Creeping Retreat

Donald Trump is failing in all the courts with his election challenges. What will we do without this awful solo entertainer when the good man Biden takes over the White House?

Donald Trump is the most interesting person on Earth. We “press boys,” as Otto von Bismarck called journalists, gave Trump trillions of bytes and wagonloads full of printer’s ink. For this he got us, especially the left-leaning liberal media, fantastic circulation numbers. The man was pure titillation, a mixture of fear, fascination and amorality. We’ll miss him, because the crook is always more interesting than the one who is fleeced, the villain more entertaining than the decent fellow Joe Biden. Who do we find more exciting: Shakespeare’s noble, selfless Juliet or King Lear, who wandered madly through the storm-lashed heath?

Exit Trump? Of course, because he is on his way to retirement and his resistance is getting weaker every day — like a wounded animal that accepts its fate. Biden’s America will no longer agitate our feelings because Trump has agreed to an orderly transition after endless maneuvers. The fact that Team Biden can now see files and exercise the levers of power is his initial act of surrender.

We “press boys” will miss the horror stories, which are so much more gripping than boring reports on American tax and health policies. For a few weeks, the media — including the American ones — could describe the United States as a banana republic, where Trump was even planning a coup. Where he’s holed up with the Colt on the desk in the Oval Office. Where he sends his armed followers out into the streets in order to capture government power in a civil war — the Twitter man as Vladimir Lenin. Where he paralyzes the constitutional mechanics through lies and deceit in order to rob Biden of his election victory — bypassing voters, Congress and the Supreme Court.

“This is simply not how the Constitution works,” is the caustic comment of the conservative federal judge Matthew Brann. It lasted for 230 years, while in Europe hundreds of constitutions were torn up and burned. No, Mr. President, according to Brann: Anyone who applies to this court to “discard millions of votes” must produce “factual proof of rampant corruption.” Instead, Trump’s legal backers would have “stitched together” their reasoning like “Frankenstein’s monster.”

He — Brann — will not overturn the election result in the largest swing state, Pennsylvania, where Trump is 80,000 votes behind Biden. Something similar happened to the Trumpists in dozens of other cases in critical electoral districts across the country. The institutions were stronger than Trump. Most recently, the election officer confirmed the pro-Biden result in the classic swing state of Michigan.

In this desperate struggle, Trump gets credit for the fact that he is not staging a coup. By pursuing formal legal remedies, he can be seen as paying a tortured compliment to the Constitution. Or at least a belated insight into its necessity. Now the only option left for the loser is the Supreme Court. But it shouldn’t help him either.