Donald Trump “doesn’t give orders. He speaks in code.”
So his erstwhile personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified in February 2019. The recording transcript of Trump’s July 2019 phone call with the president of Ukraine was a perfect example and resulted in Trump’s impeachment. The transcript released Sunday of the outgoing president’s hour-long Saturday call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, is another. Trump wants a crime committed to his benefit. He just doesn’t come out and ask explicitly.
The lame duck president regurgitated wild tales of election fraud and intrigue from conspiracy corners of the internet. He made unsubstantiated claims that he actually won the election in Georgia that counting after counting showed he lost.
But Trump says, “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.” And again, “I got to get … I have to find 12,000 votes and I have them times a lot. And therefore, I won the state.”
Trump is pressuring a public official to tamper with election results Georgia has already certified showing Trump lost. But he does not give Raffensperger orders. He says, “So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this. And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people that don’t want to find answers.”
Key people. The right people. Trump’s people. His answers.
There is no bottom
By Sunday evening, legal experts asked whether Trump’s actions were crimes under state and federal statutes.
“The president is either knowingly attempting to coerce state officials into corrupting the integrity of the election or is so deluded that he believes what he’s saying,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University:
But Pildes said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one, and he emphasized that focusing on whether he committed a crime could deflect attention from the “simple, stark, horrific fact that we have a president trying to use the powers of his office to pressure state officials into committing election fraud to keep him in office.”
Reporters should not so focus on Trump’s call to Georgia that they fail to look into how many similar calls Trump made to officials in other states he lost last November. “I bet GA is not the only one,” Norman Ornstein tweeted late Sunday. Public records requests are in order in state after state. Leading Democratic election attorney Marc Elias concurs.
The call transcript will surely deflect attention from the two Senate runoff races taking place in Georgia tomorrow. What’s more, Trump has set the frame for how the right will view voting on Tuesday when Republican Sen. David Perdue faces Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s battles Democrat Raphael Warnock.
Eric Boehlert theorizes how the aftermath of close elections Tuesday could get ugly. Very ugly:
But both Ossoff’s and Warnock’s victory margins, which have been confirmed via a recount, are tiny: Five thousand and nine thousand votes, respectively. Furious, the GOP declares war. Led by Trump, who insists Democrats “stole” the runoff elections, the Republican Party and the right-wing media noise machine unleash a relentless and brutal misinformation war, accusing Democrats of widespread corruption, and attacking Georgia election officials for covering up the concocted crimes.
Trump litigates (as Trump does), seeing yet another chance to overturn his own election loss. He would have the entire GOP political and legal infrastructure behind him as well as his MAGA minions. Death threats or worse could be in store for Georgia election officials.
Republicans are unlikely to step back from the brink. If, as is likely, Democrats fail to deploy equally relentless countermeasures to the Party of Trump’s public coup attempt, could this Covid-weakened republic stand the additional strain? What could the incoming Biden administration do to put the authoritarian genie back in the bottle? Samuel Johnson’s adage captures the feeling.
I watched Avengers: Endgame again last night. During an early scene, Steve Rogers leads a survivors’ support group five years after the “Snap” erased half of humanity. Between the damage Trump has done to the republic, the hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from the pandemic response he botched, and 10 months of social isolation, it felt too familiar for comfort.