Good news. Only threats of violence so far. We’re supposed to be relieved?
Eric Coomer is security director for Dominion Voting Systems. He is hiding out from death threats that began when lawyers for the Trump campaign accused his company of rigging the November election. It started in chat rooms with the standard “hang him, he’s a traitor” talk. That soon escalated, the Associated Press reports:
But then came targeted phone calls, text messages and a handwritten letter to his father, an Army veteran, from a presumed militia group saying, “How does it feel to have a traitor for a son?” Even now, weeks later and relocated to a secret locale, Coomer is getting messages from people saying they know what town he has fled to and vowing to find him.
“It’s terrifying,” he said. “I’ve worked in international elections in all sorts of post-conflict countries where election violence is real and people end up getting killed over it. And I feel that we’re on the verge of that.”
I assumed we would see violent attacks in November. They would start with road-rage shootings by angry Trumpers; it would take cosplaying armed gangs longer to pull something together. But their capacity for denying reality has spared us so far. So long as the president and his legal buzzards can maintain the fiction (and fundraising opportunity) that amidst all their dung-flinging there is still a Trump win in there somewhere, the faithful may keep their guns holstered.
As it stands, the outgoing president is down 7 million votes and nearly four and a half points nationwide. That should be convincing, David Frum tweets. Just not to people who have inhabited an alternate reality now for decades.
Rudy Giuliani’s traveling circus has provided days’ worth of “I know a guy who knows a guy” witnesses to supposed election malfeasance. Plenty of others know little of proper election procedures, but are sure whatever they think they saw is proof of “fraud.” And they saw it, like commies, behind every woodpile, including thousands of ballots supposedly counted multiple times despite vote counts matching poll books. A witness in Alpharetta, Ga. Thursday said this was his third presidential election serving as an observer. Except his first two were in Texas. He spent much of his time documenting what he saw as slackness in Georgia by a monitor from the Secretary of State’s office. On “irregularities” such as these, Trump’s team wants election results thrown out in state after state. So far, judges have found little credible in these anecdotes.
The reality-denying outgoing president gave a 45-minute, online speech Wednesday. He illustrated his conspiracy theories with charts showing the early-morning voting results spikes in Wisconsin and Michigan that put him behind there. (Wisconsin and Michigan are two swing states not allowed to start counting mailed votes until Election Day.)
“Mostly Biden. Almost all Biden,” he said of the Wisconsin spike, “And to this day, everyone’s trying to figure out where did it come from.”
Everyone meaning him. This is the man who in June said “people can’t explain” where the 19 in COVID-19 came from.
Eventually, reality will sink in for them. Eventually, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will take over. The rest of us may have to take cover.
Digby is not getting over the damage wrought over the last four years both by Trump and willing enablers in his party. They want to wash their hands of him and pretend it never happened. But there is no going back now to anything resembling the America or the world that came before.
Dahlia Lithwick feels becalmed in this interregnum. It is “better than waking up at 3 o’clock every morning with your jaw locked and your fists balled up,” but peaceful it is not. “We are waiting for the next thing, even if the most we can call the next thing is Not This.”
She writes at Slate:
Becalmed is that sense that you are going to end up somewhere, but without any sense of where you are headed. It is perhaps a fitting state of being during holidays, in lockdown, waiting for vaccines, and with profound gratitude that, for all the division and strife, nobody is in fact out on the streets murdering one another. Everyone appears to be in agreement that whatever this strange floaty period is, it’s still eminently preferable to civil war.
We can be thankful for that. While it lasts.