Because Democrats suck so badly at messaging, I joke that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters thinks they can do it better. They want to write the white paper that will remake Democratic politics nationwide, issue it somehow from our little redoubt in Western North Carolina, and expect people at the national level to listen. Hell, those at the top won’t even listen to real experts.

Ask my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio (“Don’t Buy It“). She gets more attention abroad than here, it seems. ASO appeared again with Dan Pfeiffer the other day on Pod Save America and had some advice worth repeating here.

Message discipline begins with the discipline part, so Democrats are at a disadvantage from the get-go. “Low-propensity voters” is negative and out. “High-potential voters” is in. Now repeat. Really. (It’s the little things.)

Repetition is really important
And so is repetition

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) May 25, 2021

The small group that attempted the violent overthrow of our country’s government on Jan. 6 are, as James Madison warned, a faction “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” They have been with us since the beginning of the country and remain committed the proposition that all persons are not created equal. This faction is “fundamentally at odds with America” and American ideals, ASO insists.

Labeling that faction authoritarians, says ASO, is unhelpful (as is repeating right-wing frames such as “stolen election”). It grants them power we do not need to hand them. And among those high-potential voters Democrats need to turn out in the next election, research shows that fosters cynicism.

“It’s not that people don’t think our ideas are right,” ASO explains. “It’s that people don’t think our ideas are possible, so why bother?”

In any election, ASO argues, there are actually three candidates. “There’s ours, there’s theirs, and there’s stay-at-home.” And if you want people to turn out and flex their political power, voters have to feel powerful, that the election is a fight that’s winnable and not a lost cause. Authoritarians risks framing our opponents as too imposing to defeat (edited for clarity):

And so, that is why we want to position them, yes, as powerful, yes, as damaging, yes, as destructive, yes, as nefarious, but not as authoritarians. And that also is the reasoning behind this sort of “faction” idea and language, that they are a potent, lying, horrible group of people that have a hold on many, many things — not least of which is the media, especially their own media channels — but this is something that we have vanquished before and it’s something that we can vanquish again.

One of the things … that was most heartening to me personally after the 2020 election was my friends in Australia where I have lived and work and my friends in the UK where I’ve done some work saying to me, “Whoa! Holy shit! Y’all dealt a blow … to fascism at the ballot box.” That has never happened. The only check that we have had in history on fascist forces has been through military action. And my friends’ views from abroad of our election was like a shot in the arm, at least for me. Yeah, we did do that, we did do that, and we can do it again.

How do we talk about voter ID laws, voter suppression and election certification rigging, etc., without convincing people that their votes do not count? 

So my answer to that is, we’ve been looking at this for a very long time doing, in some cases, daily research, weekly research, feeling all sorts of different instruments — beginning in October and continuing on now through the insurrection, post-election, up until today. And, basically, what I would say is that the encapsulating value or phrase that keeps popping and rising to the top is freedom. And what I mean by that is that we need to talk about this as an attempt to take away your freedom to vote, an attempt to take the freedoms that Americans of every race, place, wallet-sized walk of life, hold dear and cherish. 

And so a message that threads that needle … is that in America we value our freedom. Right now, a handful of lawmakers want to take away our freedom to vote so that they can rule only for the wealthiest few. And then, whatever the ask is … to make the ask framed as a protection of, a preservation of, a continuation of our freedoms. Because what we find is that when we try to talk to people in terms of “democracy”, and “saving our democracy,” or “having a democracy,” or “protecting our democracy”, or whatever, first of all, we run into the challenge of the fact that we’ve never had a democracy. And secondarily, what we find is that democracy is an abstraction. Democracy never bought you dinner. People do not have a tangible feeling about it.

So, what we’ve seen is that we need to make arguments around these anti-voter laws, arguments around these anti-election integrity laws that Republican state legislatures are passing. We need to frame them as them trying to take away your freedom, them trying to silence certain voices, them trying to rule for the already rich. But we can’t let the voting conversation and issue … wander away from what those folks deliver.

This is once again the brownie analogy mentioned in December (repetition):

“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”

Don’t argue your policies in public, ASO insists. Talk about outcomes.

So, what I mean by that is (and here she launches into a pre-tested message), in America we value our freedom, the freedom to raise our voices and to cast our votes so that we can elect leaders who deliver on our priorities — from creating jobs to expanding healthcare, to ensuring rights for all. But today, a handful of lawmakers want to take away those freedoms so they can rule only for the already wealthy and powerful few. By coming together to pass the For The People Act, or by coming together to vote in record numbers (or whatever the ask is), we can ensure that this is a place of freedom where the leaders we elect govern in our name and act in our interests.

We have to [retain the message] about good governance. That this is about the delivery of things that we want, whether that be stimulus checks, whether that be the ability to vote freely and fairly, affordable healthcare etc.

Voters won’t stand in line for policy prescriptions. They will for outcomes. From December again:

Universal health care? Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you. Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.

Right now, my truck is sitting in the driveway with a bad water pump. When it goes into the shop, all I want to know is how much it costs and when it will be ready to drive again. I don’t care about the details. That’s why I hire a mechanic. That’s why (less ideological) voters hire politicians. For the results.

