Greg Cruey thought he knew how to walk students through a presidential election. The social studies teacher has been working inside public-school classrooms for about two decades, guiding children through history-making 2008, as well as tumultuous 2016.
But 2020 shocked him.
Never before, Cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children — such blind devotion to their preferred candidate, most often Donald Trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized.
“I still get the kid that wants to know if it’s true that 100,000 dead people voted in Michigan, or if a computer stole our votes,” Cruey said. “The majority are uncomfortable or unhappy with the election. Many of them think there’s something fishy behind it.”
Teachers are always on the front lines of the fight against misinformation. But this election year poses extra challenges: For one thing, conspiracy theories — some of them promoted by the president — are running rampant on social media sites favored by young people.AD
For another, given that most schools are operating fully or partly online because of the coronavirus pandemic, teachers have fewer resources and less ability to reach the children they’re meant to be guiding through a world filled with misleading or false information.
“In the virtual world, you’re basically speaking through a microphone into people’s homes, so you might have 20 kids but actually 60 people listening to you,” Cruey said. “You don’t really know what’s going on.”
The 60-year-old educator is in a sticky position.
He teaches middle-schoolers in West Virginia’s deep-red McDowell County, where some 80 percent of the votes went to Trump in the November election. He is an outlier, one of the few people in his neighborhood — 30 minutes away in another county that is just as red as McDowell — to keep Joe Biden signs on their lawns.AD
The students he teaches, and their parents, can easily figure out his political views. All they need do is check the Internet, where a clip of him interviewing and praising then-candidate Hillary Clinton in November 2015 still circulates. So Cruey has developed a strategy for dealing with those who discover his Democratic leanings.
“I tell kids on a regular basis there’s no one out there that fully represents me or my political views,” Cruey said. “And the same parents that know I have a Biden sign also know I’m a church musician, [and] that my wife and I work at a Christian camp in the summer. [So] they reserve judgment.”
As Trump continues to promote baseless claims of sweeping voter fraud and to contest the fact of his election loss, tens of millions of Americans have come to doubt President-elect Biden’s legitimacy, as well as the stability and fidelity of the nation’s democratic process. Opinion splits sharply along partisan lines: 70 percent of Republicans say the election was unfair, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, and 90 percent of Democrats say it was both fair and free.AD
Now, Trump’s campaign of misinformation is affecting the nation’s youngest, too.
Cruey teaches roughly 95 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in McDowell County Schools, which enrolls 2,600 and is offering a mix of in-person and online learning. Until recently, when he was forced to enter quarantine after a fellow employee tested positive for the coronavirus, Cruey reported to his classroom five days a week, where he led social studies and West Virginia studies for the 40 percent of the group that had chosen face-to-face instruction. The rest followed the lessons online.
For all three grades, according to state standards, Cruey is supposed to teach “who our leaders are and how we got them,” he said. So, in the weeks before the 2020 election, he offered lessons on the electoral college. He gave kids a “Campaign Issues Worksheet” that asked their views on subjects including red-flag gun laws (provisions by which courts can order someone’s firearms taken away temporarily if the person is deemed a danger to self or others) and whether police officers should wear body cameras. And he answered election questions — the most popular query was whether the rapper Kanye West was actually a candidate (yes).AD
It quickly emerged that the views in Cruey’s classroom mirrored the political breakdown of McDowell County, which sits at the southernmost edge of West Virginia and is home to roughly 18,000 people, 90 percent of whom are White. In Cruey’s classrooms, informal polls — “Who do you guys want to be president?” — revealed that about 85 percent of children preferred the Republican incumbent.
That didn’t surprise Cruey, who remembers teaching the 2016 election in McDowell. The first hint that this year would prove extra challenging came when a sixth-grader, who was learning from home, messaged mid-class: “What has Joe Biden done in 46 years to make him worth electing president?”
Cruey thought to himself: That’s not something an 11-year-old would say.
“I know the family, they’re very right-wing, so I know the parents are sitting there watching,” Cruey said. But what could he do? “The grown-ups who are stomping their feet and gritting their teeth as I teach — that’s their right.”
