When Arizona Republicans first pushed for a partisan audit of the 2020 presidential ballots cast in the Phoenix metropolitan area, they argued that they needed to know if any irregularities or fraud caused President Trump to lose this rapidly evolving swing state.
But the audit itself could be damaging Republican prospects, according to a new Bendixen & Amandi International poll, which shows roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort. In addition, a narrow majority favors President Biden in a 2024 rematch against Trump.
The news isn’t entirely promising for Democrats, however: A majority of voters don’t think Biden should run for a second term.
Trump has cheered on the Maricopa County audit and continued to advance baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud as Republicans from other states he lost have made pilgrimages to Phoenix to review the idea of exporting the concept. But Arizona Republicans who pay close attention to the state’s changing demographics say the audit isn’t a political winner.
“It’s a failure. It’s a joke,” said Sean Noble, a top GOP operative in the state, advising Republicans elsewhere to “avoid it. The election is long over, time to look forward.”
Noble said public opinion surrounding the audit is just too baked in to change, even though the firm that conducted the effort, Cyber Ninjas, hasn’t finished its work. On Friday, Cyber Ninjas announced its team had finished photographing and recounting the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots.
The final report is widely expected to make claims about election fraud, reflecting the politics of Cyber Ninja’s founder — he appeared in a conspiracy theorist’s documentary film rife with falsehoods, according to Arizona press reports.
By 49-46 percent, Arizona voters are opposed to the audit, which puts the result within the poll’s margin of error. But the survey of 600 likely voters found that the intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points. And while Democrats and Republicans broke along familiar partisan lines, independent voters upon whom the state pivots in close elections opposed the audit by 18 percentage points.
“As bloody red meat for the MAGA Republican base, the audit is manna from heaven, but the problem is that Arizona is not a red state any more. It’s a swing state,” said Fernand Amandi, who conducted the survey. “The audit may be serving two interests: firing up the MAGA base but giving Democrats the opportunity to make the case to Arizona voters to stick with them.”
If a candidate supports the audit, the poll shows, Arizona voters would be less likely to support that politician by a margin of 9 percentage points.
I don’t know how long this effect will last. But it’s hard to imagine that Arizona voters are going to be happy about the latest report that maricopa has to buy all new voting machines because the cultists have compromised the ones they already have.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S, January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/File Photo
Michael Wolff has a new book coming out called “Landslide, The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” and New York Magazine has an excerpt. His reputation isn’t great so I have no idea how much of this is true. But this part of it is the first detailed account we have of Trump on January 6th. It’s thin on what happened with the National Guard and all that. And it doesn’t specifically recount the conversations Trump held by phone, such as that with McCarthy. But it’s interesting…
By dawn on January 6, the crowd of great unwashed was building, with the various organizers of the various events each pulling in larger-than-expected numbers. From the perspective of the White House, the protest was still just background noise, a tailgate party before the main event: Vice-President Mike Pence counting, and they hoped rejecting, the electors representing the final tally of the November vote. That would begin at 1 p.m.
The remaining group of aides around the president that morning in the White House was down to Mark Meadows, the chief of staff; Eric Herschmann, one of Trump’s on-call lawyers; and Dan Scavino, his social-media alter ego, with Jason Miller, Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, and Tim Murtaugh, the last employees from the campaign, either working from home or, in the case of Clark, heading to a Republican National Committee winter meeting in Florida. All of them had woken up with something close to the same thought: How is it going to play when the vice-president fails to make the move the president is counting on him to make? And make no mistake: Each fully understood Mike Pence was not going to make that move.
Just as relevant, none of the seven men had precisely told the president this. They, along with almost everyone else in the White House, as well as those who had slipped out, just wanted this to be over.
This was not an uncommon feeling in the final days of the Trump presidency. There was the world within shouting distance of the Oval Office — privy to the president’s monologues, his catalogue of resentments, agitation, desires, long-held notions, stray information, and sudden inspirations with little practical relationship to the workings of government — and then there was the more normal world beyond that. Early in Trump’s presidency, aides noted that a second-floor office, where the likes of Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway worked, meant a degree of exclusion but also protection: Trump would never climb the stairs (and, by the end of his term, he never had).
To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was now doing it virtually without anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril. Jared Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission: his peace deals. The president had all but banished the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who was grateful to be banished), and was speaking instead to Herschmann. Herschmann, believing he understood how to move the president, tended to offer objections that sounded awfully like the plaudits of a yes-man. Kayleigh McEnany had been strategically missing in action for several weeks. The remaining campaign officials (Jason Miller, Clark, Cannon) tended to be merely on the receiving end of Trump’s calls and opinions. And everybody else was, effectively, cleared out. White House wags noted that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had fled as far as Sudan — where he was negotiating a good-behavior economic pact with the former terrorism-sponsor nation — to get distance from this last election gasp. The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania.
Almost everyone who remained around the president understood that he, along with Giuliani, did in fact actually believe that there was yet a decent chance of upsetting the electoral count and having Trump declared the Electoral College winner or, failing that, prolonging the election and returning the fight to the disputed states. The president’s aides (and family) understood, too, that he was the only one (along with Giuliani, which only made the situation more alarming) in any professional political sphere to believe this. Hence — although they did not call it such and tried to see it as more nuanced — derangement.
There had been hardly a waking hour in the past 48 during which he and Giuliani had not been on the phone in pent-up nervousness and excitement over the coming battle in Congress on January 6. They were two generals poring over a map of the battlefield. Both men, egged on by hypotheticals ever nearer to fantasy and after exhausting all other options, had come to take it as an article of faith that the vice-president could simply reject Biden electors in favor of Trump ones and thereby hand the election to Trump; or, falling short of that, that the vice-president could determine that a state legislature ought to give further consideration to possible discrepancies in the state’s vote and send back the questioned electors for a reconsideration of their certification.
“There is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures,” said Giuliani, as though on a loop. He kept repeating this to the president and to the others who were part of the continual conversation on his cell phone. (“Yes … Yes … Yes … Here’s the thing … Hold on a second … Hey, let me get back to you …”)
The president, in his own loop, kept similarly repeating this back to Giuliani.
And they both similarly repeated this to everyone else with such insistent determination that it overrode any opportunity to disagree with them or even engage in the conversation. Throughout, they continued to weigh the odds that the vice-president would come along: sometimes 50-50, sometimes as much as 60-40, even somewhat more. At the grimmest, 30-70. But always a solid shot.
