The basic premise of Donald Trump's rolling attempts to get the 2020 election results thrown out was the idea that, in spite of all available evidence, he did not really lose. He didn't try to steal the election, you see, or try to remain in power in contravention of the will of the people. The other side stole the election, of which he was the true and rightful winner. Except there have been some clues all along that he does not actually drink the snake-oil he's peddling, at least not all the time. For instance, he called up the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021 and said the following:
So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state...So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.
Now, at other points in the call—which was recorded—Trump fired off the usual crapola about how there's no way he lost Georgia, he won by hundreds of thousands of votes, all the rest. But this section is revealing: he is asking an elections administrator to "find" the exact number of votes he needs to overturn the result of Georgia's election and make him the winner. If he'd actually won by hundreds of thousands of votes, wouldn't he be demanding an accurate tally? This is a guy who claimed there was massive fraud in an election he won in 2016 because he was upset that he got spanked in the popular vote. But in this case, he won the Georgia vote easily, but he's content to win by a single vote—11,780, to make up what was then Biden's 11,779 margin of victory? It sounds more like he was satisfied with taking Georgia's electoral votes at any cost, probably so that it could be the first domino to fall in his larger campaign to overturn the results in five or six states.
(As an aside: again, there is a recording of this call. How is Trump's request for an elections official to change the vote tally just enough for him to win different, in terms of ethics and legitimacy, from Trump asking an elections official to stuff a ballot box like we're in Kemerovo? How is this not a straightforward criminal offense?)
But the former president was kind enough to serve up an admission this weekend that made all of the above look quaint and complicated. Now that he's been thrown off the major social-media platforms, Trump funnels his stream-of-consciousness grievance bulletins into statements under the banner of his "SAVE AMERICA" shtick, and on Sunday night he elected to just...say the thing.
If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election? Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!
OK, so we get the requisite delusion that there was "fraud and many other irregularities," despite the fact that you only occasionally hear about a stray fraudulent voting case and, at least anecdotally, the practitioners are often registered Republicans. ("Irregularities," meanwhile, is the preferred nomenclature of softcore Big Lie evangelists who want to aid in the authoritarian push without dangling their necks out, MyPillow Guy-style, on the "fraud" claims.) But farther down, Trump seems to happily give the game away. "Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome," he said, warming himself up for the big reveal: "...he could have overturned the Election!"
Are "change the results" and "change the outcome" and "overturn the election" the kind of language you'd use if you actually won the election? It seems more like the language you'd use if you didn't like the outcome, which is, of course, the point. There has never been evidence that the vote tallies were fraudulent. The outcome was fraudulent because Donald Trump, the true representative of Real America, did not win. The people who voted for Joe Biden had no right to choose the leader of the country because they do not have legitimate claims to full citizenship. Everything works backwards from there. That's how you get the stuff about Hugo Chavez and various irregularities. It's backfill about the process in order to reach the predetermined conclusion: Joe Biden is illegitimate. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump began claiming the election was rigged before it happened. If his opponent won, the transition to illegitimacy would be smooth.
Meanwhile, the idea that any one person, even the vice president, has the right to throw out the results of a democratic election in America is disgusting. Even Congress, the branch of government that was meant to sit at the center of our system and best represent the wide range of the people's will, does not have this power. Still, a street mob waving the 45th president's banner staged a violent assault on the seat of the legislature in an attempt to force the Legislative Branch to install their leader in the office of the Executive for another term. Speaking of which, Trump also had some thoughts on January 6 this weekend at a rally in Conroe, Texas.
So now he is dangling pardons for the people who attempted to help install him in office by force, thereby disregarding the results of a free democratic election. As usual, the specific claims are in short supply regarding accused Capitol rioters who are supposedly being very gravely mistreated by the Feds. It's possible that's happening, of course, it would just be nice to have a single case and its details brought to bear as evidence. Instead, this has all the hallmarks of reactionary justification: Our enemies are committing grave injustices against us. We will have to punish the enemies. Trump also claimed this mantle for himself, as investigations into various decisions he made in business and public office have come under scrutiny by prosecutors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
Again, the details of any prospective indictment are completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter that Trump is on tape hinting that an elections official could face jail time if he failed to stuff the digital ballot box full of the exact number of votes Trump needed to take Georgia. All that matters is that the enemies are out to get him. We even hear the prosecutors are "radical, vicious," and "racist" against Trump, which we can safely assume is a reference to Fulton County prosecutor Fanni Willis, who since the rally has asked the Feds for security assistance. Presumably, the district attorney fears violent retribution from some extremist element among the president's fans, for which Trump signaled impunity with his talk of pardoning January 6 defendants. All of this comes together to suggest a cycle along the lines of the following:
Trump claims a grave injustice against himself or the movement >> he or a segment of his supporters attempt to remedy this by extralegal means >> if Trump regains the powers of the presidency, he will reward loyal servants with impunity, just as he did in his first term with Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and others.
Really, we should have seen this coming in the 2016 campaign, when Trump offered to pay people's legal bills if they beat up anti-Trump protesters. Or when, in the same campaign, he said the election would be rigged before it happened. Or when, even after he won that election, he claimed there was widespread fraud on behalf of his opponent, who apparently arranged a big voter-fraud scheme to beef up her popular vote win in California rather than win the actual election? You're not supposed to think too hard about these things. What matters is that we have to Save America. It's been stolen away by Joe Biden and Those People, and we're within our rights to do anything to take it back, even if none of this shit ever happened in the first place.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
