That process is made no easier by President Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the election results and authorize an official transition process in which Ms. Harris and her aides would have access to White House officials and documents. Ms. Harris has not been contacted by her departing counterpart, Vice President Mike Pence. Days after the 2016 election, Mr. Biden hosted Mr. Pence for nearly two hours at the official vice-presidential compound at the U.S. Naval Observatory. “I told Mike, the vice president-elect, that I’m available to him 24/7,” Mr. Biden told reporters.Biden-Harris transition officials declined to comment.For now, Ms. Harris remains a senator. It is unclear when she might relinquish her seat. Mr. Obama stepped down from his Senate seat days after his 2008 election, but Mr. Biden, ever the sentimentalist, hung on to his until shortly before he was sworn in as vice president the following January, telling friends he wanted to take one last oath of office for the seat he had held for decades. (Mr. Biden also said he wanted to retain his vote in case it might be needed in a lame-duck Senate session.)Like Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris also has her own staff to build — another task potentially made more challenging by her relative lack of Washington experience. While Mr. Biden, after nearly 50 years in the capital, has a network of hundreds of former Senate and White House aides, Ms. Harris has a smaller circle, though she is expected to hire several familiar faces from her Senate office and her 2020 campaign.On social media, Ms. Harris has stayed rigorously on message, posting on Twitter several times about the coronavirus and her determination to work with Mr. Biden to contain it. “In just a few months, we will swear in a new president who is committed to getting the pandemic under control: @JoeBiden,” she tweeted on Saturday morning.Later in the day, Ms. Harris, who will become the first occupant of the White House who is of Indian heritage, also tweeted greetings for the beginning of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.Ms. Harris has ventured out in the Washington area at least once since the election. On a rainy Veterans Day, wearing bluejeans and a black raincoat, she and Mr. Emhoff dropped by Georgetown’s Dog Tag Bakery, which was founded to help support veterans.She has otherwise been out of sight at her condo building, about a mile from the White House, and twice that distance from the Naval Observatory complex she will soon call home. “No great thing created suddenly,” reads an inscription on the side of the building, a quote from the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus.Mimicking a sad face, the server at the Bluestone Lane cafe on the building’s ground floor said he hoped she would visit again soon. More

A presidential transition can be a perilous time in the world. That’s particularly true when the departing president denies that he is departing and fires America’s top defense officials.President Trump dismissed Defense Secretary Mark Esper and several other top national security officials across the government. At the Pentagon, he has appointed four new top officials, one of them an extremist who had publicly called President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader.” Another hard-liner was installed at the National Security Agency over its director’s objections, and two senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security have been forced out.Rumors fly that the purge may continue with the removal of F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray and C.I.A. Director Gina Haspel. The president’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., denounced Haspel a few days ago as “a trained liar.”The new appointments may increase the risk of aggressive action toward Iran. And the upheaval certainly undermines our national security in a transition period that is already fraught.“Trump has figuratively decapitated our operational civilian leadership in the Pentagon,” James Stavridis, a retired admiral and supreme allied commander of NATO, told me in an email. “Jubilant high-fives are the order of the day in Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.”He added: “I worry about a North Korean or Iranian miscalculation, thinking the U.S. is too distracted to respond appropriately to a fresh tanker seizure in the Arabian Gulf or a new long-range ballistic missile test — something either might do to gain leverage in negotiations with the incoming administration. Similarly, China could move even more aggressively on Hong Kong or even worse Taiwan, while Russia might be tempted to launch a significant cyberattack.”The greatest risks may be in Asia. North Korea still hasn’t demonstrated that it has a warhead capable of surviving re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere — and Kim Jong-un may feel that this is the time to do so, thus presenting Joe Biden with a fait accompli.North Korea has probably absorbed the lesson that nobody pays attention to it when it’s calm and reasonable, and that it gets rewards only when it threatens mayhem. On the plus side, a negotiated deal is easier to imagine now than a few years ago, and after Trump’s meetings with Kim, it may be more difficult for Republicans to denounce Biden for negotiating with North Korea.The scariest possibility would be a Chinese move on Taiwan. President Xi Jinping may want to signal to the United States and Taiwan alike that any deepening of ties will carry a steep price. If so, Xi might prefer to lay down that marker in the transition so that Biden isn’t forced to respond.The risk isn’t so much an all-out invasion of Taiwan as it is a lesser step meant as a warning shot across the bow: snipping of undersea telecommunications cables that carry the internet to Taiwan, turning out the lights with a cyberattack, impeding oil tankers in ways that alarm investors and tank the stock market — and, from Xi’s point of view, teach Taiwan a lesson. Clashes could quickly escalate, for Taiwan would want China to pay a price for such bullying.