He kept going, moving on to the next topic and set of facts as quickly as he could: a battle-tested tactic for avoiding conflict that he’s developed over years of teaching.AD
But he was less successful Nov. 9, the Monday after the election.
He began that lesson by explaining the Associated Press’s long history of calling presidential elections. He showed the students a BBC article debunking the QAnon-promoted conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems election software caused President Trump’s defeat.
Forty minutes in, he shared a video of Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris and Biden giving their acceptance speeches. And that’s when Facebook messenger pinged.
“This parent sent me a message to say her child was not going to be listening to this stuff about Biden and Harris,” Cruey said. “Then she just disconnected her kid.”
I know I don’t have to tell any of you that this is all wrong. It’s going to take a lot of effort to unwind this level of brainwashing.
I grew up in a conservative household. And I’m sure that as a little kid I probably assumed the right wing talking points of my parents. But the counter culture was very strong and penetrated from a very early age and I was a liberal hippie from at least the age of 12 or so. I have a sneaking suspicion the same thing will happen with a lot of these kids. And there are many more entrance points to liberal and progressive culture than there used to be, from online gathering places like Twitch and TikTok to movement politics that appeal to young people like Black Lives Matter, climate change and gun safety. Not all of these red state kids will go that way (they didn’t back in the day either) but I would guess that quite a few will. The world has changed a lot since I was young, but rebelling against your parents is perennial.
If you missed Chris Krebs, the lifelong Republican and director of US cyber agency, who Trump fired, his assessment in unequivocal. one would think he’d be a good validator of the integrity of this election. Unfortunately, most of the right wingers will never hear him because he isn’t appearing on OAN, Newmax and Fox.
This figures. Trump lies about everything and is a conspiracy theorist from way back. He was king of the birthers, after all. Because he always cheats, he projects his own worldview on to everything:
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread fraud, but it’s far from the first time he’s cried foul about an election.
Timeline:
Nov. 2012 Trump, who had endorsed Republican nominee Mitt Romney, tweeted about apocryphal reports of “voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama” after previously warning supporters in October to “be careful of voter fraud!”
Feb. 2016 Trump repeatedly chalked up his narrow loss to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in the Iowa caucus to voter fraud, pushing vague, unsubstantiated claims Cruz “cheated” and “stole” the election and demanding, “either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
Nov. 2016 Despite defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, Trump tweeted baseless allegations of “millions of FRAUD votes” and claiming, “Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California.”
Dec. 2017 Trump subtly pushed doubts about the legitimacy of Alabama’s special Senate election, which Democrat Doug Jones won in an upset, conceding “a win is a win,” but adding, “The write-in votes played a very big factor.”
Nov. 2018 Trump took aim at Senate elections in Arizona and Florida and a gubernatorial race in Georgia – the latter two of which Republicans won – falsely claiming Florida counties “miraculously started finding Democrat votes” and proposing a new election in Arizona because of unexplained “electoral corruption.”
Aug. 2020 A rare example where Trump lacked a direct personal stake, he called to re-run the late-decided Democratic primary in New York’s 12th District, pointing to it as a prime example of the failings of mail-in voting – though analysts argue such examples serve better as a display of New York’s subpar election administration.
Nov. 2020 Trump has made some of his most outlandish voter fraud claims yet in an effort to hang onto power despite Democrat Joe Biden’s clear win, repeatedly pushing claims about voting machines changing votes that even his own officials rebuked.
Amid Trump’s continued refusal to concede the election – despite allowing his General Services Administration to recognize Biden as the “apparent winner” and authorize cooperation toward a transition of power – his legal team has filed lawsuits in key states won by Biden to try to overturn the results. Those efforts have largely been met with failure, as have Trump’s attempts to pressure state lawmakers to block certification of their states’ results. […]
Aaaand:
73%. That’s the share of Republicans who agree with Trump’s false claims that he won the election, according to a CNBC/Change Research poll released Monday. Just 3% of GOP voters, by contrast, acknowledge the reality of Biden’s victory.