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.

Paul Rosenberg’s interview with Rachel Bitekover in Salon is fascinating. I’m not a data scientist or professional strategist so what do I know? But I have to say that her analysis strikes me as intuitively correct:

Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer made a name for herself as an election analyst who saw the 2018 blue wave coming long before anyone else. On July 1 of that year, she presciently predicted a 42-seat gain for Democrats — a near-perfect call, when others still envisioned smaller gains. At the same time, she warned that the landscape would be very difficult for Democrats in 2022, based on the same understanding of negative partisanship and the ways the electorate has changed. The 2018 midterms were a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency more than it was about individual candidates and individual races, she argued, foreseeing that aggrieved Republicans would be similarly motivated in 2022.

She believes that Democrats have not learned that lesson. So they are once again counting on “kitchen table issues” trumping the monumentally, overwhelmingly aggrieved party of The Big Lie. Not bloody likely.

So:

[R]ather than fruitlessly try to change their thinking, Bitecofer has decided to go around them, leaving the academic world and creating her own super PAC — Strike PAC — to do the kind of messaging her research suggests is key to winning elections with today’s electorate. There are no big-money donors involved. She’s counting on grassroots support to deliver a grassroots message. The first batch of ads she’s released paint a clear picture of the threat to democracy the Republican Party now presents, and an equally clear picture of how Democrats should respond. 

Salon spoke with Bitecofer about her PAC, this new wave of advertising and the thinking behind them — and of course how she sees next year’s critical midterm elections. This interview has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length.

On “Morning Joe,” you said your new PAC “is about bringing a brand offensive against the whole Republican Party. It’s not just about Donald Trump, but it definitely includes him.” Three things struck me about that. First, that seemed to be exemplified by your ad, “Fuse.” Tell me about that one. Why is it shaped the way it is, and why now? 

All four of our launch-packet ads are targeted toward different aspects of this branding offensive. “Fuse” is geared towards a national audience. In political advertising, the conventional two types are what we call “persuasion” — which is trying to get voters who don’t have a firm vote to come over and vote for you — and the other type is “mobilization,” making sure your core voters will show up. 

What Strike PAC is doing is not within those two buckets. It certainly has overlap — it’s performing both persuasion and mobilization. But what it’s arguing is, “Look, the GOP doesn’t really run anything except a marketing/branding op and it’s predominantly a branding offensive against the left.” They don’t spend a lot of time on their own brand, but they do spend a lot of time in their messaging on discounting, discrediting and debasing our brand. That will go from everything from economics to the “woke” war, so it’s always about showing us as unattractively to voters as possible. We’ve never answered that.

Democrats, up until now, have been told by their consultants, “Don’t worry about it,” or “Don’t push back on ‘socialism’ or ‘defund the police.'” To their credit, candidates are starting to understand when somebody is lobbing missiles at you, you can’t just stand there and pretend it’s not hitting. They are starting to try to put forward a response. But the it’s a defensive mechanism, it’s not offensive. The GOP is saying, “We’re going to have a debate about these topics,” and when you enter into that field, you are basically on the defense the whole time because you’re having a conversation that’s been structured by the opposition party. 

So that’s what “Fuse” is trying to change?

It’s flipping that GOP tactic over to our side. It’s attacking the Republicans to make a conversation about their anti-democratic power grab, that goes back from contesting the results of 2020, an armed insurrection, Trump actually trying to use the Justice Department to stage a coup, and the Republican Party’s wholesale embrace of that. 

It’s not like Trump did these things and the Republican Party stood against him. They have slowly but surely normalized this anti-democratic behavior. In fact, they have doubled down on it by going into these state legislative sessions trying to restrict voter access for progressive parts of the electorate, even going so far as to put provisions that take the certification process away from nonpartisan actors and into their partisan hands. 

That conversation is something you might see if you’re me or you, if you’re very political, but for the broader electorate it’s happening completely invisibly. There’s very little media coverage — certainly not saturation coverage like you would see for Clinton’s emails — about this power grab, what that means for democracy and what it means for Democrats in the next cycle. 

So “Fuse” is about fixing that problem, putting the stakes of 2022 in clear-eyed focus for the other half of the electorate. Because the Republican electorate has been told now for a while that the other side is coming after democracy, right? So it’s their belief in a Democratic Party that has been articulated by the GOP. It’s completely out of whack of reality, but Republican voters believe that Democrats are trying to “destroy democracy,” and what they’re doing is saving it. It’s not like they don’t have a motivation. So we really need this side of the electorate to realize that this meta-conversation about American democracy is on the ballot in 2022. 

To me, “bringing a brand offensive” pretty much describes how Republicans have run the vast majority of their national campaigns at least since Ronald Reagan, if not Richard Nixon. Democrats have virtually never done so—not even when Trump first ran in 2016. Why do you think that is?

That’s exactly right. You could believe it’s a problem that began when polarization really began to take off in the mid-2000s when asymmetry appears, and to some extent that’s true, because Republicans developed this technique of making every election a referendum on the Democratic brand. But you’re right, it does have its roots back in the 80s. 