“Beijing might calculate that the time is ripe for a move on one of Taiwan’s outer islands, but it would sacrifice any opportunity for a moderated U.S. position toward China once President-elect Biden takes office,” noted Elizabeth Economy, a China expert with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Beijing should also realize that any provocation could backfire and result in closer ties between the United States and Taiwan, plus pressure to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022.One not-so-reassuring sign, Economy noted, is that China recently proved willing to sacrifice its larger relationship with India over a border dispute.As for Iran, most experts believe that it will be on good behavior in hopes of getting a fresh start with Biden — unless it is provoked by some aggressive step concocted by the newly installed hard-liners in the Pentagon. In other words, any dangerous provocation is more likely to originate in Washington, not Tehran.Another risk is that Israel may conclude that the next two months offer a last chance to strike Iranian nuclear sites with support from Washington. The ensuing storm would reverberate through the region and might make it impossible for Biden to get Iran back into the nuclear accord.Robert Malley, president of the International Crisis Group, said that one risk generally is that governments may prefer to take aggressive steps now, while the United States is distracted. For example, Ethiopia’s prime minister has ignited a civil war and Azerbaijan began an offensive against an ethnic Armenian enclave. There’s no proof that the timing for either was shaped by events in Washington — but if you’re an autocrat, this is not a bad time to start a war.“Any transitional period presents foreign policy risks,” Malley said, “but a transitional period involving Trump by definition magnifies them.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected]. More

To the Editor:Re “A Repudiation That Never Came,” by Jamelle Bouie (column, Nov. 6):Can we stop being morally indignant that half the country voted differently than we did?This nation was founded and built on conflict over values: the role of government, the divide between church and state, the limits of individual freedoms, who is a person. We are a people in constant tension with one another over values.This endless struggle may seem at times as absurd as Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, only to have it fall back down for him to start anew. It is hard work. It seems to go nowhere. We grow exhausted, physically and spiritually. But it also is the meaning of being American.The Constitution’s preamble memorializes the basis on which we agree to push that rock up the hill each day: to form a perfect union, to establish justice, to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to us and those who follow us. The rock falls. We start over. It is not easy. But we push our way back up the hill to preserve America. We push back up the hill because the struggle to do so is what it means to be American.Jessica KurzbanLos AngelesTo the Editor:In “A President Sabotages His Own Country” (column, Nov. 5), Nicholas Kristof expresses bewilderment about how voters in this election could have voted for President Trump in greater numbers than ever, after four years of experiencing his bungling of Covid-19, his endless lies and his attacks on American institutions.In Thomas L. Friedman’s column on the same day, “Even Before a Winner, America Was the Loser,” we find a plausible answer, from Rich Lowry, National Review editor: Mr. Trump, repellent as he is, is seen as the only means available to resist “the overwhelming woke cultural tide that has swept along the media, academia, corporate America, Hollywood, professional sports, the big foundations, and almost everything in between.”The Democrats are regarded by many who in the past would have been part of their base as identified with the trends of “wokeness” that accuse white people, and particularly white men, of complicity in systemic racism, patriarchal oppression and “toxic masculinity.” Moreover, Democrats have taken stands on issues such as abortion and policing that denigrate values and beliefs a lot of ordinary people hold dear.If Joe Biden is going to help heal the terrible divisions that afflict us, he must not only address the wreckage due to Mr. Trump but also work to reform the divisive and counterproductive agenda of the woke “progressive” left.Richard H. MillerWinston-Salem, N.C.To the Editor:Thomas L. Friedman has written another brilliant column, outlining the deep, irreconcilable divides in our country. He describes the fear of less educated whites that the country’s population is moving heavily toward people of color and different cultural backgrounds, and that they are being left behind by a skilled technological society that they believe ignores their needs and demeans them. There is also a rural and urban divide. These differences have deeply divided America, exacerbated by the Trump presidency.A century and a half ago America fought a civil war over issues painfully