The rest of the president’s aides gave it essentially no chance. They weren’t putting much stock in the January 6 rally, which looked to those around Trump less like a way to keep the president in power than a way to make money afterward.
Here was the math: He was going to lose the White House; that was certain. But he was going to be left with enormous reach and sway and influence. As the great unwashed were gathering, on the evening of January 5, there was another gathering, at the Trump Hotel, of ranking Republicans, all primarily there to plan and to fund-raise for 2022. This included a circle of top-draw Trump celebrities, Don Jr., Flynn, and Corey Lewandowski among them, and presentations by groups such as the Republican Attorneys General Association.
The primary organizer was Caroline Wren, the most prodigious fund-raiser in the Republican Party. On the eve of a protest over the 2020 election, Wren had assembled 30 to 40 major Republican donors. The organizers of the rally where the president would speak included Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie Jane Kremer, tea-party and pro-Trump super-PAC activists, organizers, and fund-raisers; Ali Alexander, another right-wing organizer and Trump fund-raiser; and Alex Jones, the conspiracist media personality — each of them with a direct financial interest in the day’s events and in future dealings with the Trump money machine.
Early in the morning, Jason Miller called Boris Epshteyn, the shuttle between the Giuliani camp and the Trump aides, for a reality check: “So … how exactly do we think this is going to go today?”
“Short answer: We have no idea.”
“How many states are teed up?” The number of states receiving House and Senate objections would determine how long and how pitched the day’s events would be.
“We’re still not sure.”
“And the chance of anything going anywhere? Really, ballpark me.”
“Zero.”
“And then what?”
“Then it’s over.”
When Miller spoke to the president at 8 a.m., he was looking for a reaction to the loss of the Senate in Georgia — counting from the day before was only just finishing. As per their usual routine, the president, who had seen that morning’s coverage, asked Miller to recap it. Who was getting blamed? But of course the president right away told Miller the answer to what he was asking.
“It’s all about the $2,000 — if Mitch had just cut those checks. Do people get this? The Dems’ closing ads were all about those checks,” the president said. He asked Miller what he thought Pence would do and then told Miller that Pence would do the right thing.
The family arrived at the White House shortly before 10 a.m. Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric and Lara, and Ivanka, on her own — Jared was on his way back from the Middle East. It was a good-feeling gathering, even a bit of a party. The president might still be dug in, but his family was moving on — and wanting to acknowledge this most remarkable four years they had experienced. No regrets. Come on — who would have expected any of this!
One curious point of consideration for the family that morning — prescient of the events that would shortly unfold — was a follow-up to a discussion initiated some months before by aides and family. Trump representatives, working with Trump-family members, had approached Parler, the social network backed by Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, far-right exponents and large Trump contributors. They had floated a proposition that Trump, after he left office, become an active member of Parler, moving much of his social-media activity there from Twitter. In return, Trump would receive 40 percent of Parler’s gross revenues and the service would ban anyone who spoke negatively about him.
Parler was balking only at this last condition.
This was now being offered by the family as a carrot to entice the president out of the White House (it was also a potential future family revenue stream): Trump could do what he loved to do most and potentially make a fortune off it. It was a given in the Trump White House that he was one of social media’s most valuable assets and that he would like nothing better than to share, monetarily, in that value.
Giuliani left the Willard with John Eastman, a right-wing constitutional scholar whom Giuliani had recruited to argue the vice-president’s wide latitude in accepting or rejecting presidential electors; Bernie Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who went to prison on federal tax-fraud charges and to whom, at Giuliani’s urging, Trump granted a full pardon; and Epshteyn at a little before 10 a.m. Giuliani was now in hyperdrive over Pence. To the president, Giuliani was still offering good odds that the vice-president would come through. To others, he was saying that Pence just didn’t have the balls to do what could be done.
On the evening of January 4, as both the president and the vice-president were returning from a campaign swing in the runoff Senate races in Georgia, Giuliani arranged yet another come-to-Jesus meeting for the president and vice-president on the subject of the VP’s ability to upset the election — this time with Eastman in attendance. Marc Short, the VP’s chief of staff, believed they had made it absolutely clear that the vice-president believed he had no discretion in the electoral count and was reluctant to reprise the discussion. He agreed now to the meeting only to avoid insulting the president — and only on the understanding that Giuliani, whom Short considered unhinged, would not be present.
The next day, the president again called Pence on the carpet — the meeting at which the president famously asked Pence, “Do you want to be a patriot or a pussy?” At other points, he was more politic. “You want to do the right thing,” said the president. “I very much want to do the right thing,” said the vice-president. “That’s all I want to do.”
Giuliani had spent weeks telling everyone that they knew exactly what was going to happen, that they could depend on Pence, no question at all about that.
Coming out of the Willard, Giuliani ran into Roger Stone in the lobby. When Giuliani asked if he was going to the rally, Stone said he hadn’t been invited. He didn’t even know who had organized it, he said.
The four men were let out of their car and had to walk across the grass to the Ellipse. They were already freezing by the time Giuliani went on at about 10:50.
At 11:45 a.m., the White House entourage, including Meadows, Herschmann, and Scavino, piled into the Beast, the presidential limo, and the follow-on vehicles for the two-minute ride to the rally-staging area (mostly the president liked to ride alone with the rest of the entourage following). The Trump family was already there. The greenroom tent was almost giddy. Nostalgia was beginning. Don Jr. had his phone out, filming the moment.
A few days before, rally organizers had amended their estimate of the crowd’s size from 5,000 to 30,000. Various media reports were now putting it at more than 10,000. The best estimate put the crowd somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 — a righteous cold-weather turnout for a defeated president. During his speech, the president would pause to observe that he reckoned there were 250,000 people there. In days to come, he would raise his estimate to 1 million.
He came onstage to his standard anthem, “God Bless the U.S.A.,” but with less swagger than usual — slower, less sure, even. He was in a black overcoat and black gloves: a strongman look.
The speech, shortly on its way to becoming the most notorious of his presidency, and the key piece of evidence for his imminent second impeachment, was a B-grade delivery. Not long into it, Giuliani and his crew, with freezing toes, left and went back to the Willard. They had heard it all before.
At about 12:30 p.m., midway through Trump’s speech, the vice-president’s office released a two-and-a-half-page letter explaining that “after a careful” study, the vice-president had concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do.