He’s always been this way. And now they are too. Everything is always rigged against them. They just can’t get a break. Unless they win.
The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.
But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”
However cleareyed that Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ”
Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin, for instance, discussed with Trump a poll he had conducted after the election that showed Trump with a positive approval rating, a plurality of the country who thought the media had been “unfair and biased against him” and a majority of voters who believed their lives were better than four years earlier, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. As expected, Trump lapped it up.
The result was an election aftermath without precedent in U.S. history. With his denial of the outcome, despite a string of courtroom defeats, Trump endangered America’s democracy, threatened to undermine national security and public health, and duped millions of his supporters into believing, perhaps permanently, that Biden was elected illegitimately.
Trump’s allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric — and his singular power to persuade and galvanize his followers — generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.
“It was like a rumor Whac-A-Mole,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Despite being a Republican who voted for Trump, Raffensperger said he refused repeated attempts by Trump allies to get him to cross ethical lines. “I don’t think I had a choice. My job is to follow the law. We’re not going to get pushed off the needle on doing that. Integrity still matters.”
All the while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting so hard to keep, chief among them managing the coronavirus pandemic as the numbers of infections and deaths soared across the country. In an ironic twist, the Trump adviser tapped to coordinate the post-election legal and communications campaign, David Bossie, tested positive for the virus a few days into his assignment and was sidelined.
Only on Nov. 23 did Trump reluctantly agree to initiate a peaceful transfer of power by permitting the federal government to officially begin Biden’s transition — yet still he protested that he was the true victor.
The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden’s transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump’s White House: a government paralyzed by the president’s fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy.
Instead, Trump empowered loyalists who were willing to tell him what he wanted to hear — that he would have won in a landslide had the election not been rigged and stolen — and then to sacrifice their reputations by waging a campaign in courtrooms and in the media to convince the public of this delusion.
Though Trump ultimately failed in his quest to steal the election, his weeks-long jeremiad succeeded in undermining faith in elections and the legitimacy of Biden’s victory.
And, not incidentally,it set the table for his triumphant comeback, something he has done over and over again in his life, having been able to snow the public and his wealthy benefactors into repeatedly bailing him out. The only thing that will stop him is when he shuffles off his mortal coil, probably quietly in bed at the age of 95. He is that lucky.
The Post’s narration of these last three weeks is actually hair- raising. What if a foreign country had decided this was a good time to poke the bear? Or terrorists pulled of a major attack. Or, I don’t know, a pandemic hit our shores and killed a quarter of a million people?
How is it possible that someone this delusional is being propped up by a whole political party and 74 million of our fellow citizens. It is literally madness.
And yet … Mad King Donald had prepared for this for months:
In the run-up to the election, Trump was aware of the fact — or likelihood, according to polls — that he could lose. He commented a number of times to aides, “Oh, wouldn’t it be embarrassing to lose to this guy?”
But in the final stretch of the campaign, nearly everyone — including the president — believed he was going to win. And early on election night, Trump and his team thought they were witnessing a repeat of 2016, when he defied polls and expectations to build an insurmountable lead in the electoral college.
Then Fox News called Arizona for Biden.
“He was yelling at everyone,” a senior administration official recalled of Trump’s reaction. “He was like, ‘What the hell? We were supposed to be winning Arizona. What’s going on?’ He told Jared to call [News Corp. Executive Chairman Rupert] Murdoch.”
Efforts by Kushner and others on the Trump team to convince Fox to take back its Arizona call failed.
Trump and his advisers were furious, in part because calling Arizona for Biden undermined Trump’s scattershot plan to declare victory on election night if it looked like he had sizable leads in enough states.
With Biden now just one state away from clinching a majority 270 votes in the electoral college and the media narrative turned sharply against him, Trump decided to claim fraud. And his team set out to try to prove it.
