Many have remarked on the contrast between this week’s certification in congress of the United States presidential result, and the corresponding events four years ago. But the point is worth making again, because the message is an important one, and the underlying reality in the two cases was otherwise so similar.
Put simply, there is nothing to justify Donald Trump’s defiance of the 2020 election result that would not equally have justified Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in defying last year’s. But of course they did no such thing.
Trump won a majority of 86 seats in the electoral college, slightly more than Biden’s 74 seats; neither was very close, but both were reasonably close by historical standards. Trump’s popular vote margin was 1.5 percentage points, or a bit less than 2.3 million votes; Biden had won by 4.5 points, or just over seven million votes, but even that is closer than average.
When we last looked at these numbers, back in November, I said Trump would finish with about 50.8% of the two-party vote; the figure is actually 50.7498%, so by the tiniest of margins it rounds to 50.7%. That comes off a raw vote of 49.8%: he thus joins Bill Clinton and Grover Cleveland in having won the presidency twice without ever winning a majority of the popular vote, although I remain of the view that this is fundamentally unimportant.
(These figures are undisputed and easy to find, but the contrast between them and the tone of most media coverage – with its talk of “sweeping”, “decisive” victory and the like – is quite striking. Perhaps instead of agonising about whether they should editorialise against Trump, media could concentrate on getting the basics right and not going out of their way to feed the Trumpian narrative.)
No election is perfect; in each case, anyone who looks hard enough can find minor irregularities of various sorts. While American electoral administration has improved since the days of Florida 2000, it is still creaky. But in neither is there anything remotely close to affecting the required number of votes, or anything suggesting a systematic advantage for one side or the other.
Yet an utterly ordinary election like this was used as the basis for Trump, and only Trump, to attempt to overthrow the constitutional order. Whatever else is forgotten, that needs to be remembered.
And if the congressional proceedings themselves were not enough of a reminder, there’s always South Korea. Readers will remember that in early December president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law and attempted to seize power from the opposition-controlled legislature. It succeeded in meeting despite his effort, overturned the declaration and subsequently impeached him; the constitutional court will now decide whether he is removed from office.
At the time, the coup attempt seemed a bit half-hearted and shambolic, but further investigation has revealed that Yoon was very much in earnest. Plans were made and orders given to use force to evict opposition legislators and to seize the headquarters of the electoral commission. As with 2021 in the United States, it seems to have been largely a matter of good fortune that a bloodbath was avoided.
So far, anyway. Attempts to secure the president’s compliance with a congressional investigation have so far been unsuccessful, and presidential security forces were able to prevent his arrest. What at one level is a bureaucratic dispute about jurisdiction has the potential to turn deadly. Although the mass of public opinion seems firmly against Yoon, he has a solid core of supporters whose delusions he has been steadily feeding.
The similarities with four years ago are not coincidental. Yoon is clearly reading from the same Trumpian playbook, and his support draws on the same toxic mix of conspiracy theories promoted by both new and traditional media. As with many such movements worldwide, anti-feminism is an especially prominent theme. Yoon may well hope that if he can remain at liberty for another ten days until Trump takes office, some sort of assistance from the US will be forthcoming.
And even if it is not, Trump’s example is there to show him that what looks like abject failure can be a prelude to future success. It may also add to the determination of South Korea’s opposition not to imitate America’s failure, but to put Yoon behind bars and keep him there.
The World is Not Enough 
Perhaps we should get the choir to sing For He’s a Jolly Good Felon in his self-adjudicated honour. (Jests aside, you make some very useful points that, as you say, deserve to be remembered.)
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