“Oh, shit,” noted Miller at home, sending the statement to Giuliani, Epshteyn, and Scavino and leaving it to one of them to tell the president. Everybody else thought Oh, shit, too.
At the Ellipse, Trump’s delivery was more singsong than bombastic and explosive. He was rushing through it. Ordinarily, he’d have thrown some red meat out and waited for the reaction — always, clearly, the moments of his keenest enjoyment — but now he was just plunging forward. “After this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”
He had added that part: the walk. After this, we’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you. The walk wasn’t in the text. The entourage heard little else — the hundreds upon hundreds of hours of Trump rallies that they all had been subjected to blurred into the usual blah-blah, but they heard that line: the walk. He did not mean this, of course. Trump didn’t walk anywhere.
Meadows and Scavino had slipped out and weren’t listening to the speech. One of the Secret Service agents hurried to get Meadows aside and tell him the president said he was planning to march to the Capitol with the protesters.
“No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol,” said Meadows.
Meadows confirmed this with the president as soon as he came off the stage at 1:11 p.m.
The president seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.
“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol.”
“Well — ”
“How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”
“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump said.
By 1:30, the president was back at the White House, his family returning with him. Lunch was waiting.
Don Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric and Lara Trump left, and Ivanka hung around.
Trump was back on the phone trying to get new information on Pence. The Joint Session had convened at 1 p.m. Arizona was the first objection.
The state had occupied a special place in the president’s paranoia ever since Election Night, when Fox News had called it for Biden much earlier than its competitors — and much earlier than Trump’s data team had believed was plausible.
The president was looking for coverage of the breakout sessions in Congress, when both the Senate and the House would return to their respective chambers and debate the challenges to the various states. But only C-SPAN seemed to be on it. Giuliani, calling from the Willard, where he had watched the remainder of the president’s speech and was just seeing the first mentions of disorder in the streets, gave him a breathless report on Pence but without any new information. That said, he was also promising that as many as six states would be contested, hence a volatile situation — We just didn’t know what’s going to happen (his breathlessness was only increasing). Meadows was in close touch with Jim Jordan. But the details Jordan was offering were unsatisfying. The president was, in theory, waging an extraordinary legislative fight, one with hardly any precedent — the culmination of a two-month battle in which he had considered little else and on which both his immediate future and his place in history depended. But other than via his own tweets and fulminations and his meeting the day before with the vice-president, nobody in the White House was much participating or even present.
There was nobody on the White House side whipping votes. There was nobody on the White House side who was particularly up-to-date on who might be with them or against them other than from public reports. To the extent that, as the media darkly warned, there was an extraordinary plot to hold on to power — an incipient coup, even — there really were only two plotters, with no one to back them up. Trump had no functioning political staff, the White House counsel’s office had been all but shut down (to the degree the office was still functioning, it was almost entirely focused on vetting pardon pleas), and the leadership of the Justice Department was in disarray.
All the same, the president and Giuliani, in their bubble, remained confident that success was there for them to grab.
At 1:49 p.m., the president retweeted a video of his Ellipse speech. At just about this time, rioters were breaching the Capitol door.
At two o’clock, the president and Giuliani — the president in the White House and Giuliani at the Willard — tried to find Tommy Tuberville, the recently seated senator from Alabama, but they instead mistakenly called Mike Lee, the Utah senator, on his cell phone. Lee, amid the increasing confusion as reports started to come in of mobs breaching the Capitol fences, found Tuberville and put him on the phone. The president and Giuliani seemed to have no idea what was occurring, and Tuberville was either unsuccessful in telling them or thought better of trying.
At about 2:15 p.m., Epshteyn, watching television in Giuliani’s suite at the Willard, was one of the first people in the greater Trump circle to start, with some sense of panic, to take note of what was happening. Epshteyn spoke to Miller, who called Meadows.
“I’m sure you’re tracking this,” Miller said.
“Yeah, I know. Some things are moving here that I can’t get into at the moment,” Meadows said.
Miller assumed the White House was mobilizing the National Guard. By 2:20 p.m., both the House and Senate had adjourned.
At 2:24 p.m., the president, having been informed that Mike Pence had not rejected the Arizona Biden electors, tweeted:
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!
Reading the tweet in the Capitol bunker, the siege now in progress, Pence and Short, hardly for the first time, noted how far off the president could be from the page everyone else was on. That was the generous interpretation.
In part, the president seemed just not to be grasping the facts as they were coming through — mounting crowds, breached barricades, protesters entering the Capitol. Or maybe he was simply disagreeing with them: These people were protesting the election, he was still repeating as late as 2:30. The protesters wanted Pence to do the right thing. These were good protesters: his protesters.
Meadows, Herschmann, and Scavino began pressing the president to make some public acknowledgment of what was happening and to admonish the protesters, but his attention was elsewhere, still focused on the vice-president. Fourteen minutes after his tweet attacking Pence, at 2:38 p.m., the aides managed to get a tweet out from the president composed by Scavino: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
Approaching 3 p.m., the pressure for the president to say something quickly mounted.
Ivanka Trump had been floating around the West Wing, chatting to a variety of people. Her children had gotten into private school in Florida, and she was pleased about this — an excited topic of conversation. She was pulled away from her discussion about schools to join the increasingly tense debate about how to respond to the news.
The president, though, was digging in his heels. He remained singularly focused on the electoral challenge and had blinders on to everything else — at least, that was how everybody was rationalizing something close to his total failure, willful or not, to understand what was going on. At the same time, no one in the White House was seeing this as the full-on assault on the Capitol and the nail in the coffin of the Trump administration that the world would shortly understand it to be; they were, for perhaps another 90 minutes or so, still treating this as “an optics issue,” as Ivanka was putting it.
It wasn’t until later in the three o’clock hour that Trump seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election — defending him so he would defend them — to seeing them as “not our people.” Therefore, he bore no responsibility for them.
Giuliani and Epshteyn were still watching television reports from the Willard. Giuliani was on the phone with the president, relating, with growing concern, what he was seeing on television, but both men were still talking about the vice-president and what might happen in the electoral count.
Ivanka wasn’t casting off the protesters entirely — here was the base. “American Patriots,” she addressed them directly in a tweet at 3:15, which she would shortly delete, “any security breach or disrespect to our law enforcement is unacceptable. The violence must stop immediately. Please be peaceful.”
The debate about putting the president out there to say something — something calming — continued for as much as an hour.