analogous to these. Perhaps it is time to consider a similar solution, but by peaceful means. The fractionalization of the country is leaving deep scars that will not heal.Perhaps recognizing this can lead to peaceful separation of the union into red states and blue states acceptable to both sides. The states on each coast could join in a blue union, with a few states in between, perhaps even joining with Canada to unite the geographic separation.Ken LefkowitzMedford, N.J.To the Editor:It is time to end the hatred on both sides. A first step would be for President Biden to fully pardon President Trump, and for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do likewise. Historians mostly agree that Gerald Ford was wise to pardon Richard Nixon. The good of the country must come first.President Trump gave voice to many voters who previously felt hopeless. Although personally flawed and corrupt, as are a great many politicians, he did keep many of his promises and brought needed balance to our politics. More than 70 million citizens voted for him. He would have been re-elected by a wide margin but for a virus. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he may have made liberals a little less arrogant.A pardon is both needed and appropriate. We need to come together as a nation.Elizabeth StesselWestfield, Mass.To the Editor:As a lifelong Democrat, an Oakland resident and a lesbian, I am thrilled by the prospect of a more diverse administration, the hopeful emblem for which is Kamala Harris, Oakland’s pride.But I also fear more division and stalemate. I’m apprehensive about the prospect of relentless Senate blockading by Mitch McConnell — against all things perceived as Democratic, blue, liberal.That is why I urge liberal support for at least two respected Republican cabinet members, who could encourage Republican senators — and those voters who did not support Joe Biden — to be more receptive to the new administration’s initiatives.The truth is, Democrats demonize and “other” Republicans as much as the other way around. It’s time to have leadership nudge our divided country toward real dialogue and reconciliation, in brave, practical and highly visible ways.Mary GroverOakland, Calif.To the Editor:Re “We Still Don’t Really Understand Trump,” by Frank Bruni (Sunday Review, Nov. 8):Like Mr. Bruni, I wonder how more than 70 million Americans could have voted for Donald Trump. I understand that many who live away from large, diverse urban areas believe that “elites” look down on them and have strong negative feelings about nonwhites and immigrants. That said, I am baffled as to why his failure to manage Covid and its economic fallout — which must have affected many directly — wasn’t more important in their electoral decisions.Part of the answer is that many of them do not share the view that, in fact, he did fail. I heard an elderly person in Florida tell an interviewer that she thought Mr. Trump had done all he could about the virus. Yet those of us who read The Times and other mainstream media know that Mr. Trump rejected science-based recommendations. As a result we did worse than every other developed country.Since the data don’t lie, my assumption is that those facts did not make an impression on Trump voters. Why? Because they get their news and views from sources — Fox and social media — that overwhelm them with “alternative facts.”To make progress on the many fronts that need attention, this is a problem that must be overcome.Stephen M. DavidsonPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:As I read the opinion pieces and letters to the editor since the election, it remains obvious to this New York Times reader that your journalists and many of your readers still don’t understand President Trump’s supporters. I accept that and expect that this mistaken and condescending view (we are all “deplorables”) will yield gains for the G.O.P. in 2022 and 2024.Gerald KatzEdwards, Colo.To the Editor:The most important takeaway for Democrats is that it’s time to get to know the voters in all of the states, and learn how to communicate in a way that does not frighten or insult them.The Democrats may be capable of developing good policies, but they stink at communicating them. Carefully worded polling often shows that a majority agree with Democratic proposals to combat systemic racism, address income disparity and reform the health care reimbursement system. But when the masses hear “Defund the Police,” “Occupy Wall Street” and “Medicare for All,” they recoil.As a liberal living in a small town in Michigan, I can attest that no amount of patient explanation of the actual policy proposals overcomes the impressions left by these sadly worded slogans.The best thing Democrats could do is stick with their ideas and hire the Lincoln Project folks to sell them. The slick and glitzy slogans that appeal to parts of the coasts may be cool, but they don’t play in Peoria.Mary K. O’NeillYpsilanti, Mich. More

