The Donald thought he was Inigo Montoya still trying to win with an electoral knife stuck in him. Donald Trump Jr. went to Atlanta for a Nov. 5 “Stop the Steal” rally and told the crowd daddy would “fight each and every one of these battles to the death.”
From the golf course.
“Everyone knows that we won the state,” the outgoing president tweeted a week later.
For all the Republican pre-election hype about cities burning across the country and breakdown of law and order, Slate’s William Saletan sees anarchists as a threat all right, just not the ones Trump means:
The new anarchists pretend to support law enforcement. But when the law doesn’t go their way, they threaten violence. “Victory or death!” the crowd in Atlanta chanted. One speaker at the rally vowed to “fight for Donald Trump until our last dying breath.” Another warned, “If they seat an illegitimate government, we’ll remove them.” A third said Trump would stay in power because “the Deep State doesn’t have the military on their side.” When police asked the rally’s leaders to finish up and end the event—after letting them rant for two hours without a permit—a speaker shouted at the cops: “We backed the blue. Thank you for nothing!”
God bless the U.S.A. Until you lose.
Trump has been setting up excuses for losing and insiders to help him rig the elections since the beginning of the year. He continues to claim his loss is all a massive heist in every swing state he lost and attempted to get ballots thrown out anywhere it might help him. Screw other Republicans candidates whose votes got thrown out with them.
These insurrectionists—not antifa or Black Lives Matter, which the right accuses of destroying the country—are the new threat to America. They’re talking about tearing down our democracy, with emphatic support from the president and his allies. Trump made that support clear after the Atlanta rally, by endorsing it and posting a link to the livestream. “Big Rallies all over the Country,” he tweeted. “This was a LANDSLIDE!”
Saletan continues:
The Republican senators running for reelection on Jan. 5, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, could have defended the rule of law. Instead, they joined the insurrection. On Nov. 9, they challenged the honesty of the election and demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Perdue said Democrats couldn’t win the state legitimately: “They know [that] to win in this runoff, they’ve got to do something illegal.” On Monday, he repeated his call to oust Raffensperger and told a crowd, “We’re calling for lawsuits right now.” Loeffler, in a series of Fox News appearances, issued the same demands and referred, without evidence, to “election fraud.”
[…]
Three weeks after the election, Trump continues to insist that it was “stolen” and a “hoax.” He refuses to concede, retweets appeals for military intervention, and demands that Georgia’s election officials step in to help Perdue and Loeffler. “He’s the political equivalent of a street rioter,” says the president’s former national security adviser, John Bolton. But this rioter controls a party that, for the next two years, will hold at least 50 seats in the United States Senate. It shouldn’t be trusted with two more.
I don’t have that much hope Democrats will secure both those Georgia Senate seats, but it would be a terrific late Christmas present for those of us not in the cult. Not that it would quiet the insurrectionists. They’ve already shown how bogus their pretensions are to faith in this system. They will not give up. They have to be defeated.