There were three views: that he must, as fast as possible, say something — it was getting serious (though no one yet was seeing this as the defining moment of his presidency); his own view, which was that he should say nothing — it was not his fault or responsibility, and he certainly didn’t want to give a speech that might imply it was; and, lastly, that anything he said, instead of helping to address the problem, might well make matters much worse, as it did when he was forced to make a speech condemning the racist protesters in Charlottesville.
Aides put in front of the president two suggested tweets, written in Trump’s voice, which they hoped he might accept:
Bad apples, like ANTIFA or other crazed leftists, infiltrated today’s peaceful protest over the fraudulent vote count. Violence is never acceptable! MAGA supporters embrace our police and the rule of law and should leave the Capitol now!
The fake news media who encouraged this summer’s violent and radical riots are now trying to blame peaceful and innocent MAGA supporters for violent actions. This isn’t who we are! Our people should head home and let the criminals suffer the consequences!
Trump either rejected them or ignored them (other than Dan Scavino, Trump didn’t like anyone else writing his tweets).
The challenge now became how to use Trump’s own arguments to convince him that he had to do something — what passed for the Socratic method in the Trump White House. He had often said what he needed to say, so just say it again: He and the Republican Party represented law and order, so how could he not speak out about lawlessness? He should urge his people, the good people, to go home and leave the bad people.
Still, he did not see the necessity of speaking out. It wasn’t as bad as the media were saying it was. People were saying it was bad just to blame it on him. It took 35 minutes from his “Stay Peaceful” tweet to get him to go further — with Scavino as the author:
I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order — respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!
The entire narrative of the election — and indeed the Trump presidency — was quickly being transformed: The Capitol was under siege; the “steal” was moot. But Trump remained fixed in his obsession: The election had been taken from him, and whatever happened, someone had to give it back; he could not see or think or imagine beyond this.
By 3:30 p.m., he was telling callers that, yes, he had decided to say something. He was going to speak. But he was still repeating that the election had been stolen and was seeking assurances from each caller that the protests were overblown — that it was mostly a peaceful protest, wasn’t it?
Every one of the people yet in the White House as well as those who had slipped out, along with the president’s large traveling retinue, his family, the many members of Congress seeking photo ops with him, and the legions of favor seekers, had all been at rally after rally and, over and over again, seen vivid demonstrations of the exotic, self-dramatizing, out-from-under-a-rock Trump fan base. But now, to a person, to a political professional, they were dumbfounded and awestruck — revulsion competing with incomprehension.
In part, the radically faithful had simply been concentrated. The merely eager party types, and the Las Vegas audience sorts, and the local business proprietors, and the family-outing Republicans, and the VFW-post members, and various church groups, the salt of the Republican earth, more or less in normal dress, all had mostly self-selected out, leaving what was generally, if abstractly, referred to in the Trump circle as the “hard core.” But no one had ever come so clearly face-to-face with this pure hard core as was happening now and would happen, in video footage and in indictments, in the weeks to come. Even Trump himself, the clearest channel through to this fan base, was growing confused.
As he went upstairs to the residence, he seemed, said some of the people talking to him there by phone, at a terrible loss. The monologue slowed and even paused, with a few people not even sure that this otherwise-unstoppable monologuist was still on the line.
At about this time, Scavino informed Trump that he had been booted off Twitter — still a temporary suspension. For more than four years, he’d been told that this was always a possibility, and every time, he’d responded that Twitter needed him more than he needed it.
The doubtless president was, at least for a moment, someone else. “I don’t know what to do here,” he said to one caller not long after 7 p.m. — as stark a sense of uncertainty and even crisis as the caller had ever heard the president express.
The notable thing is that he seemed to have finally recognized that the main event, the certification of the electoral votes, was now far from the main event. He may even have realized that after 64 days of struggle, it was over.
Jason Miller, at home in Arlington, was lying stupefied in bed with his wife, watching the video loops of the day over and over again and hoping there was a plan. But no one called. At 9 p.m., he got out of bed, opened his laptop, and started to write a statement. A statement — the considered language of politics, the true mandarin’s language — was an indication of ongoing business. This meant doing what Trump had refused for the past 64 days to do: acknowledge that Joe Biden would inevitably be the next president.
But there was not going to be an abject or contrite Trump or even a formally defeated one. It was necessary to skip over the fairness of the election and to skip over the Trump-told narrative — the election in his mind would remain stolen, forever stolen. This statement could certainly not be the official, belated concession — at least not to Trump — but it had to establish acceptance, a fait accompli, and put Trump’s stamp on the new, if disagreeable, reality.
Miller was trying to get the headline, the chyron roll: the message from Trump that something had changed.
Orderly transition.
Not exactly the torch passing, and hardly a round of applause for democracy in action.
That was as far as the president could be moved. He called Kushner and read him the draft.
“Will you call the president?” Kushner smoothly pushed Miller into the fray.
Miller called Meadows, still in the West Wing, and then the president. The president seemed eager to hear from Miller, eager to be on the phone. Most often for Trump, the phone was a one-way instrument: Callers listened.
“How bad is this?” Trump asked, a stark difference from his usual opener, “How are we doing?” — which was not, ordinarily, a question at all but a preface to Trump’s saying how well everything was going.
“Mr. President, today is literally going to change everything.”
“This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats. Hold on, our great First Lady is here,” said Trump, switching to speakerphone.
“Jason,” said the great First Lady with a sharp note. “The media is trying to go and say this is who we are. We don’t support this.”
“That’s what we have to make clear,” said Miller, relieved that the president and First Lady were seeing the protesters as bad guys rather than good guys (and not a mix of the two). Pushing through, Miller told the president and First Lady that he had just gotten off the phone with Kushner and Meadows and that they had a proposal for later that evening if Biden reached an electoral majority. He went into reading the statement draft.
The president suggested “peaceful” transition instead of “orderly.” Miller said that that called attention to the fact that it wasn’t peaceful now and might not be peaceful. “Orderly,” Miller did not say, suggested not just an absence of disruption but that all the aspects of government would pass, as they should, to a new administration. “Peaceful” put it in someone else’s hand; “orderly” meant cooperation, too — the Trump White House would cooperate with the incoming Biden White House. It wasn’t just the protesters who needed to stop; Trump needed to extend himself, too. After all, it wasn’t just the recount effort and the election challenge behind the protests but Trump’s personal intransigence.
Trump seemed to appreciate this now, to walk back, even. “The media thinks I’m not going to leave,” said the president. “Do they really think that? That’s crazy.”