We are all Georgians now. Or at least that’s how it feels with the eyes of the nation focused on Georgia and its two U.S. Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5, which will determine party control of the Senate. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, will face off against the Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, and Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, will attempt to unseat the Republican Senator David Perdue.One thing is clear: 2020 has been a historic year for Georgia Democrats. For nearly two decades Democrats have predicted that demographic trends showing a younger, more diverse population in the state would help turn Georgia blue. For the past two years, flipping Georgia has been the singular focus of Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2018, along with the young activists whom she has galvanized. There’s also a broad, multiracial array of Georgians inspired by the example of Congressman John Lewis and united in the effort to repudiate Donald Trump.In a historic achievement, Joe Biden did turn Georgia blue. It would perhaps be a greater achievement if Democrats win even one of the Senate races. They are up against a stubborn foe, however — not just Republicans, but also Georgia’s political history, which shows that change doesn’t come easy in the state.Just ask Republicans. Only in the 1990s did they begin to make significant inroads against Democrats, who had dominated state politics since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. It wasn’t until 2002 that a Republican won the governorship, when Sonny Perdue, now the secretary of agriculture, upset the incumbent, Roy Barnes, who had angered conservative white voters by removing a Confederate emblem from the state flag.Why did Democrats hold on to power in Georgia longer than any in other Southern state? That owed in part to the distinctive structure of the state’s politics. Georgia has almost 160 counties, second in number only to the state of Texas. The story goes that the legislature carved out small counties so that a farmer in a mule-drawn wagon could make it to the courthouse and back in a single day. The real consequence was that under Georgia’s county-unit system, the more rural counties there were, the more leverage they would have against urban interests in Atlanta. All Democrats who controlled their local fiefs for much of the 20th century had little reason to switch to the Republican Party.Until, that is, the 1990s, when culture war issues — abortion, guns and gay rights — transformed political loyalties in rural Georgia. The field general of the conservative culture wars of the 1990s was a Georgia Republican, Representative Newt Gingrich, who played a singular role in bringing forth the scorched-earth tactics of the modern Republican Party.“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Mr. Gingrich told the Georgia College Republicans in 1978 during his third, and ultimately successful, race for Congress. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.”What Mr. Gingrich pioneered in culture-war politics Mr. Trump has escalated. Two days after Election Day, Donald Trump Jr. was in Georgia at a rally outside Republican Party campaign headquarters, castigating Republicans who did not defend his father’s specious claims of fraud. Sounding a lot like Mr. Gingrich in 1978, Mr. Trump Jr. speculated that Democrats had gotten used to “a Republican Party that hasn’t had a backbone.”“That party is gone,” he said, “and anyone that doesn’t fight like that should go with it.”The problem for Republicans is that when they “fight like that,” as Mr. Trump Jr. put it, they sometimes lose voters — like suburban women. Those voters played a big role in Democrats’ success in the 2018 midterm elections and were key to Mr. Biden’s victory. The weight of Georgia’s rural population is no longer sufficient to balance the state’s surging urban and suburban populations, particularly in Atlanta, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. On Nov. 3, Mr. Biden racked up staggering margins in the state’s urban counties — Fulton and DeKalb (include parts of Atlanta) and Chatham (includes Savannah). To repeat Mr. Biden’s feat, Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock will need to do the same.Nevertheless, the two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, apparently prodded by President Trump, called for the resignation of the Republican in charge of Georgia elections, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, lobbing baseless accusations of “mismanagement and lack of transparency.” Mr. Raffensperger called that criticism “laughable”; in fact, he received praise from national experts for a well-run election. But he did call for a manual vote recount (or an audit) of the state’s presidential ballots, a decision that may have had to do with addressing right-wing conspiracy theories (about software glitches skewing elections results), some of which have been retweeted by President Trump himself.History shows that Republicans have the advantage in the Jan. 5 runoff elections. They traditionally have an easier time turning out their voters, especially when a president is not on the ballot, and turnout is everything in today’s polarized political environment. Yet Senators Perdue and Loeffler, in doing Mr. Trump’s bidding, have turned the runoffs into a state referendum on Trumpism and its future, which may boost Democratic turnout once again.Perhaps the history from Georgia and the American South most relevant for our current moment are the eerie final years of the Massive Resistance strategy, when reckless politicians, ignoring all legal and constitutional realities, misled white Southerners into believing that they could maintain segregation forever.Mr. Trump’s delusional tweets declaring that he won the election or teasing new revelations of fraud and corruption evoke a similar sense of living in a dream world. The good news for Georgians is that on Jan. 5 they have an opportunity to send a wake-up call. Two Democratic victories would not only give Democrats control of the Senate but could also help turn the page on Donald Trump’s influence in American politics.Georgia voters, are you ready for the election runoffs?

