MICHAEL BESCHLOSS on the Presidential Election of 2020
Presidential Historian
“We always have to be vigilant. Democracy is never safe. We can never take it for granted.”
The events following the presidential election of 2020 were seemingly unprecedented: the losing candidate not only refused to accept the legally approved results but also tried to overturn those results through lawsuits, political pressure, untrue statements, intimidation of government officials, and the calling for a march on the Capitol to stop the official vote count.
How unprecedented was this? Had anything like this ever happened before? Who better to answer those questions than a scholar of the presidency, and I was fortunate to talk to a longtime friend who is one of the country’s leading presidential experts. Over the past several decades, Michael Beschloss has become one of our best-recognized and most-respected scholars of the U.S. presidency. And that is despite having a Harvard MBA—not the typical degree of choice for someone in his field. He is a best-selling author of ten books on the subject, including works on Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, and he is a frequent television commentator on all matters relating to the presidency.
I have known Michael for many years—we both live in Washington and enjoy discussing the presidency whenever possible—and he is the person I invariably turn to when I have questions about the subject. I thought he would be the perfect person to discuss the impact of the events relating to the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
I had a virtual conversation with Michael on January 24, 2021, during which he related that there certainly have been other contested presidential elections. But in those elections, there seemed to be credible cases of some fraud—even if not enough to overturn the election outcome. But in none of those other elections, in his view, was the president engaged in efforts to incite violence to overturn the election, to get election officials to overturn the legally certified vote, or to have the vice president overturn the certified Electoral College vote.
For these reasons, he was not surprised that the House of Representatives impeached President Trump. And while the Senate did not subsequently convict the president, Michael Beschloss felt that America’s well-established commitment to democracy had passed a very serious stress test—to the country’s credit.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): In the history of our presidential elections, have there been other times when the losing candidate contested the election’s outcome in the courts or in Congress?
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS (MB): We have had contested elections in history where there was reason for one candidate or another to challenge the results. The year 1876 is the best example of that, where there were a number of states whose electoral votes were contested. It did go to Congress, and there was a process and the result was a compromise.
The good result is that there was a compromise that kept the country going. The bad part of it was it was a terrible compromise, which was to abruptly end Reconstruction and pull federal troops out of the South. As a result, Jim Crow was enforced in the South. A lot of the noblest hopes for the winning of the Civil War were dashed, and we had people suffering in this country, African Americans in the South, for over a century more as a result.
But there was a process that resolved the dispute. The difference between 1876 and 2020 is that in 2020 there was no serious reason to contest the results. President Trump and the people who worked with him were given opportunity after opportunity to show solid evidence of massive vote fraud, and they produced none. Yet they kept this process in limbo for two months plus and deprived the man who was actually elected, President Joe Biden, of a real transition, which will hurt the country, in my view, for years, because he was cheated of the full amount of information and time he needed to prepare for the presidency.
DR: Have other losing presidential candidates claimed that their loss was due to fraud?
MB: Yes. For instance, Richard Nixon lost the 1960 election by losing the electoral votes of Texas and Illinois. He lost Texas by 45,000 votes. He lost Illinois by 9,000 votes. And after the election, he seriously thought of trying to contest it and trying to get recounts in at least those two states.
He raised this possibility with Dwight Eisenhower, who told him to shut it down, that he would not support him if he did so, it was too divisive. Eisenhower told him that “no one” steals the presidency of the United States. Yet Nixon continued to tell friends, “The election was stolen from me. I’m the person who was elected president in November, not Kennedy.” He said that in private for the rest of his life.
But in public, the first week of January, it fell to Nixon, as the vice president and as president of the Senate, to declare the winner of the 1960 election. And he gave an absolutely elegant and statesmanlike and gracious talk in Congress, saying that Kennedy and Johnson had indeed been elected, and saying that one of the great features of democracy is that we have elections that are hard-fought, and once the decision is made, we unite behind the person who was elected.
In private, Nixon was graceless. But in public he did everything he was supposed to. And at least in public, Nixon was the model of the way that a defeated candidate should behave. However, Nixon’s resentment and anger for the rest of his life, believing that the Kennedys had stolen the 1960 election from him, led directly to Watergate, because when he became president, it was his view that rules don’t apply and that people on the presidential level do all sorts of things that cut corners. He felt that the Kennedys had done that and that FDR had done that, and so would he. The result was a lot of the offenses that led to the Watergate scandal and ultimately caused him to be forced from office.