“We’ve never laid that out,” said Miller, with some deadpan. “I really can’t stress enough how much we have to make it clear that we’re fully onboard with an orderly transition.”
“We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!”
“I’ll work with Dan on getting this out,” Miller told the president. Saying this, Miller suddenly wondered if they would even have the tools and channels to get it out. Every call — to the wires, networks, and major dailies — yielded variations on the same question: When are we going to hear directly from the president? When is he going to come and talk about it? When is he going to stand in front of us and in front of the American people?
This is over, Miller thought. This is the end of the road. Of all the news outlets, only Fox had never gotten back to him. Even Fox, Miller accepted, was truly over Trump.
Scavino could use only his personal Twitter account to finally, at 3:49 a.m., get out the president’s statement.
If this was an attempted putsch, it had not only failed but shown its leader to be almost a random participant in it, without method or strategy. Disorder had always been his element, and it was now his followers’, too. But he was not so much with them as alone in his own rebellion and desires, a bubble of grievance that somehow floated apart from actual events, even events that were meant to make real the president’s own delusions.
This latest by Eric Boehlert’s excellent newsletter (you can subscribe here, with a nice discount) is right on the …er, money. Tucker Carlson can’t keep any advertisers so why, exactly, is he on TV?
Remember when bigoted Fox News hosts were forced to take unscheduled ‘vacations’ when their hateful speech kicked up controversy and advertisers, feeling pressure from outraged consumers, would head for the exits? It’s been a long-standing Fox News tradition, as a way to cool the marketplace temperature and ride out storms.
In 2018, Laura Ingraham hastily left for “a pre-planned vacation” as advertisers started fleeing her show after she mocked a Parkland school shooting survivor online. The year before, Sean Hannity suddenly vanished from the airwaves when advertisers began dropping his time slot when he kept fueling an ugly conspiracy theory about the murder of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staffer.
And last summer, Tucker Carlson announced a “long-planned” vacation that weirdly started on a Tuesday night, just as high-profile advertisers were ditching him after CNN discovered that Carlson’s head writer had spent years pseudonymously posting wildly vulgar, KKK-like rants online.
Today, those vacations appear to be a thing of the past, even as Carlson purposefully courts controversy with hate speech, remaining a blight on our cuture. (He recently lied, claiming the Covid-19 vaccine has killed thousands of Americans.)
Consider that weeks after the election, Tucker Carlson told viewers that “the 2020 presidential election was not fair” and that “no honest person would claim that it was fair.” Just two days before the deadly January 6 insurrection, he claimed that election was “rigged” and then, “There is no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on January 6.”
There’s a reason prominent white nationalist Andrew Anglin, who oversee the hate site Daily Stormer, has described Carlson’s Fox News show as “basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show,'” and called Carlson “literally our greatest ally.”
Carlson generated more headlines last week when he denounced Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a “disgraceful,” “stupid” “pig” after Milley told lawmakers that military personnel should be “widely read” and that included learning about issues such as critical race theory. Several veterans groups responded with outrage, and pressured USAA, which provides financial services to personnel and the families of those who serve or have served in the U.S. Armed Forces, to stop advertising on Carlson’s show.
In theory it should work. Just ask previous, top-rated Fox News hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck who got tossed overboard when their shows became largely ad-free zones when advertisers walked away following scandalous commentary (Obama is a “racist”), and behavior (chronic sexual harassing.)
For years progressive activists used that marketplace dynamic as a key leverage point, working hard to drive advertisers away from Fox News’ toxic content. The tug-of-war was well defined: If hosts insisted on trafficking in clearly racist, homophobic and hateful language, then Madison Ave. clients were going to be forced to make a choice, stand with Fox or stand with common decency.
For dozens (hundreds?) of advertisers and would-be Fox advertisers, that choice over the years has been a no-brainer. Corporate America spends untold billions each year cultivating brand value and has no interest flushing that away via some hot-headed basic cable host. Bye-bye Disney, Lexus, T-Mobile etc. They all have dropped Carlson.
He’s Madison Ave. poison. So why does he still have a show?
What’s now protecting Carlson, aside from the support he gets from Murdoch’s powerful son, Lachlan, who has publicly defended the host’s white supremacy programming, are cable fees. Billions of dollars in cable fees. The network earns more annually in fees from cable operators, such as Comcast and Verizon, that pay to carry Fox News content, than the network earns from advertising.
What’s so unusual about the Fox News carrier fees is it’s wildly bloated in terms of how many people actually watch the network.
According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of $1.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just $0.81 to an average cable bill. This means, for every actual viewer, Fox News receives a $7.75 subsidy from people who never watch Fox News.
The network rakes in nearly $2 billion each year from the hidden subscriber fees, twice as much as CNN and three times as much as MSNBC. Those sky-high fees in turn protect Fox News when advertisers abandon the network.
Meanwhile, Carlson is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of remaining advertisers (WaxRx, Fungi-Nail), led by Trump sycophant Mike Lindell’s MyPillow.
Back at the end of March, “Of the 81 minutes and 15 seconds of Tucker Carlson Tonight ad time from March 25-31, My Pillow made up about 20% of those, Fox News Channel promos had over 5% and Fox Nation had nearly 4%,” TVRev reported. So, almost 1-in-3 ad minutes were filled by a partisan Carlson ally, which means he’s playing with house money.
We know there’s no collective conscience among managers at Fox News. Without the marketplace pressure of advertising boycotts to occasionally shame the network, it’s difficult to hold Murdoch’s rogue operation accountable.
I kind of think that this is starting to unravel. A lot of people are cutting the cord and streaming is taking over. At some point that’s going to start making a real difference.
But keep in mind that the Murdochs have enough money to last all our lifetimes. It’s not just about money for them. It’s also about ideology. These rich right wing fanatics have a whole other agenda and they have plenty of money to finance it.
New polling from Bendixen & Amandi International (usually polls for Democrats) shows half of Arizona voters oppose the partisan “fraudit” circus still dragging on. Plus, President Joe Biden leads narrowly in prospective match-ups with Donald Trump. Even so, a majority polled think Biden should not run for a second term (Politico):
By 49-46 percent, Arizona voters are opposed to the audit, which puts the result within the poll’s margin of error. But the survey of 600 likely voters found that the intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points. And while Democrats and Republicans broke along familiar partisan lines, independent voters upon whom the state pivots in close elections opposed the audit by 18 percentage points.