Throughout the summer and fall, Trump had laid the groundwork for claiming a “rigged” election, as he often termed it, warning of widespread fraud. Former chief of staff John F. Kelly told others that Trump was “getting his excuse ready for when he loses the election,” according to a person who heard his comments.
In June, during an Oval Office meeting with political advisers and outside consultants, Trump raised the prospect of suing state governments for how they administer elections and said he could not believe they were allowed to change the rules. All the states, he said, should follow the same rules. Advisers told him that he did not want the federal government in charge of elections.
Trump also was given several presentations by his campaign advisers about the likely surge in mail-in ballots — in part because many Americans felt safer during the pandemic voting by mail than in person — and was told they would overwhelmingly go against him, according to a former campaign official.
Advisers and allies, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), encouraged Trump to try to close the gap in mail-in voting, arguing that he would need some of his voters, primarily seniors, to vote early by mail. But Trump instead exhorted his supporters not to vote by mail, claiming they could not trust that their ballots would be counted.
“It was sort of insane,” the former campaign official said.
Ultimately, it was the late count of mail-in ballots that erased Trump’s early leads in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states and propelled Biden to victory. As Trump watched his margins shrink and then reverse, he became enraged, and he saw a conspiracy theory at play.
“You really have to understand Trump’s psychology,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime Trump associate and former White House communications director who is now estranged from the president. “The classic symptoms of an outsider is, there has to be a conspiracy. It’s not my shortcomings, but there’s a cabal against me. That’s why he’s prone to these conspiracy theories.”
Those are the classic markings of a paranoid, malignant, narcissist. And that level of instability should not be allowed anywhere near a powerful office like the presidency. I think we’ve all become a little bit crazy over the past four years that something like this can be written and we read it with astonishment and then move on to watch a football game or read a book or otherwise carry on with our cloistered pandemic lives as if it’s perfectly normal. Which is has been for the past four years.
And here is more about Georgia, which I still think Trump is subconsciously trying to sabotage:
In the days following the election, few states drew Trump’s attention like Georgia, a once-reliable bastion of Republican votes that he carried in 2016 but appeared likely to lose narrowly to Biden as late-remaining votes were tallied.
And few people attracted Trump’s anger like Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor who rode the president’s coattails to his own narrow victory in 2018.
A number of Trump allies tried to pressure Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, into putting his thumb on the scale. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both forced into runoff elections on Jan. 5 — demanded Raffensperger’s resignation. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump friend who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, called Raffensperger to seemingly encourage him to find a way to toss legal ballots.
But Kemp, who preceded Raffensperger as secretary of state, would not do Trump’s bidding. “He wouldn’t be governor if it wasn’t for me,” Trump fumed to advisers earlier this month as he plotted out a call to scream at Kemp.
In the call, Trump urged Kemp to do more to fight for him in Georgia, publicly echo his claims of fraud and appear more regularly on television. Kemp was noncommittal, a person familiar with the call said.
Raffensperger said he knew Georgia was going to be thrust into the national spotlight on Election Day, when dramatically fewer people turned out to vote in person than the Trump campaign needed for a clear win following a surge of mail voting dominated by Democratic voters.
But he said it had never occurred to him to go along with Trump’s unproven allegations because of his duty to administer elections. Raffensperger said his strategy was to keep his head down and follow the law.
“People made wild accusations about the voting systems that we have in Georgia,” Raffensperger said. “They were asking, ‘How do we get to 270? How do you get it to Congress so they can make a determination?’ ” But, he added, “I’m not supposed to put my thumb on the Republican side.”
Trump fixated on a false conspiracy theory that the machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and used in Georgia and other states had been programmed to count Trump votes as Biden votes. In myriad private conversations, the president would find a way to come back to Dominion. He was obsessed.
“Do you think there’s really something here? I’m hearing . . . ” Trump would say, according to one senior official who discussed it with him.
Raffensperger said Republicans were only harming themselves by questioning the integrity of the Dominion machines. He warned that these kinds of baseless allegations could discourage Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs. “People need to get a grip on reality,” he said.