That said, we really do see a distinct version of the modern GOP that has its origins in that 2004 Bush re-election campaign with Karl Rove, to use the gay marriage issues to turn out on their side, but also to talk about politics — including Senate and House races that might have otherwise been more local — with the intention of making them about the national party, about the national political climate and the national brand. That really starts to solidify with the 2010 midterms. They made it a referendum on Obamacare and Nancy Pelosi, and tied every candidate to that as tightly as they could. So every candidate really didn’t stand for re-election on their own performance in office or voting record, things that people think traditionally mattered. Instead, it was all about whether they were a Democrat. 

We never made that adjustment at all. In fact, it seems like we don’t even really recognize how distinctly different voter behavior in the two coalitions are and how hyper-partisanship has changed things. Whether or not we want that change, it’s there, right? We’ve been grasping for this old-school model of electioneering, it’s like when Sega was replaced by Nintendo. 

The GOP is running this very strategic, very intentional branding campaign, and we’re still talking about politics in terms of policies and things like that. We’re arguing that we are making a huge mistake when we’re tinkering around in the branches of electioneering infrastructure on the left, because our real problem lies at that root level, where we are not engaged in a campaign technique that matches the moment.

That segues to the third thing I wanted to ask about. “Bringing a brand offensive” sounds like a logical outgrowth of your election analysis in terms of the hyper-polarization driven by negative partisan. So, how did the idea of Strike PAC develop out of your earlier work?

You could say it had its genesis on election night 2020. Around 7 o’clock it was clear that Biden was going to win the presidency — at least to me — with the Midwest swinging back to the Democrats. But it was also becoming increasingly apparent that Democrats had delivered a tremendous underperformance down-ballot. I understood exactly why those two things were, the most important factor being the asymmetry in terms of how they do politicking, how they do campaigns and elections at that messaging and strategic level. 

The way that you would nationalize the 2020 campaign down-ballot is that instead of Biden running against Trump, the party should have run against Trump and the Republican brand. You don’t make it about one guy, you make it about the whole party embracing and covering for him and staying next to him. But you also make it about economics. Reaganomics has now got a 40-year track record, and it’s a total shitshow. It should be easy to eviscerate. In 2020, for example, Democrats could have made the economic argument for the HEROES Act.  The HEROES Act was introduced in July and then blocked by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. The Democrats should have been from top to bottom, even at the state legislative level, hammering the Republicans for denying economic aid in a crisis. And that did not happen.  

I also saw many things that I assumed would get fixed after 2016 go completely unaddressed. It was dramatically underwhelming in terms of what changed. And then there was suspension of field operations [by Democratic campaigns]. That was a huge mistake. Yes, I understand that, ethically, you do not want people knocking on doors in a pandemic. But when the opposition party is doing it and it is the only thing that really ever shows a measurable effect — at least if you’re doing it to mobilize people, not persuade them — then you have to find a way, right? 

So I was watching that and I was deeply concerned. At that point I wasn’t even sure if Democrats would hold onto the House. It’s just unbelievable, they had the best fundamentals you could ever hope for in 2020. You’ve got a man who’s mismanaging this pandemic, completely incompetent. At that point his negligence had led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people and you don’t make that a central theme? Like, “Hey! These people can’t do government!” So I realized these things were not going to change unless I found a way to do it myself.

While “Fuse” exemplifies the idea of a brand offensive against the GOP, you have another ad that does that as well, “Hold the Republican Party Accountable,” which starts with Donald Trump saying, “Part of the problem is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore. You’ll never get back our country with weakness.” Tell me about this ad. 

Hold the Republican Party Accountable from STRIKE PAC on Vimeo.

It’s not one that we necessarily would show in its entirety to target voters, because it’s a little long. But this ad is about trying to get people to understand that we seem to have two conversations in America. We have the right talking about how extreme and crazy the Democrats are. Then we have Democrats bitching about that, bitching about “woke” culture and self-inflicting. It’s like, the Republican Party makes a critique, and then Democrats jump in and start having that conversation too, just amplifying it. 

We don’t have any conversation on this side about a party that literally is extreme, has an extremism problem which has been quantified throughout dozens of political science articles, and Democrats just assume, “Well everyone knows the Republican Party is extreme.” 

Actually, the average person on the street, if they’re not one of the 10% of people like us and your readers, you ask them about the Republican Party and they are apt to say, “Low taxes, right?” 

There’s no media ecosystem that’s focused on how crazy the Republican Party is. The assumption is that the mainstream press has a liberal bias, but left-wing topics are not centralized in the way that right-wing topics become. There’s no intensive conversation about what the Republican Party has been doing for the last five years as it has progressively fallen down the pathway towards fascism. So that ad is about telling that story and tying those disparate events into a cohesive story.

The interview goes on to talk about the campaign her PAC is running in Virginia which is quite interesting. Here’s the one about the California recall, closer to home for me:

You also have an ad about the California recall targeting Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. How does that embody your strategy? And how does that contrast with the Democrats’ ineffectual response to the 2003 recall of Gray Davis?

Stop Them Now FINAL.mp4 from STRIKE PAC on Vimeo.