“As bloody red meat for the MAGA Republican base, the audit is manna from heaven, but the problem is that Arizona is not a red state any more. It’s a swing state,” said Fernand Amandi, who conducted the survey. “The audit may be serving two interests: firing up the MAGA base but giving Democrats the opportunity to make the case to Arizona voters to stick with them.”
If a candidate supports the audit, the poll shows, Arizona voters would be less likely to support that politician by a margin of 9 percentage points.
When pollsters told respondents the effort by Cyber Ninjas was partisan — “it’s being conducted by a firm with no experience in the field, and election experts, Democratic officials and Republican members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors oppose the recount” — opposition grew to 51 to 44.
In a separate story, election officials in Maricopa County announced on Monday they would replace the voting machines handled by Cyber Ninjas. They cited concerns that the machines’ security has been compromised (Washington Post):
“The voters of Maricopa County can rest assured, the County will never use equipment that could pose a risk to free and fair elections,” the county said in a statement. “As a result, the County will not use the subpoenaed equipment in any future elections.”
The announcement probably reflects an added cost to taxpayers for a controversial review that has been embraced by supporters of former president Donald Trump, who has falsely claimed that the 2020 election was rigged in Arizona and other battlegrounds that he lost.
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) had warned she might decertify the machines if they were not decommissioned after being in Cyber Nijnas’ custody.
Among the most vocal critics has been the Republican-led leadership of Maricopa County. In May, all seven of the county’s elected officials — including five Republicans — joined in a scathing letter to the state Senate denouncing the audit as a sham.
“Our state has become a laughingstock,” they wrote. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”
Noting the tactics used by organizers of the review, such as hunting for bamboo in ballot paper, they added, “Your ‘audit,’ which you once said was intended to increase voters’ confidence in our electoral process, has devolved into a circus.”
Cyber Ninjas announced Friday it had “finished photographing and recounting the 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots.” Yikes.
Nathan Allen. (Image Credit: Suffolk District Attorney)
An otherwise unexceptional Massachusetts man stole a box truck outside Boston on Saturday, crashed it into a home in Winthrop, then proceeded to gun down two Black residents. Nathan Allen passed by non-Black ones, leaving them unharmed (BuzzFeed News):
After crashing the truck, Allen, 28, got out of the vehicle and targeted Cooper, who was shot in the back multiple times, and Green, who was shot in the head, neck, and torso repeatedly, [Suffolk District Attorney Rachael] Rollins said in a statement on Sunday. Green was shot outside his home and “may have been trying to engage the suspect to end the threat,” according to Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher Mason.
Allen walked by several people who were not Black and left them unharmed, Rollins told reporters during a press conference at the scene on Sunday, the Boston Globe reported. “They are alive, and these two visible people of color are not,” she emphasized.
Yesterday, retired Massachusetts State Trooper David Green and Air Force Staff Sergeant Ramona Cooper were murdered in Winthrop by a man who drew swastikas and handwrote messages about whites being superior and “apex predators.” pic.twitter.com/kBRt6Wmwtv
Allen died after exchanging gunfire with local police.
Is it something in the water?
Rollins said in a statement that Allen “wrote about the superiority of the white race. About whites being ‘apex predators.’ He drew swastikas.” Police are investigating it as a hate crime. Allen is believed to have acted alone.
But Rollins suggested that there were few, if any, outward signs of Allen being a violent white supremacist prior to the killings. She said Allen was legally licensed to carry a firearm and was not on authorities’ radar. “He had nothing in his background check,” she added.
“This shooter was married and employed. He had a PhD and no criminal history. To all external sources he likely appeared unassuming,” she said. “And then, yesterday afternoon he stole a box truck, crashed it into another vehicle and a property, walked away from the wreckage interacting with multiple individuals and choosing only to shoot and kill the two Black people he encountered.”
This is the point in the reportage that we get six paragraphs on Allen’s seemingly normal white life in an effort to understand what triggered him. No prior record. Nothing on his Facebook account except “drinking beer in an American flag-styled shirt with a friend, and traveling in Vienna,” etc. Just a normal, recently married white guy who dreams of being an apex predator and draws swastikas.
Daily Beast gives Allen even more normal white guy backstory. The Black victims’ get respectful mentions from those who knew them, naturally, but the white shooter gets the Hallmark treatment.
"It's beyond the beyond" Winthrop residents bring flowers & candles to the scene of chaos over the weekend. The brother of retired @MassStatePolice Trooper David Green tells me there is no doubt Green would rush towards danger to save lives. Latest 4,5,6 @boston25pic.twitter.com/XyjbwyR373
The New York Times quotes Rollins as noting there are several synagogues in Winthrop.
“We don’t know where he was going; that is mere speculation,” Rollins said. “We do know he had anti-Semitic rhetoric written in his own hand.”
BuzzFeed News again:
The apparent targeted killing comes amid a rising tide of white supremacist violence in the US. An analysis by the Washington Post found that since 2015, there have been 267 plots or attacks by far-right extremists and 91 fatalities. The Department of Homeland Security has issuedwarnings this year about potential violence by domestic political extremists and racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.
Or is it something in the air?
We don’t know yet what set off Nathan Allen (WBZ):
The Anti-Defamation League says to is worrisome to know there are those among us who have been radicalized to hate people because of their religion or skin color. And it is scary and dangerous not to know when they could act on that hatred.
“There are people walking around who they’re motivated by hatred, and have, at some point, been radicalized to target people because of their skin color or their religion. And what’s dangerous, and what’s scary for all of us in the public, is we don’t know when this might happen,” said Robert Trestan of the Anti-Defamation League
We do know a major political party and its propaganda outlets are complicit in stoking right-wing extremism and pretending they are not. Critics tend to blame media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Fox News. The real blame, however, falls squarely on those holding and promoting such views so as to make them seem mainstream and normal-white-guy.
At a Twitter confab two years ago, an employee asked that if they could ban ISIS content from the platform, why not white supremacist content? Well, because algorithms involve trade-offs that can catch innocent users as well (Vice):
In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.
Facebook employees had concluded that, in addition to violating the company’s policies, Singh’s rhetoric in the real world was dangerous enough to merit kicking him off the platform entirely, according to the report, but the company’s top public policy executive in India overruled them, arguing that the political repercussions could hurt Facebook’s business interests in the country (its largest market globally).