The year after Nixon resigned, he encouraged Victor Lasky to write a book called It Didn’t Start with Watergate. The thesis of the book was suggested by Nixon privately, and the thesis was that presidents had been abusing power and stealing elections long before the time of Watergate and that Nixon was unfairly singled out.
DR: When Al Gore lost the election to George W. Bush in 2000, he also had to read the results when he, as vice president, was the presiding officer of the Senate. Did he go around and complain that he had really won the election?
MB: Publicly he said, “George W. Bush is my president.” And in the concession statement that he made on the night of the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore in December 2000, he said—and the language is really illuminating here, this is a verbatim quote—“For the sake of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Period. What he was saying was that he might have some private doubts over who was elected in the year 2000. But for the sake of our democracy, he said he was not going to contest a decision of the Supreme Court.
DR: When Gore read the results saying that George W. Bush had won, and when Richard Nixon read the results that said John Kennedy had won, could they have said, “I don’t really accept these results”?
MB: They could have absented themselves, as Hubert Humphrey did in January 1969. Humphrey was so broken up over having lost the election that he did not want to punish himself, and he found a reason not to be there. But Nixon and Al Gore had enough respect for our democratic process that they knew, in and after an election that was close and contested, it was essential for the losing candidate, who was vice president of the United States, to concede that indeed he and his running mate had lost.
DR: Has the Supreme Court ever gotten involved in these kinds of disputes?
MB: The Supreme Court got actively involved in 2000. It did so because it felt that that was the only way of resolving the dispute over the 2000 election peacefully. The result was a hotly controversial result, along party lines on the court, that to this day is one of the most debated and controversial things the court has ever done.
But the larger message from that episode is that the court ruled. A lot of people were angry. Some Gore supporters were saying they would never acknowledge George W. Bush as president of the United S
tates. One of them told me at the time that if he ever saw Bush, he would “moon” him. But Bush not only became president of the United States, he was treated as a full president, not one with a question mark or an asterisk.
DR: Have there been prior elections where the losing presidential candidate urged his congressional supporters or voters to help to contest the election?
MB: Again, 1876 is a classic case—1876 was when you had Samuel Tilden winning the popular vote. Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, lost it. Both candidates refused to accept the result, and they pushed this dispute for months. The result was that a commission was appointed and a compromise was reached.
In our system, we usually prefer not to go to that extreme, because you never know quite how the system will operate. For instance, in 1968, George Wallace, the racist third-party candidate, ran for president against Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. Wallace never thought there was much likelihood that he would win the popular vote, but he hoped to collect enough electoral votes in the South to throw the election into the House of Representatives and possibly force one of the major candidates to make a deal with him along the lines of the deal that was made in 1876 to stop Reconstruction.
DR: In the 2020 election, was there any real evidence, to your knowledge, of voter fraud?
MB: Nothing serious, and nothing that goes beyond any other election in American history whose results were immediately accepted by the loser and went uncontested.
DR: Why do you think so many people believed there was fraud? Do you think the members of Congress who supported looking into it really believe there was fraud?
MB: I think what was going on was this. Donald Trump is a survivor. He understood that if he lost the presidency for a second term, he would lose all sorts of legal immunity. If that happened, and the statute of limitations had not run out, he would be vulnerable to lawsuits and indictments, possibly hundreds of them at the same time. He also might be more vulnerable to financial demands made on him by people to whom he owes loans.
It’s almost like something out of a novel. Trump had the most primal, personal, selfish reason to try to hang on to the presidency.
The interesting thing about Trump in that whole 2020 campaign was how little discussion there was by him of why he wanted a second term and what he intended to do for the country, what his agenda would be. Since reelection, for Trump, was as close to being a personal matter of life or death than we have ever seen in the history of the presidency, he was determined to do everything he could to hang on. The result was that immediately after the election, he claimed that he had won, although privately I presume he knew he had actually lost.
Trump tried to contest the results in a number of states, and charged vote fraud that was not there, lying during much of this time, and putting the country through the trauma of a period that was indecisive and unpredictable. Many people feared that he would abuse his presidential powers to try to get the United States involved in an unnecessary war, or foment domestic disorder that might let him use emergency powers, including martial law, to try to delay Biden’s inauguration and overturn his election.
In retrospect, those things did not happen. We know that now. But at the time, it was impossible to be sure, and it was a very frightening period for many people to live through. Not to mention that this is a very complicated government. We are the world superpower, and we need every minute of that ten-week transition period for a new president to come in and make his appointments and plan his policies. Joe Biden and the country were robbed of that.