Joseph Crespino (@CrespinoJoe) is a history professor at Emory University and the author of, most recently, “Atticus Finch: The Biography — Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

WASHINGTON — Many see a wannabe despot barricaded in the bunker, stubby fingers clinging to the levers of power as words that mean nothing to him — democracy, electoral integrity, peaceful transition, constitutionality — swirl above.One presidential historian sees something different in Donald Trump’s swan song. Michael Beschloss has been tweeting pictures of Hollywood’s most famous divas, shut-ins and head cases.Norma Desmond watching movies of herself, hour after hour, shrouded in her mansion on Sunset Boulevard as “the dream she had clung to so desperately enfolded her.” Howard Hughes, descending into germaphobia, madness and seclusion. Greta Garbo, sequestered behind her hat and sunglasses. Charles Foster Kane, missing the roar of the crowd as he spirals at Xanadu, his dilapidated pleasure palace.The president and his cronies are likely to do real damage and major grifting in the next two months. But in other ways, the picture of the president as a pathetic, unraveling diva is apt.Trump has said in interviews and at rallies that two of his favorite movies are the black-and-white classics about stars collapsing in on themselves, “Citizen Kane” and “Sunset Boulevard.”In “Sunset Boulevard,” Max the butler and a camera crew conspire to make the demented silent film star believe she’s getting her close-up when she’s actually just being lured down the staircase to answer for her sins.The Republicans enabling Trump’s delusion are like the camera crew, filming a scene with the disintegrating diva that is never going to be seen.“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” a senior Republican official told The Washington Post. “No one seriously thinks the results will change.”Trump, who once wanted to be a Hollywood producer and considered attending U.S.C. film school, never made the pivot to being a politician. He got elected because he played a competent boss and wily megabillionaire on a reality TV show — pretty good acting now that we know he is neither — and he has stayed a performance artist and a ratings-obsessed showman.Even after Georgia and Arizona were called and Joe Biden clinched 306 electoral votes — the same number Trump declared “a massive landslide victory” when he reached it in 2016 — the president is putting on a play within the play, one in which he’s still the star.Trump Boswell Maggie Haberman reported that there is no grand strategy and the president “is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next,” playing his familiar game of creating a controversy and watching it play out.As a growing number of Trump advisers and Republican Party leaders privately admitted the end was nigh — and as the Secret Service was rocked by coronavirus infections and quarantine orders from the president’s mask-defying, super-spreader campaign travel — White House officials propped up Donald’s grand illusions. This, even as his lawyers deserted him and judges ruled against him.“We are moving forward here at the White House under the assumption there will be a second Trump term,” Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said on Fox Business Friday.Kayleigh McEnany chimed in that the president would “attend his own inauguration.”In his remarks about Operation Warp Speed Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden, Trump showed how tortoise-slow he has been about accepting that he’s out.“I will not go, this administration will not be going to a lockdown,” he said. “Hopefully, the — the, uh, whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be — I guess time will tell.”Time has told. Do we detect a sliver of reality creeping in?The president, who has never shown much interest in governing, has finally dropped all pretense to focus on the core tenets of the Trump Doctrine: himself, cable news, Twitter, self-pity, and caterwauling about perceived slights.“.@FoxNews daytime ratings have completely collapsed,” he tweeted. “Weekend daytime even WORSE. Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”The goose was at Fox’s neck. What an unnatural and delicious sight.The network helped Trump become president and allowed him to maintain his viselike grip on his base. Fox was the oxygen inside his alternate-reality bubble.But because Trump is 100 percent transactional, he couldn’t accept pure math, training his laser beam on Fox when it dared to veer ever so slightly from total fealty by correctly calling the race early in Arizona.Trump is right about this one thing: He has been a Golden Goose for the news business. Every time he opens his mouth, 50 headlines jump out.But the Golden Goose is also a Silly Goose. He should just recognize that Biden winning is actually the best outcome for him. He doesn’t have to do the job anymore and can simply get on with the branding and the whining and the pot-stirring — the parts that interest him.He certainly branded the Democrats very effectively with socialism, defunding the police, shutting down the country and ending fracking. Biden escaped but a lot of down-ballot Democrats didn’t.Now Trump should move on and stick to what he knows best: promoting himself. Like Norma Desmond, he should give in to the fantasy of his life that he is so devoted to and leave the rest of us to live in the cold, cruel, unforgiving, inconvenient reality.Mr. DeMille just called, Mr. President. He says he’s ready for your close-up. Keep your pancake makeup on and step on out of the house now. The cameras will be waiting.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More