There are a lot of ambitious politicians right now who don’t care if they shoot democracy point blank in the chest. They somehow believe that they can do that and it will devolve to their benefit — rather like burning down one’s own home and then crying about not having a place to sleep. It is beyond madness to destroy the institutions that we depend upon to protect us, yet this is what the House and Senate Republicans who support the ludicrous posture of Trump being *cheated* out of the election are committed to.
Project Lincoln describes the precipice we stand on well. And remember: this election we dodged the bullet. But the next election we just not might. We can lose this country. We are this (snaps fingers) close.
It couldn’t happen here could it? Take a good listen to the #TrumpTapes and then watch this. This is our moment to protect American values. We will not fail! pic.twitter.com/wxUuk3seVX
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) January 4, 2021
Trump telegraphed his opposition to this election early on. Now we live to see the fruits of his disingenuous labors as distrust in the electoral system hits a staggering high. This is not like what we saw in 2016 with Cambridge Analytica interfering with Brexit and the U.S. election and Russian bots posing as the neighbors on Facebook. That was all hashed through before Congress. This is much much worse. Mail-in balloting is very safe. A vote is tracked like a package. But that is no longer believed because of the fantasy web that Trump has spun this election about “tremendous corruption” — which is so tremendous he can’t prove a jot or tittle of it — and which could lose us the republic during the next. The Bulwark:
The basic approach was to take advantage of the “red mirage” produced by the partisan differential between in-person and mail-in voting. Republicans usually do slightly better with in-person voting, while Democrats have an edge in absentee and mail-in voting, but the mail-in vote isn’t usually big enough to make much of a difference. During a pandemic year, particularly one in which Trump was downplaying the risks of COVID-19, making his voters less likely to mail in their ballots, that effect was much larger. This produced a window in which Trump could point to an early lead from in-person voting, dismiss mail-in votes as fraudulent—a line of attack he had been preparing all summer—and claim victory on election night, before all the votes were counted.
But this plan required follow-up from state-level officials—either election officials or members of state legislatures—who would be prepared to use this shift as an excuse to throw out the actual vote counts and grant Trump their state’s Electoral College votes. Failing that, it required that the Trump campaign try to achieve the same result by filing lawsuits that would end up in the Supreme Court, where Trump believed the majority of justices would back him.
Trump and his people have tried every aspect of this strategy—and failed. Why did it fail? Because not enough people were willing to go along. The first failure was Fox News Channel’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden relatively early on election night, depriving Trump of the narrative of an election-night victory that would then be “stolen” by late-counted mail-in votes. Then various local officials agreed to certify the final counts that included mail-in ballots and confirmed a lead for Biden in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
Then Trump’s team took his case to court, only to have all but one of his suits tossed out—often contemptuously so—for lack of evidence. (This lone procedural victory was reversed on appeal.) I’m trying to decide whether my favorite is the judge who rejected supposed evidence because it came from an anonymous Internet troll or the judge who took Trump’s lawyers to task for making up a quote from a court ruling cited in support of his case. […]
But winning this election is not the point any more. The point now is to get a large number of congressional Republicans to officially sign on to Trump’s “rigged election” fantasy.
I read a piece on Axios yesterday. The reporter was saying that in interviewing Republicans in Georgia every last one of them that she spoke to thought that the election had been stolen from Trump. Whether this will depress voter turnout at the polls tomorrow for the runoffs has yet to be seen. Also yet to be seen is Trump’s *rally* in Georgia tonight, which is expected to be another Trumpian grievance fest and expected to do the two incumbents more harm than good. Let us pray that that’s the case.
The only thing that is certain is that this completely false right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon spin on our elections is horribly damaging. This is Donald Trump’s legacy to America. Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were Americans. They never would have done anything like this in a million years to save face or for any other reason. They had too much class, too much of a desire to honor the institution of the presidency in which they had served and preserve it for the future. No, this is vintage Donald Trump. Like a rat, what he doesn’t consume, he fouls. Like an insane lover, if he can’t have the White House, he’ll try to ruin it for somebody else.
The question is how long can these cuckoo birds keep holding on to their nonsense fantasy. If tRump gives up the ghost once he has fleeced enough suckers to pay off his debt he may drop those fools kike everyone else he used up & threw in the trash.
He’ll never drop them as long as they will pay attention and send him money. Michael Cohen says that Trump wants to hang onto about 20 million followers, who will pay $4.99 apiece as a subscription to some internet Trump TV and keep him in clover forever. That idea makes perfect sense to me.
He knows him well.
They will hold on until / unless they wake up. I was in a cult and it still took me two years to leave – even after I woke. It took many years of therapy to deal with it too. They will wake when they are impacted directly and right now – they are not impacted – they feel they have the power and the truth.
It amazes me that these Republicans think that if Trump gets another 4 years, there will even be a presidency. We are this close to autocracy and this little stunt of theirs, were it successful, would push us right over the edge. Dictator Trump would pass the mantle to Ivanka, who would keep it until her oldest child could take it. Seriously, do they really think they’d even have a shot in 4 years? What fools.
You mean Don Jr. Patriarchal authoritarians NEVER put women in positions of real power. Ivanka is an ornament. She has done nothing and had no influence at all in the last four years & will have none going forward.