DR: You think it’s ironic that this is one election where we didn’t have any voter fraud?
MB: This was one of the most effective, cleanest elections in American history.
DR: Were you surprised about how easily President Trump was able to get many of his supporters to march to the Capitol and then to invade the building?
MB: I was surprised by his success in doing it. I was not surprised that he tried. I felt that he was so motivated to try to hang on to the possibility of a second term that he would almost do anything not to relinquish the presidency. As I’ve mentioned, I was worried about his access to nuclear weapons. I was worried about his ability to start an unnecessary war. I was worried about emergency powers.
Notice, throughout his presidency, the number of times in public that Trump would boast of his emergency powers, saying, “I’ve got powers that are secret that you wouldn’t believe that I can’t even talk about.” Almost like a small boy. That’s not exactly something that would instill confidence in Americans, having a president in a period like this who was desperately trying to hang on to his job.
His plan was clearly to incite an insurrection against Congress at the Capitol. If you read his speech of January 6, there’s no other way of reading it. He’s saying, “I’ll even march with you.”
They go up to the Capitol. For some reason we do not know yet, law enforcement lets them in. They go running into the Capitol, right to the places where the Speaker of the House was and where the vice president was, just as they were counting the ballots. We don’t know enough yet to know whether this was a specific plan, but there’s at least the possibility that they intended to grab the mahogany boxes with the ballots in them, and to go and kill the vice president and the Speaker of the House, as many of them were chanting. There was a gallows outside the Capitol that was designated for Vice President Pence.
And had the attack happened a couple of minutes sooner, before the vice president, the Speaker of the House, and other congressional leaders could be properly protected, they might have been assassinated or taken hostage. The mahogany boxes might have been taken hostage or burned. And we would be in a situation of chaos, which under certain circumstances might have absolutely jeopardized our democracy.
Do I believe that Donald Trump planned this out and abetted it and oversaw it? At this point we don’t have conclusive evidence of that. Do I believe he would have welcomed it if it had resulted in his being president again? Absolutely!
DR: In hindsight, have you thought about how vulnerable the Capitol was, in the sense that had there been a foreign military force or really well-trained U.S. former military people with real weapons, what damage they could have done and how easily they could have killed so many people?
MB: This was a terrorist attack. And what is staggering is that only nineteen years after 9/11, when the Capitol was in danger of having a plane crash into it, we came so close. The real question is going to be, did we come so close because we had a president of the United States who wanted the attack to succeed? We don’t know that yet. But it doesn’t look great.
DR: What do you think countries around the world thought about seeing an invasion of the Capitol?
MB: Countries around the world were horrified by this, because one of the things they had counted on is the fact that, even though America has all sorts of political conflicts, you can rely on the stability of our democratic system. What this showed was a scenario that was almost like the film Seven Days in May [1964] or some of the other books and movies that came out in the early 1960s about plots against the government. Those were scenarios that at the time were thought to be chilling but never quite plausible. The fact that this came so close does suggest that it nearly happened and it could happen again and that those founders were right who always said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” We always have to be vigilant. Democracy is never safe. We can never take it for granted.
DR: Were you surprised that the House voted to impeach President Trump over what happened at the Capitol?
MB: I was not surprised. I was shocked that so few Republicans supported the impeachment. Before the last four years, if you had told me that a Republican president was deeply implicated in an insurrection against the government of the United States that almost led to assassination and hostage-taking and overturning of a free and fair election and possible fracturing of our democracy, I would have said that members of his own party would vo
te to impeach him for that.
I was wrong. I would have underestimated the degree to which a president like Trump can terrify members of his own party into supporting him through almost anything.
DR: As you look at our American legal and political system, what is it that you think prevented President Trump from being able to prevail in his effort to overturn the election? Was it the election officials in the states, members of Congress, the judiciary? Who do you think really deserves the credit?
MB: If you’re looking at the positive side, look at the months between the election and the inauguration—the number of public officials who actually did take chances to stand up for what was right, secretaries of state in various states who may have been Republican Trump supporters but said, “I don’t see any evidence of fraud,” and who, as a result of their political courage, got death threats against them and their families, some of them from organizations that supported Donald Trump. Election officials in various states, those members of the Senate and the House who did speak out. Same thing with governors like the governor of Arizona, who refused to take a call from the president of the United States of his own party intended to pressure him into declaring the results of the Arizona presidential election invalid. There are a lot of individual profiles in courage, but the overwhelming verdict on this story, from my point of view, is that our democracy was very vulnerable.
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