“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.” – retiring Wisconsin state Sen. Dale Schultz, March 2014.
“Trump is an aspiring fascist who would burn democracy to the ground to salve his diseased ego,” Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday. His niece Mary Trump agrees.
Some Trump followers make a related calculation. If they can’t have their beloved America as theirs and theirs alone, they will kill her so no one else can, à la the traditional murder ballad, “Banks of the Ohio.” (Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” if you prefer.)
So Rick Wilson’s #ETTD thesis was already on my mind before I read Dana Milbank’s afternoon column in Friday’s Washington Post. “Everything” now includes the country itself.
Despite favorable polling showing the presidential contest leaning former Vice President Joe Biden’s way, unease grows that there are more authoritarian shoes to drop the closer we get to Jan. 20 — no matter what happens on Nov. 3.
“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” warns Milbank, dispensing with his usual ironic stance. “Don’t let democracy burn to the ground.”
Donald Trump’s back is to the wall. Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “a top authority on Nazism and Stalinism” tells Milbank that Trump knows he must stay in power or go to prison. He is no longer trying to win the election. Watch his campaign’s spending for signals. The cheapskate cannot help himself. He will not spend money on a project he expects to lose when he means to remain in power by other means.
Trump is spreading unfounded allegations of mail-related election irregularities and plans to use them to challenge the vote count on Election Day and afterwards. Even before Election Day, perhaps. Whatever he thinks works for him.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified this week to Congress that “we have not seen, historically, any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election, whether it’s by mail or otherwise.”
But White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows dismissed Wray’s testimony on “CBS This Morning” on Friday. “With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there is any kind of voter fraud,” Meadows said.
This, of course, is Grade A bullshit. There is no widespread voter fraud. Republican voter suppression efforts are “predicated on some belief there is a massive fraud or irregularities, something my colleagues have been hot on the trail for three years and have failed miserably at demonstrating,” former Wisconsin Sen. Dale Schultz (R) said in 2014.
The Bush II administration charged federal attorneys with rooting out and prosecuting voter fraud and fired them when they failed to find any. Trump’s own voting integrity commission assigned to prove it exists failed to. There are isolated cases only, as famously committed by a Republican operative in 2018 in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District race.
The Heritage Foundation has tracked this stuff for years. Heritage reached back to 1948 to bump its database of “proven instances” over 1,000. For its purposes, “voter fraud” includes any and every form of election malfeasance from vote buying to ballot stuffing to registration and ballot petition fraud to voter impersonation at the polls. The last you can count on your fingers and toes and includes several instances of election workers running the poll and a man trying to prove it is easy to impersonate a voter. They were all caught and prosecuted.
Yes, Trump himself is incompetent. But he is surrounded by acolytes smarter and just as unscrupulous. The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman this week described how Trump’s attorneys and allies in Republican-controlled legislatures are gaming out how to use legal delays in certifying the election to throw out the popular vote for Biden in key states. They could hand the state’s electors to Trump, either handing Trump an outright electoral win or sending the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, in a “contingent election,” the vote to elect the president is by state delegation, not by head count. Republicans currently control the majority of delegations. *
Because Trump cannot help himself, he has been spilling key details of this evil plan in public like a movie villain just before it goes up in smoke and explosions.
This is where you come in, Captains America. You can do this. You are called to preserve the republic. Register. Vote. Volunteer. Donate. Our local Board of Elections worried it might not be able to staff all 80 precincts on Election Day. Yet, Millennials have stepped up across the country to man polling stations their grandparents cannot because of the COVID-19 risk. Our Board now has met its quota. That younger people are this engaged is also a great sign of what turnout among their cohort might look like on Nov. 3.
This is a fight we can and must win.
* MSNBC’s Joy Reid this week thought it unlikely that GOP legislators would ignore the will of voters they would have to face in the next election. She should visit the home of gerrymandering with “surgical precision” (NC), where for much of the last decade voters have cast a majority of votes for Democrats for Congress, yet receive only 3 seats while the GOP gets 10. GOP legislators who gerrymandered the congressional districts drew their state districts to be Democrat-proof as well.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.