Yes, exactly. You hear that the electorate is much more Democratic than it was in 2003 and that is verifiably true, OK? But that doesn’t mean that California isn’t still at risk of having a repeat of 2003. In the recall in 2003, the turnout was in the 30% range, and when you’re talking about only 30% of California, there’s a very motivated Republican Party versus a complacent Democratic one. Because Newsom will probably poll pretty decently and [folks will say] “Oh, this is in the bag. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not worried about it.” 

We’re doing a couple things with this ad. Again, we’re doing the nationalization component that’s lacking in Democratic messaging, and is the bread and butter of the GOP. But it’s also innovating — I wanted to show an example of something that other people might want to copy, which is to make the frame of the recall not about Newsom. Because if it’s about Newsom, then you’re going to have this conversation about whether he shut down too long, or too little and blah blah blah. You’re just playing right into their hands. That’s the conversation they want to have. 

Instead, you want to personalize the stakes of the recall to the electorate, so that they feel the connection, and you want to paint to them a picture: “It’s not about Newsom or the Democrats, it’s about you controlling California and turning it into a liberal wonderland. And they’re coming for it!” You want to make voters feel motivated about the recall, and also attacked. Their identity is being attacked. That’s how the Republicans would approach it. That’s how they defended Scott Walker, which is what I’m modeling this on. 

Here’s another one of her ads with what she calls the “positive, values-driven firewall Democratic brand”

This is What Democracy Looks Like from STRIKE PAC on Vimeo.

She says:

That ad in particular is again a movie-style ad. It’s aimed specifically at Democrats, but ultimately the same methodology will be adapted to go after young people, especially voters of color. Latinos are a huge persuasion target for conversion right now and even young Black voters, but younger white voters in particular. The GOP, in my opinion, still over-performs with white young people, people under age 30, relative to what the Republican platform, and their embrace of racism and fascism, should warrant. When you’ve got one party that is constantly taunting the Democrats — “They support Hamas, and they’re socialists, yada yada yada,” you want to create an image for those younger voters: “No, this is what the Democratic Party really is.” 

That sounds logical to me. She’s certainly right that the GOP overperoms with young white people and frankly they overperform with people of color too.

And yes, it would be nice if Americans as whole truly understood how much GOP policies have failed them over the years. It’s insane that they think they are better on the economy. But that’s because Americans fetishize business success and wealthy corporations and individuals back Republicans for their own parochial reasons not for the general health of the economy as a whole.

Another aspect of your modernization strategy is “Undermining the Republican brand and areas of perceived dominance, like the economy.” You did this in an ad you showed on “Morning Joe” [at 9:25] comparing Democrats’ and Republicans’ record on the economy since 1933, on GDP growth, job creation and the stock market, using sports imagery from football, basketball and baseball to drive home the point that Democrats do much better on all these key indicators. The difference is stark, but Democrats never talk about it. 

That’s exactly right. If you ask the average voter, the GOP often wins or at least breaks even on the question of which party is good for the economy, although the facts bear out a completely different story. But instead of making an affirmative case for ourselves, especially as we move through Reaganomics — and even by the early 2000s the failures of that economic philosophy were already legion — instead of running on that, saying “The GOP tried this thing and it totally destroyed our infrastructure, it destroyed our K-12 education system,” and going on what I’ve called a brand offensive, you see Democrats try to align themselves rhetorically with their opponents, saying “I’m a fiscal conservative.” 

The economy tends to be the most salient issue, or second-most salient, every election cycle. So why would we concede on an issue that’s that important to so many people? Especially when we’re better at it? So that’s why we’re going after that, and the other sacred cows for the GOP, national security. I’m going to go after national security as well because the performance of the Republican Party over the last 20 years on foreign policy and national security is terrible. 

It’s a long interview so click over to the read the rest. It’s all interesting. As I said, I’m no expert, but I do know that the standard approach of touting “kitchen table issues” is insufficient. We are dealing with a very sophisticated propaganda machine that dominates the political culture in such way that assuming “reality” (aka “real results”) can compete. I don’t know if her ideas will work better but they are a different approach. It’s worth considering.

That’s what one expert calls the recipe for disaster that leads a democratic nation down the road to authoritarianism. The NY Times’ Tom Edsall speaks to a whole bunch of people who study the issue and it’s not reassuring:

Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities.

Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.”

The actions of Republican state legislators to curtail absentee voting, limit days for early voting and seize control of local election boards have prompted 188 scholars to sign a “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards,” in which they assert:

We have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures.

Among statutes Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or are in the process of approving are “laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections” that

could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t.

Virginia Gray, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, argued in an email that for Republicans, “the strongest factors are racial animosity, fear of becoming a white minority and the growth of white identity.” She noted that Tucker Carlson of Fox News articulated Republican anxiety during his show on April 8:

In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.

Trump, Carlson and their allies in the Republican Party, Gray continued,

see politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.

Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, law professors at the University of Chicago, make the case in their 2018 paper, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” that in the United States and other advanced democracies, the erosion of democracy will be gradual and stealthy, not an abrupt shift to authoritarianism.

“Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay?” Huq and Ginsburg ask, and write:

There are two modal paths of democratic decay. We call these authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion to three institutional predicates of democracy occurring simultaneously: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. We show that over the past quarter-century, the risk of reversion in democracies around the world has declined, whereas the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is neither exceptional nor immune from these changes.

In an email, Ginsburg wrote that there are two forces that lead to the erosion of democracy: “charismatic populism and partisan degradation, in which a party just gives up on the idea of majority rule and seeks to end democratic competition. Obviously the U.S. has faced both forces at the same time in Trumpism.

From a different vantage point, Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, argues that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn in examining the consequences of Republican tampering with election administration, with one more dangerous than the other. In an email, Berman writes:

The downward spiral refers to attempts by Republicans to do two related things. First, effectively making voting more difficult by, for example, restricting voting by mail, shrinking voting times and places, adding ID requirements and so on. The second is injecting partisanship into the electoral oversight process. As potentially harmful as the first is, the latter is even more worrying.

In other circumstances, Berman argues, one could imagine “having a good faith debate about the conditions under which mail-in ballots are distributed and counted, whether ID should be required to vote and if so of what type, etc.”

But in the current contest, she says, “these concerns are not motivated by a general desire to improve the quality of our elections, but rather by false, partisan accusations about the illegitimacy of Biden’s victory and so good faith discussions of reform are impossible.”

There’s more and it’s not good. The consensus among those who study this sort of thing is that we are at a very dangerous moment. I think we all instinctively understand that. But this confirms our worst fears.

There was a reason they used to call President Obama “No drama Obama.” He never seemed to get worked up about anything. It was one of the things people liked about him. He seemed to take everything in stride and the rigors of the job never overwhelmed him.

This recent interview with Anderson Cooper didn’t show him hysterical or anything but it sure seemed to me that this is what passes for Obama with his hair on fire:

“All of us, as citizens, have to recognize that the path towards an undemocratic America is not going to happen in just one bang. It happens in a series of steps,” Obama told Anderson Cooper during an interview that aired on CNN on Monday evening.

Asked by Cooper if the January 6 insurrection and Republicans’ effort to delegitimize elections has led him to believe that our democracy is in crisis, Obama said he’s concerned.

“I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago,” he said.

In an exchange with Cooper, Obama pointed out that democracy has fallen at the ballot box in other countries.

COOPER: Democracy does not always die in a military coup.

OBAMA: Yes.

COOPER: Democracy dies at the ballot box.

OBAMA: That’s exactly right.

And Vladimir Putin gets elected with a majority of Russian voters, but none of us would claim that that’s the kind of democracy that we want.

These comments, coming from a former president, should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thought Donald Trump’s departure from the White House in January ended the existential threat to American democracy that crested with the January 6 insurrection.

“When you look at some of the laws that are being passed at the state legislative level, where legislators are basically saying, we’re going to take away the certification of election processes from civil servants, you know, secretaries of state, people who are just counting ballots, and we’re going to put it in the hands of partisan legislatures, who may or may not decide that a state’s electoral votes should go to one person or another, and when that’s all done against the backdrop of large numbers of Republicans having been convinced, wrongly, that there was something fishy about the last election, we’ve got a problem,” he said.

Fmr Pres. Obama to @AndersonCooper on the GOP: “I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment [step in]…we did not see that Republican establishment say hold on, time out” pic.twitter.com/o9ZYGOoa0J

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) June 8, 2021

Prof. George Lakoff once described the conservative philosophy in ten words: strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values. Democracy is not among them. Granted, the word appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. It underlies words that do appear frequently: elect, vote, majority, and their variants. And in votes required to pass laws: two thirds, three fourths, etc.

“Strong defense” in this scheme is outward looking. Defense of democracy itself is not among the defining characteristics of American conservatism no matter how often its spokespersons repeat phrases such as election integrity. Hence today’s editorial from the New York Times Editorial Board.

“Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting” is a headline-tight summary of what those committed to democracy see needs defending right now from enemies domestic. Republican legislatures are in a rush to secure the Blessings of Power for themselves and their Posterity.

It would be overreach to assign blame for this antidemocratic movement solely to the immediate past president, perhaps the most corrupt, emotionally damaged, and antidemocratic leader in the nation’s history. Republicans are not working furiously to rig upcoming elections because they are afraid of Trump, Eric Boehlert wrote this week. “Republicans are doing this because they want to.” They do not want to govern. They want to rule. Democracy is a cosmetic convenience for them, not principle. They’ve proven that with actions.

The Times Editorial Board, however, believes the Democrats’ H.R. 1 is too broad, and inadequate to defend the republic against the systematic assault on democracy from within. Rather than wage a losing symbolic fight, Democrats should craft a more focused bill perhaps more palatable to more senators (Senate Republicans) “that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.”

That advice may be sound on its face, but ignores the fact that such legislation is needed because one major party in this country has rejected democracy as a foundational principle. Democracy itself has become unpalatable for Republicans, however well-seasoned.

The Board nonetheless presses on:

The vote-counting process necessarily relies on the judgment and integrity of local officials. No rules can perfectly prevent malfeasance. But Congress can take steps to protect the integrity of the election process.

One important measure included in H.R. 1 is to require a paper record of every vote, so that outcomes can be verified independently.