More troubling to Raffensperger were the many threats he and his wife, Tricia, have received over the past few weeks — and a break-in at another family member’s home. All of it has prompted him to accept a state security detail.
“If Republicans don’t start condemning this stuff, then I think they’re really complicit in it,” he said. “It’s time to stand up and be counted. Are you going to stand for righteousness? Are you going to stand for integrity? Or are you going to stand for the wild mob? You wanted to condemn the wild mob when it’s on the left side. What are you going to do when it’s on our side?”
On Nov. 20, after Raffensperger certified the state’s results, Kemp announced that he would make a televised statement, stoking fears that the president might have finally gotten to the governor.
“This can’t be good,” Jordan Fuchs, a Raffensperger deputy, wrote in a text message.
But Kemp held firm and formalized the certification.
“As governor, I have a solemn responsibility to follow the law, and that is what I will continue to do,” Kemp said. “We must all work together to ensure citizens have confidence in future elections in our state.”
Think about that. The guy who, as secretary of state while running for Governor, went out of his way to disenfranchise 50,000 Georgians in order to win that election against Stacey Abrams, actually bucked Trump. I can see why Trump was surprised.
On Nov. 7, four days after the election, every major news organization projected that Biden would win the presidency. At the same time, Giuliani stood before news cameras in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, near an adult-video shop and a crematorium, to detail alleged examples of voter fraud.
[…]
Also that day, Stepien, Clark, Miller and Bossie briefed Trump on a potential legal strategy for the president’s approval. They explained that prevailing would be difficult and involve complicated plays in every state that could stretch into December. They estimated a “5 to 10 percent chance of winning,” one person involved in the meeting said.
Trump signaled that he understood and agreed to the strategy.
Around this time, some lawyers around Trump began to suddenly disappear from the effort in what some aides characterized as an attempt to protect their reputations. Former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had appeared at a news conference with Giuliani right after the election, ceased her involvement after the first week.
“Literally only the fringy of the fringe are willing to do pressers, and that’s when it became clear there was no ‘there’ there,” a senior administration official said.
Giuliani and his protegee, Ellis, both striving to please the president, insisted that Trump’s fight was not over. Someone familiar with their strategy said they were “performing for an audience of one,” and that Trump held Giuliani in high regard as “a fighter” and as “his peer.”
He considers Rudy Giuliani his peer. Which is true. He is. And that’s not a compliment. What a pair.
The article goes on to report on the “hostile takeover” of the campaign by Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. It’s as farcical as you can imagine. They were given a free hand and it wasn’t until Giuliani appeared on TV sweating black liquid down his face and talking about “My Cousin Vinnie” that Trump felt it made him look like a fool. But, of course, he didn’t fire Rudy. He fired Sidney Powell who is hardly any more Looney Tunes that the Rudester.
They gathered the people who were willing to go on TV to shout that the election was stolen and sent them out. Everyone else stayed mum. Meanwhile, all of his court challenges were failing one after the other. So he moved to Plan B:
As Trump’s legal challenges failed in court, he employed another tactic to try to reverse the result: a public pressure campaign on state and local Republican officials to manipulate the electoral system on his behalf.
“As was the case throughout his business career, he viewed the rules as instruments to be manipulated to achieve his chosen ends,” said Galston of the Brookings Institution.
Trump’s highest-profile play came in Michigan, where Biden was the projected winner and led by more than 150,000 votes. On Nov. 17, Trump called a Republican member of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, which is where Detroit is located and is the state’s most populous county. After speaking with the president, the board member, Monica Palmer, attempted to rescind her vote to certify Biden’s win in Wayne.
Then Trump invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state Senate and House to meet him at the White House, apparently hoping to coax them to block certification of the results or perhaps even to ignore Biden’s popular-vote win and seat Trump electors if the state’s canvassing board deadlocked. Such a move was on shaky legal ground, but that didn’t stop the president from trying.
The Post reports that there was a “full-court press” by Democratic and Republican leaders to urge them to resist. I had not heard that before and I have to wonder if it’s true. Republicans sure kept a low profile if that’s what they were doing.
