Jan. 6 hearings lay out how Trumpers undermine America at home and abroad. Beware election coup in 2024 | Trudy Rubin

Last week laid bare the urgency of the threats to U.S. and global democracy. Yet most Americans still don’t grasp the immediacy of the danger.

The warning flashes didn’t flow from the White House’s virtual Summit of Democracies, which President Joe Biden had conceived during his candidacy — long before Donald Trump’s Big Lie drove the dramatic decline of democratic norms. At this point the summit could provide little more than a well-meaning talk show.

More striking last week were China’s reaction to the summit — and congressional hearings on GOP efforts to steal the presidential election during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Piqued by the summit, China mounted a global PR blitz claiming its system is a greater democracy than ours because it “reflects the people’s will” and delivers more than the dysfunctional U.S. system. The Jan. 6 hearings in the House laid bare the GOPs servile obeisance to Donald Trump who believes he alone reflects the will of the American people — and therefore cannot lose an election.

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Trump’s Big Lie not only feeds Chinese propaganda about U.S. democracy’s failings. It also threatens to destroy the foundation of America’s democracy in 2024.

Those who decline to submit themselves to the lies and misinformation promoted by Fox News may be unaware of how deeply Trump’s Big lie has taken root among his fans.

It’s not just a question of the Trump acolytes and lawyers gathered at a suite in Washington’s Willard Hotel and the White House in the hours before the Capitol riot plotting how they could defy the Constitution to overturn Biden’s win. And it’s not just Trump’s infamous calls to swing state GOP politicians and secretaries of state trying to convince them to find ways to reverse the people’s votes.

What we are seeing now is that Trump, and Fox News have instilled the utterly false claims of voter fraud into the heads of a vast majority of GOP voters. Poll after poll has shown that around 60% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. In a recent NPR/PBSNewshour/Marist poll only one third of Republicans said they would trust the results if their candidate lost in 2024.

“When looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election, it is remarkable that a bedrock principle of democracy — that losing candidates and their supporters accept the results — is not held by nearly two in three Republicans,” said Lee M. Miringoff, Director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, when the poll came out.

I see it in my email, or in speaking with Trump supporters. One reader, whom I met with at a local deli, had attended the Jan. 6 rally and insisted that it was a peaceful gathering of patriots disturbed by “800 idiots.” He said he accepted that Biden had won but added “Of course all those absentee ballots … there had to be fraud.”

There wasn’t fraud. It’s simply not true. But the Big Lie legend grows — fed by Trump at his rallies, by GOP candidates who refuse to critique it, and by Fox talking heads like Tucker Carlson, who whitewashes the Jan. 6 insurgents as a crowd of peaceful patriots caught up in violence organized by antifa. (This last is absolutely untrue.)

Which is why, as the House hearings lay out the intricate details of how the Trumpers tried to subvert the last election, Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman warns in the Atlantic that the GOP plans to subvert the next one. His article, “Trump’s Next Coup has Already Begun,” is a must read. “January 6 was practice,” he writes. “Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.”

In 2020 the Trump team tried to induce GOP legislatures in states where Biden won to overturn the people’s votes and appoint Trump electors instead to the electoral college. This is illegal in 32 states and probably never has been done in the rest.

Trump’s goal failed in 2020 thanks to brave election officials such as Gabriel Sterling in Georgia or Al Schmidt in Philly so Trumpers are trying to drive them out with threats or oust them from their seats. As Princeton historian Kevin Kruse told Gellman, “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”

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That clearly is the GOP goal.

There is little time left for small-d democrats from both parties to fight back. Nothing highlights the hypocrisy of the Trumpers better than the emails sent by Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, during the insurrection, begging him to urge Trump to stop the violence. Now they promote the Big Lie and undermine America at home and abroad.

If Joe Biden wants to counter the Big Lie that feeds Chinese propaganda and hastens democracy’s demise, the president should make strengthening voting rights his first priority, above everything else. He should support the end of the filibuster toward this goal.

The Justice Department must challenge the attempts at hostile, partisan takeover of election authorities that would permit the fixing of elections, and are far more dangerous than voter-suppression tactics.

The key difference between China’s so-called “democracy” and ours is that American voters have the right to choose their leaders freely — or at least they have had until now. The day Trumpers substitute their leader’s will for the will of the American people is the day our democracy dies.