But the bill needs to go further. Congress also should establish uniform rules for vote counting, certification and challenges. It should also clarify its own role in certifying the results of presidential elections to prevent the possibility that a future Congress would overturn a state’s popular vote.

Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.

In addition to setting minimum standards for voting access, there is also a need to constrain states from moving backward, even if existing standards exceed those minimums.

Democrats are separately pursuing the revival of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain states and counties, mostly in the South, to obtain approval for any changes from the Justice Department. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling effectively ended this system, helping to clear the way for the restrictions that states are now imposing.

The problem with H.R. 1, the Board argues, is that it is too “sprawling.” And it may be. But that is not the source of Republican opposition. Republicans bent on undermining democracy itself are. Narrowing the bill’s scope will not change that.

“If Democrats can find 50 votes for reform, they should not postpone necessary interventions in the illusory hope of a bipartisan breakthrough, nor allow Republicans to filibuster,” the Board concludes.

On this, at least, we agree.

This is the city. Washington, D.C. I work here, I’m a congressman. I wear a pin. My name is Swalwell.

It was Wednesday, January 6th. It was cold in Washington….

The heat is on. Hundreds of Rep. Mo Brooks’ (R-Ala.) brothers-in-insurrection have been arrested and charged for the riot and deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th instigated by Donald J. Trump with the help of Brooks and Republican colleagues.  

“Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” Brooks told the StopTheSteal rally on The Mall. He then asked rally attendees if they were willing, like their ancestors, to sacrifice “their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes, and sometimes their lives” to fight for America. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? [cheers and applause] Louder! Will you fight for America?“

No Republican officials have drawn charges yet, but Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) has detectives attempting to run down Brooks for his role. Brooks is dodging being served with a lawsuit (CNN):

Federal Judge Amit Mehta, after learning of Swalwell’s inability to serve Brooks with the lawsuit, gave the Democrat’s legal team another 60 days to get to Brooks with their formal notification. The judge, however, won’t allow the US Marshals to deliver the lawsuit to the Republican congressman “due to separation of powers concerns,” Mehta wrote, after Swalwell asked for the US Marshals Service’s help.

After Swalwell — a California Democrat — sued in March, his attorneys tried to reach the Alabama Republican through calls to the congressman’s office and by sending a letter to formally provide him notice he had been sued, a necessary step in this type of court proceeding.

When they couldn’t get the lawsuit to Brooks, the Swalwell legal team hired a private investigator to find him — only to be hampered in April and May partly by the visitor lockdowns around the US Capitol complex, which were put in place for Congress’ protection after the siege, according to their filing Wednesday.

“Counsel spoke to two different staff members on two separate occasions, and each time was promised a return call that never came,” Swalwell’s attorneys wrote on Wednesday.

Following the Swalwell team’s calls, they emailed, too. “Neither Brooks nor any member of his staff has responded to his request,” their filing said.

Swallwell’s attorneys have had to hire a private investigator to find and serve Brooks. Brooks is a slippery devil.

In the suit, Swalwell alleges that former President Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Brooks broke Washington, DC, laws, including an anti-terrorism act, by inciting the riot, and that they aided and abetted violent rioters and inflicted emotional distress on members of Congress.

Swalwell claims that the four men prompted the attack on Congress with their repeated public assertions of voter fraud, their encouragement that supporters go to Washington on January 6, and in their speeches that day. Each man had told the crowd that Joe Biden’s electoral certification in Congress could be blocked, and that Trump’s supporters should fight, the lawsuit alleges.

This story is true. The names have not been changed….

Statement of Concern

The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards

STATEMENT

June 1, 2021

We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm. Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election. Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections. Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.

When democracy breaks down, it typically takes many years, often decades, to reverse the downward spiral. In the process, violence and corruption typically flourish, and talent and wealth flee to more stable countries, undermining national prosperity. It is not just our venerated institutions and norms that are at risk—it is our future national standing, strength, and ability to compete globally.

Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations should Democrats win more votes. They are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy. They are also putting in place criminal sentences and fines meant to intimidate and scare away poll workers and nonpartisan administrators. State legislatures have advanced initiatives that curtail voting methods now preferred by Democratic-leaning constituencies, such as early voting and mail voting. Republican lawmakers have openly talked about ensuring the “purity” and “quality” of the vote, echoing arguments widely used across the Jim Crow South as reasons for restricting the Black vote.

State legislators supporting these changes have cited the urgency of “electoral integrity” and the need to ensure that elections are secure and free of fraud. But by multiple expert judgments, the 2020 election was extremely secure and free of fraud. The reason that Republican voters have concerns is because many Republican officials, led by former President Donald Trump, have manufactured false claims of fraud, claims that have been repeatedly rejected by courts of law, and which Trump’s own lawyers have acknowledged were mere speculation when they testified about them before judges.

In future elections, these laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections could enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.