They also report that the Michigan GOP leaders only acquiesced to visit Trump as a courtesy and to try to get COVID relief which sure sounds to me like an after-the-fact rationale. These are the same people who’ve been pushing Governor Whitmer to open up, virus be damned. I think there is a little ass-covering going on.
His slightly less insane enablers had been trying to get him to authorize the transition but he felt it was tantamount to conceding but, as we know, he finally agreed when they assured him that it wasn’t and he could keep challenging the results, which he did. And he and Rudy decided he should attend the half-baked “meeting” at the Wyndham hotel in Gettysburg thes next day to address the GOP officials who were discussing possibly sending alternate electors to the congress.
A few hours before he was scheduled to depart, the trip was scuttled. “Bullet dodged,” said one campaign adviser. “It would have been a total humiliation.”
That afternoon, Trump called in to the meeting of GOP state senators at the Wyndham, where Giuliani and Ellis were addressing attendees. He spoke via a scratchy connection to Ellis’s cellphone, which she played on speaker. At one point, the line beeped to signal another caller.
“If you were a Republican poll watcher, you were treated like a dog,” Trump complained, using one of his favorite put-downs, even though many people treat dogs well, like members of their own families.
“This election was lost by the Democrats,” he said, falsely. “They cheated.”
Trump demanded that state officials overturn the results — but the count had already been certified. Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes will be awarded to Biden.
This is utter madness. But from what I gather, we are all supposed to indulge him for the next two months and then he’ll be gone and we’ll all live happily ever after. Indeed I think we’re all supposed to immediately behave as if none of this ever happened. If the rhetoric coming from congressional Republicans is to be believed, we are already going right back to the good old days of harangues about deficits and spending and foreign policy weakness, basically erasing the last four years of insanity.
And I’m seeing a lot of people on the other side doing that as well, reverting back to all the old arguments and complaints as if nothing has changed. But everything changed. We now know that our supposed “guardrails” are only as good as a few people in random places doing the right thing in a situation in which denying reality requires a total suspension of reason.
If this election had been closer I have no doubt they all would have done it. Just go back and look at the lengths to which they were willing to go in 2000. You see, they already succeeded once.
President Trump speaks as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., looks on during a meeting with House and Senate leadership at the White House in June.
Despite having begrudgingly allowed the General Services Administration to issue an “ascertainment” that Joe Biden is the president-elect and the normal transition process could begin, Donald Trump is still relentlessly flogging the lie that the election was stolen by the Democrats and he is the rightful winner. And he’s sending out a daily fusillade of emails begging for money, with the alleged goal of overturning the results.
There is no record of how much the Trump campaign have raised with his grift. According to some reports, they were taking in $10 million a day shortly after the election was called. It appears Team Trump plans to use most of the money for a post-presidency slush fund, either to finance Trump’s hypothetical 2024 run or to curry favors with Republican politicians. I don’t think we need to wonder whether any of it will wind up in Trump’s pockets, because of course it will.
So far, the legal challenges have all been thrown out of court since they offered no real evidence. Once all the lawyers who cared about their reputations dropped out, the only ones left were a clown car full of fools driven by Rudy Giuliani, with the even more delusional legal sidekick Sidney Powell riding shotgun.
Powell was shoved out the door this week when her conspiracy theories proved to be too much even for the Trump campaign, which should tell you everything you need to know. But for a worked-up, cult-like base primed by the likes of Pizzagate and QAnon to believe anything, Powell’s wild stories about how the election was stolen from Trump make perfect sense.
Powell’s “theory” isn’t worth going into here because it’s utter nonsense. But that’s not the reason she was canned. She made the mistake of saying that Republicans and Democrats alike were on the take, which didn’t sit well with the party. But her bigger error was in focusing on Georgia and ranting against Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the pair of Republican incumbents who are fighting to hold their seats — and a GOP Senate majority — in the January runoff elections. And Powell had the audacity to air some of the party’s dirty laundry.