In Facebook’s home country, similar business interests overrule public safety interests.
“Not too long ago,” writes Dan Kennedy (GBH), “Tucker Carlson would go on vacation — always long-planned, of course — whenever one of his rancid descents into racism and white supremacy made life momentarily uncomfortable for his overlords at Fox News. He’d disappear for a few days, come back once the heat had died down and resume his hate-mongering ways.”
But when the Anti-Defamation League recently called on Fox News to fire Carlson for promoting white replacement theory, News Corp heir Lachlan Murdoch himself defended Carlson (and Fox’s audience share).
Kennedy writes, “This is how it works if you’re Tucker Carlson: You can express vile, unadorned racist views. And as long as you say the equivalent of “I’m not being racist,” you’re good to go. Or, rather, good to stay.”
If you do so as a fringe-right politician, business interests that make money from your audience engagement will help you build your audience by inviting you on the air to spread extremist views. For some outlets, it’s a twofer. They provide both a platform for those popularizing extremist, white supremacist, even fascist views, and reserve time for hosts to do the same with or without guests.
There's a real fascist vibe to this One America News personality calming calling for the execution of potentially tens of thousands of Americans over fake voter fraud claims. pic.twitter.com/wm4E0qVJaf
“Neither I or OAN are suggesting anyone should be executed,” said Pearson Sharp. He’s only reminding fringe-right viewers that treason is punishable by death.
The problem is not the algorithms or the people who program them. The problem is the extremists among us who feel free these days to evangelize.
I doubt we’ll ever rally know how much of this corruption and grift happened under the Trump administration but I’m sure it was everywhere:
Two former Environmental Protection Agency officials intentionally kept two staffers on the payroll and allowed them to continue receiving their salaries even after they were terminated, according to a report from the agency’s independent watchdog. The report also found that the former officials, both appointed by former president Donald Trump, committed other fraudulent payroll-related activities — including one giving the other an improper pay increase — that cost the EPA more than $130,000.
The EPA’s Office of Inspector General investigated former EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson and former White House liaison Charles Munoz and concluded in March that they had “made and used official time sheets and personnel forms that contained materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” to facilitate continued payments to two employees after they had left the agency, according to a copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post and first reported by Politico.
As it turns out, the two employees to whom they gave unauthorized pay were terminated for abiding by the rules and the Trump appointees felt sorry for them and wanted to give them some “severance” which is not allowed in these circumstances. Everybody did what they wanted and if they had to do something they didn’t want to do they just found work-arounds. The rules are for the rubes.
The Trump family has trouble with depositions. In 2007 testimony, Donald Trump was repeatedly shown to be a liar. In February, Donald Trump Jr. was deposed in the Trump inauguration scandal lawsuit, and on several key points, under oath, he provided false testimony. A review of documents filed in that case and other material obtained by Mother Jones shows that Ivanka Trump also testified inaccurately during her deposition in this lawsuit.
The inauguration probe was launched last year by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC. He has alleged that Trump’s inauguration committee misused charitable funds to enrich the Trump family. As Racine put it, the lawsuit maintains “that the Inaugural Committee, a nonprofit corporation, coordinated with the Trump family to grossly overpay for event space in the Trump International Hotel… The Committee also improperly used non-profit funds to throw a private party [at the Trump Hotel] for the Trump family costing several hundred thousand dollars.” In short, the attorney general accused the Trump gang of major grifting, and he is seeking to recover the money paid to the Trump Hotel so those funds can be used for real charitable purposes.
There are tons of details in that piece by David Corn. She’s quite the operator. If reports are correct that the Trump Org is going to be charged with fraud, Vanki must be relieved that married money. It’s possible that the family fortune is going to be substantially diminished.
The head of Arizona Republicans’ controversial “audit” of 2020presidential ballots was revealed Saturday as the anonymous star of a new movieclaiming the election was stolen, raising questions about how credible any upcoming report from the supposed audit could be.
The revelation of Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan’s involvement in the conspiracy theory movie TheDeep Rig came at the film’s premiere in a church on the outskirts of Phoenix, as Arizona Republicans gathered to celebrate the count’s end.
The Deep Rig, which is based on a book by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, features an array of discredited voter-fraud hunters presenting a hodgepodge of theories claiming that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. But while Deep Rig’s claims may be on the fringe, its premiere drew support from top Arizona Republican officials, with GOP state Sen. Sonny Borrelli and Reps. Mark Finchem and Walt Blackman in the audience.
As the head of Cyber Ninjas, Logan was in charge of the audit of 2.3 million ballots ordered by the Republican-controlled state Senate. For much of TheDeep Rig, Logan’s identity is obscured through blurring and a voice modulator, identified only as “Anon” as he argues that the CIA was behind “disinformation” around the election.
Towards the end of the film, however, Logan’s identity is revealed. The crowd of a couple hundred people at the premiere at Phoenix’s Dream City Church exploded in applause when Logan was revealed as the conspiratorial “Anon.”
While the Deep Rig audience was thrilled to see Logan in the film, his participation had long been suspected by reporters tracking the audit. In a trailer for the film released in early June, Logan’s voice wasn’t changed, meaning that “Anon” was quickly identified as Logan himself.
The Cyber Ninjas audit has been criticized by both elections experts and the Justice Department, with observers noting audit procedures often changed or were nonsensical. After the premiere, auditor Bob Hughes told the audience that the audit included procedures to find bamboo fibers, which would have supposedly revealed the ballots were manufactured in Asia.
Along with Logan, The Deep Rig featured amateur election-fraud sleuths pushing baseless claims. Another segment of the film centered on activist Joe Oltmann, who claimed to have infiltrated a local “antifa” conference call ahead of the election and discovered them talking about a man named “Eric” rigging the election.
In the aftermath of the vote, Oltmann’s claims were embraced by right-wing media as supposed evidence that Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer stole the election. That false allegation has proven to be totally baseless, however, with right-wing outlet Newsmax retracting its claims against Coomer in May.
The Deep Rig was directed by Roger R. Richards, whose UFO conspiracy theory movie Above Majestic posited aliens were involved in the 9/11 attacks. While mainstream reporters often struggled to report from the stadium where the audit was being conducted, the footage from Deep Rig’s suggests its team had close-up access to the inspections, filming ballots from the counting floor.
Conspiracy theorists were given prominent roles at the film’s premiere. In the lobby, a group of right-wing activists manned a booth with brochures claiming that the United States is in fact a bankrupt corporation ruled by London, urging attendees to declare their “real” American citizenship.