Democracy rests on certain elemental institutional and normative conditions. Elections must be neutrally and fairly administered. They must be free of manipulation. Every citizen who is qualified must have an equal right to vote, unhindered by obstruction. And when they lose elections, political parties and their candidates and supporters must be willing to accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome. The refusal of prominent Republicans to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, and the anti-democratic laws adopted (or approaching adoption) in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Montana and Texas—and under serious consideration in other Republican-controlled states—violate these principles. More profoundly, these actions call into question whether the United States will remain a democracy. As scholars of democracy, we condemn these actions in the strongest possible terms as a betrayal of our precious democratic heritage.

The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections. Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South, so federal law must once again ensure that American citizens’ voting rights do not depend on which party or faction happens to be dominant in their state legislature, and that votes are cast and counted equally, regardless of the state or jurisdiction in which a citizen happens to live. This is widely recognized as a fundamental principle of electoral integrity in democracies around the world.

A new voting rights law (such as that proposed in the John Lewis Voting Rights Act) is essential but alone is not enough. True electoral integrity demands a comprehensive set of national standards that ensure the sanctity and independence of election administration, guarantee that all voters can freely exercise their right to vote, prevent partisan gerrymandering from giving dominant parties in the states an unfair advantage in the process of drawing congressional districts, and regulate ethics and money in politics.

It is always far better for major democracy reforms to be bipartisan, to give change the broadest possible legitimacy. However, in the current hyper-polarized political context such broad bipartisan support is sadly lacking. Elected Republican leaders have had numerous opportunities to repudiate Trump and his “Stop the Steal” crusade, which led to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Each time, they have sidestepped the truth and enabled the lie to spread.

We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards that both guarantee the vote to all Americans equally, and prevent state legislatures from manipulating the rules in order to manufacture the result they want. Our democracy is fundamentally at stake. History will judge what we do at this moment.

As Greg Sargent astutely observed:

An acceptance that protecting democracy will never, ever, ever be bipartisan, and will happen only on a partisan basis, is fundamental to accepting the reality of the situation that Democrats face.

Click over to see the list of luminaries who signed this. This actually makes me feel better knowing that at least I’m not goin crazy by being as worried as I am.

Here’s a Democrat who gets the urgency. And it isn’t surprising it would be him:

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) was elected to office the day before supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win.

Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia, was born while his state was still represented by segregationists. He won in a runoff election system that racists created during the Jim Crow era, and he’s currently supporting voting rights legislation blocked by a Senate procedure long used to stop the advancement of civil rights in the United States.

On Friday, moments after Senate Republicans used their first filibuster of Biden’s presidency to block debate on a bill to establish a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, Warnock stood off the floor of the Senate and reflected on the moment. Standing in a Senate hallway not far from where a mob of Trump supporters chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up the stairs after they smashed out windows of the Capitol and broke into the building, Warnock said he worried his colleagues may have grown cynical and prioritized short-term political gains at a time when the future of American democracy is on the line.

“Sometimes we’re standing in the midst of a defining historical moment, and we miss the magnitude of it all,” said Warnock, the pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. grew up listening to his father preach.

“I think there were some people who slept through the civil rights movement, quite frankly, who didn’t understand that in a real sense it was a fight to save the country. Not just the South, not just Black people, but the country,” Warnock said. “We are in a renewed, 21st-century fight to defend our democracy so that we might pass on a future that’s worthy of all our children.”

Warnock said the country is in the middle of a “historic abandonment” of the “basic democratic framework” in statehouses across the country, as supporters of former President Trump move to pass restrictive voting laws because of his election lies. Jan. 6 was not only a violent physical attack on the U.S. Capitol, Warnock said, it was “an attack on the votes of the people of Georgia and people all across this country.” But most Republican senators, Warnock said, have decided they are unwilling to do the right thing to stand up for American democracy.

“All of us are here as representatives of a democracy that folks on the other side have decided they’re not willing to defend. Some things ought to be bigger than politics. This is about truth,” Warnock said.

“It’s ironic that this would happen [on Memorial Day] weekend, because all of us will go back to our home districts, and we will celebrate great patriots who paid the ultimate price to defend our democracy on bloody battlefields, and we have politicians who are not even willing to stand up on the Senate floor for what’s obviously right,” he added.

Jan. 6, Warnock said, “was an unabashed exercise in attempted disenfranchisement, and now we have seen that attack metastasize to state capitals all across the country” as Trump-supporting legislatures throughout the country pass legislation that will make it more difficult to vote because their supporters believe the former president’s lies about a stolen election. 

“This is a defining moment. Somebody’s got to stand up and defend our democracy,” Warnock said.

“The integrity of the democracy is at stake,” Warnock said. “Let’s have the arguments about the size of government, let’s have the arguments about health care, taxes, education, infrastructure. But what has made this country work, with all of those challenges, is that we have a general framework in which those arguments take place, and what we are witnessing in this moment is a historic abandonment of that basic democratic framework.”

What he said.

Dan Crenshaw is a slick operator with big ambitions. It’s important that he not be allowed to play the “reasonable Republican” on TV when he is clearly trying to have it both ways. So I appreciate this fact check from CNN’s Daniel Dale:

Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw tried Sunday to downplay his December decision to sign on to a legal brief in support of the Texas lawsuit that sought to get the Supreme Court to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The extraordinary and ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit from Texas’ Republican attorney general asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the results of the election in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, all of which were won by Joe Biden.

Crenshaw and 125 other House Republicans backed the Texas lawsuit in a submission to the court known as an amicus brief. Crenshaw defended his decision in a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” — telling host Chuck Todd that the amicus brief has been unfairly portrayed by the media.

“You guys in the press painted that as some extreme action, and of course it wasn’t,” Crenshaw said. “That amicus brief was a simple question of the Supreme Court, in saying, ‘Can you please speak to this question of whether, of whether process changes in the election — last minute, not approved by the legislature — can be deemed constitutional?’ It was a question, and they didn’t want to answer that question.”

Facts First: Crenshaw’s claim is misleading. The House Republican amicus brief did not merely ask the court to answer a constitutional question. In reality, the brief expressed a firm opinion — that the four Biden-won states had taken “unconstitutional actions” — and asked the Supreme Court for a specific response: to allow Texas’ lawsuit to proceed and to grant Texas’ request for a preliminary injunction forbidding the four states from certifying Biden’s victories until the lawsuit was resolved. The brief also invoked baseless claims of election fraud, saying that “the election of 2020 has been riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities.”

[…]

When CNN invited Crenshaw spokesman Justin Discigil to comment for this fact check, Discigil made a claim that was even more untrue than Crenshaw’s original claim.

We’ll get into the spokesman’s statements in a moment. First, here’s a look at the problems with the congressman’s remarks.

There is a kernel of truth to Crenshaw’s comments on “Meet the Press.” The House Republican amicus brief did say the Supreme Court should “determine for the people if indeed the Constitution has been followed and the rule of law maintained.”

But Crenshaw made it sound as if the brief solely consisted of this kind of neutral request. It didn’t, as a plain read of the text makes obvious and as three election law experts told CNN on Monday.

“In fairness, the language of the amicus brief was restrained in a way that the language of Texas’s briefs was not. So I would not be surprised if some people believed that this amicus brief was simply asking the Supreme Court to review the case, nothing more. However, the text of the amicus brief clearly goes beyond that simple request,” Lisa Marshall Manheim, a law professor at the University of Washington, said in an email.

Manheim noted that the amicus brief “repeatedly stated that the conduct of defendant states was unconstitutional” and that the brief asked the court to grant the preliminary injunction.

David Schultz, a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University, said Crenshaw incorrectly made it sound like the brief was asking the Supreme Court for a non-binding “advisory opinion.” Since “the Supreme Court long ago said federal courts do not give advisory opinions,” Schultz said, a first-year law school student is taught that “you would never file something where you say, ‘We’re just kind of curious, what do you think?'”

This brief, Schultz noted, proposed that the Supreme Court take specific actions.

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, honed in on another component of the brief — the fact that it said its 126 signers believe “the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections.”

“That’s taking a side in favor of the spurious allegations in Texas’s suit,” Hasen said in an email.

[…]

When we asked Crenshaw’s office for comment, Discigil said in an email: “The conclusion of the amicus brief specifically states that the Supreme Court should objectively review the argument presented in the Texas lawsuit and make a determination. It doesn’t make any specific request of the court or urge any specific outcome, and certainly didn’t ask the court to overturn election results in states. It asked the court to weigh in on the lawsuit, which ultimately did not happen.”

That’s just flat wrong. The conclusion of the amicus brief did make a specific request of the court beyond just objectively reviewing the Texas argument. In fact, it made two specific requests. Here’s how the conclusion ends:

“It is now the duty of this Honorable Court to objectively review the facts presented by the Plaintiff in this historic case, render judgment upon the unconstitutional actions in the Defendant states, and restore the confidence of all Americans that the rule of law will be upheld today and our elections in the future will be secured. For the reasons stated above, the Plaintiff’s Motion for Leave to File a Bill of Complaint and Motion for a Preliminary Injunction should be granted.”

So: there’s 1) an explicit request for the court not to dismiss the Texas lawsuit and 2) an explicit request for the court to impose a preliminary injunction. And right before that, there is an explicit argument that the four states had acted unconstitutionally.

Discigil also said in his email: “This amicus brief was filed in early December, when there were still questions regarding the constitutionality of changes certain states made to election procedures without the approval of their legislatures. Congressman Crenshaw signed the amicus brief to ask the Supreme Court to answer this question: were these moves constitutional? The amicus brief would not have overturned the election results and would not have disenfranchised anyone. Congressman Crenshaw would not have supported any effort to do either of those things.”

This is absurd. Of course the amicus brief would not itself have overturned the election: an amicus brief is not an actual lawsuit that gets ruled on by a court, just a legal submission that discusses a lawsuit. But there is no evading the fact that the amicus brief Crenshaw endorsed was filed in support of a lawsuit that sought to overturn the election — nor the fact that the amicus brief asked the court to halt the certification of Biden’s victory.

The Supreme Court declined on December 11 to hear the Texas lawsuit, citing Texas’ lack of standing in other states’ conduct of their elections. The Electoral College voted on December 14 to affirm Biden’s victory.

The spokesman was right that Crenshaw voted to certify the election on January 6th which was big of him. By that time, of course, it was clear that none of their tactics were working and he bailed. He’s always walking that line.