The event was hosted by Ann Vandersteel, a prominent QAnon booster. QAnon references also appeared in the film, with former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn wearing bracelets bearing the QAnon slogan ‘Where we go one, we go all’ during his interview in the movie.
But not everyone who believed in the voter fraud conspiracies outlined in the film was universally welcome at the premiere. A brief speech at the event from QAnon conspiracy theorist Austin Steinbart, who has claimed to be Q himself and is known as “Baby Q” to his supporters, set off a minor controversy.
Steinbart, who helped find the church as the location for the premiere, is set to appear in an upcoming film from Richards about QAnon. Steinbart addressed the audience before the film was shown to promote his series of QAnon-themed meet-up groups, but didn’t mention QAnon, telling The Daily Beast later that a member of Byrne’s camp asked him not to bring up the conspiracy theory.
Steinbart, who is controversial even among other QAnon believers, has been derided as a would-be cult leader or fame-seeker by more prominent QAnon promoters. Steinbart also has a checkered legal history, after being pleading guilty to a felony in April. Steinbart’s legal travails with federal prosecutors included being busted with a synthetic penis, in an apparent attempt to evade drug tests for marijuana while out on bail.
[…]
The premiere doubled as a party for Republicans activists in the state who had pushed lawmakers to organize the audit. While any report from Cyber Ninjas is likely to be hotly disputed, Republicans have seized on a report as the first step in overturning Arizona’s 2020 results, or even somehow putting Trump back in the White House.
Shelby Busch, a conservative activist who was one of the audit’s most vocal backers, urged audience-members to keep an election-fraud journal to share with their descendants.
“Your great-grandkids are going to talk about this day, and they’re going to be able to say, ‘My grandma and my grandpa, guess what?’” Busch said. “‘They wrote history.’”
When she’s right, she’s right.
I just don’t know what to say about these people. So I’ll just let that sit there. It would be funny and/or pathetic if they weren’t all violent neo-fascists.
Donald Trump held his first full-fledged rally since leaving office this past weekend in Ohio and nobody really cared. Sure, he packed the house with MAGA faithful, eager to see their idol and sing along to the greatest hits. But it landed with a thud in the media — and that’s got to hurt.
None of the major networks covered Trump’s first return rally live, not even Fox News, which stuck with “Watters World” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” instead. It looks like Trump is going to have to come up with some new schtick if he thinks he can run again. I suspect that only the most devoted MAGA fans really want to hear him mention Hillary Clinton so they can all chant “lock her up” for the ten-thousandth time and lurch into yet another awkward rendition of “YMCA.”
It may even be possible that sore loser Trump’s pathetic obsession with the last election is why some of his former henchmen and sycophants are taking some tiny baby steps away from him in a vain attempt to salvage some shred of their reputations. Since they failed to save his wretched presidency, Trump rejected them anyway, so what do they have to lose?
Former Vice President Mike Pence has been out on the road trying to both stay loyal to the MAGA legacy (such as it is) while defending his decision on January 6th not to destroy the constitution for the dotty, orange man in the White House. This week he even went so far as to give a speech at the Ronald Reagan library in which he actually came close to suggesting that Trump is not, in fact, a living god:
“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States. The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
It appears Pence has finally managed to wipe that adoring gaze off his own face. What good it does him remains to be seen?
Trump’s number one henchman, former Attorney General William Barr, is also on his own reputation rehab tour after having repeatedly protected Trump and his cronies and abruptly ending his disgraceful tenure at the top of Trump’s shit list. He spoke with ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, a reporter known for being friendly to members of the right-wing, for Karl’s new book about the Trump administration’s final days called Betrayal, due out in December.
Karl published an excerpt in the Atlantic this weekend that shows Barr as an independent-minded tough guy hero, slinging around the word “bullshit” like he’s Robert DeNiro in “Goodfellas.” According to this version of events, Barr always knew that Trump was going to lose and he just pretended to be concerned about Joe Biden stealing the election so he’d have the credibility to say that the Democrats won fair and square. Sure, he did.
Yes, it is true that Barr told the AP on Dec. 1st that the DOJ had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. That was big of him considering the stakes (and the fact that he broke yet another DOJ rule by prematurely “investigating” the issue in the first place.) But according to Karl, this was really done at the behest of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who believed they needed to admit defeat so he could win the two runoff races in Georgia by saying they needed a GOP firewall in the Senate. Barr told him he understood and would say the election was not stolen when the time was right. According to Karl, McConnell confirmed the conversation. Apparently, Barr and McConnell see absolutely nothing wrong with the Senate Majority Leader conscripting the attorney general to help him win a couple of races. They don’t even try to hide their corruption anymore. I’m not sure they even know what it is.
And let’s not forget that no one in the administration more eagerly followed Trump’s pre-election playbook, preparing his followers for The Big Lie. All the way back in June of 2020, Barr went on NPR and claimed that mail-in ballots were ripe for fraud, especially “counterfeiting,” none of which he could provide evidence for, simply saying “it’s obvious.” NPR’s public editor later admonished the network for airing these false claims, even quoting one expert saying they were “totally nuts.”
That didn’t stop him.
Barr continued to repeat his weird beliefs about “counterfeit” ballots in congressional testimony and in a wild CNN interview (which I wrote about here) leading up to the election. He never offered any evidence for his claims which, in many respects, were even more outrageous than Trump’s. The idea that Barr, of all people, was some kind of Big Lie skeptic is absurd. Nobody pushed it harder than he did — until the writing was on the wall and he realized that his place in history was going to be somewhere between Rudy Giuliani, Roy Cohn and Sidney Powell.
According to Karl, Trump went totally bonkers when he heard that Barr said there was no evidence of fraud, and you can’t blame him for being surprised. But in a faint echo of the famous march up to the White House by Barry Goldwater to tell Nixon that he had lost the support of Congress, this tale has Barr going to meet with an enraged, red-faced Trump who shrieked, “How the fuck could you do this to me? Why did you say it?” prompting the steely Attorney General to simply reply, “because it’s true.”
Trump then ranted and called him worthless and Barr left that meeting unsure if he still had a job. He and the White House worked it out the next day with Barr saying that he’d stay on a long as he was needed, which lasted for a few more days until the brave speaker of truth to power wrote one of the most obsequious resignation letters in history and snuck out of town just before all hell broke loose.