Recall that Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia was one of Trump’s made men in Congress, vociferously defending him through thick and thin. When Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned due to poor health, Trump wanted Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to appoint Collins to the Senate. But Kemp preferred the moneyed-up Loeffler — who, together with her husband, New York Stock Exchange chair Jeffrey Sprecher, is reportedly worth at least $800 million — and she was ultimately given the seat. Trump wasn’t happy about that and there’s apparently some lingering bad blood between him and Kemp. You know how he is.
Collins ran against Loeffler in the November special election — a nonpartisan “jungle primary” — and finished third, splitting the Republican vote and leading to Loeffler’s January runoff against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. (Powell claimed the vote was rigged against Collins in favor of Loeffler.) Trump then put Collins in charge of his fruitless recount effort in the state — having already completed a hand audit of all the votes, Georgia is now conducting a second machine recount — and there’s a lot of back-stabbing going on among all the players, complicating their ability to show a united front.
Trump has of course waded in, tweeting one bogus claim about voter fraud and election irregularities after another, all of them false. Loeffler and Perdue, the other incumbent Republican senator headed for a runoff in January (against Democrat Jon Ossoff), sought to please Trump by demanding the resignation of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who had the temerity to run an honest election. Collins dutifully echoed Trump’s inane tweeting, garnering a harsh rebuke from Raffensperger, who called him a “failed candidate” and “a liar.” (One can’t help but suspect he was indirectly addressing the big guy, who fits that bill even better than Collins.) Trump has been tagging Kemp with every one of his outrageous tweets, undoubtedly taking pleasure in taunting the Georgia governor for refusing to show proper fealty by appointing Collins in the first place.
So, the Republican Party in Georgia was already a big mess, with its various players and the president engaged in a circular firing squad armed with rhetorical AR-15s. Along came Sidney Powell, seemingly implicating the state party in a massive kickback and voter-fraud conspiracy which had to make Mitch McConnell get a little bit twitchy. Unfortunately for Mitch, Georgia Republicans may not be able to put that toothpaste back in the tube. All this infighting hasn’t just tapped into the paranoid strain among the base, it has revitalized one of the most powerful themes of the old conservative movement: a powerful hatred of “RINOs,” or Republicans in Name Only.
Morning Consult recently polled Republican voters and found that the vast majority see Trump as reflecting their values far more than GOP leaders do:
Nearly 7 in 10 Republican voters (68 percent) said they consider Trump to be more in touch with the party’s rank and file, compared with 20 percent who said the same of Republicans in Congress.
Attacking Republican officials who fail to toe the line is comfortably familiar to GOP base voters. (Just ask former House Speaker Paul Ryan.) They’ve been ruthlessly culling their herd this way for a couple of decades now, and are always eager to show their power.
Across social media, Trump followers are calling for Loeffler and Perdue to step in and demand that the state’s presidential vote be audited yet again, with all signatures checked on absentee ballots. As mentioned above, there has already been a hand count, and a machine recount is now underway. Rechecking signatures is literally impossible, since signed envelopes were already checked and separated from the ballots in order to protect the secrecy of the vote. Right-wing Georgia attorney Lin Wood (who is also representing Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse) is one of those leading the charge with threats to withhold his vote if the two Senate candidates fail to take action:
Why are they doing little or nothing to support efforts by GA citizens to address unlawful election & need for @BrianKempGA to order special session of legislature?
He has not backed off even in light of Powell’s removal, and he’s not alone. The Daily Beast reports that a couple of shady groups affiliated with Roger Stone are involved as well, encouraging voters to write in Trump’s name in the Senate races to show the RINOs who’s boss. A lawyer for one of these groups admits that Stone is a client but denies knowing anything about it. (We know Stone would never be involved in any sort of dirty tricks, so that’s that. )
If Stone is involved, these shenanigans are almost certainly being conducted with Trump’s approval. From his point of view, maybe that makes a certain amount of sense. Trump doesn’t care whether the Senate stays in Republican hands, even if he’s actually planning another run in 2024. The idea that he’s anybody’s team player is laughable, and he may see his personal interest in demonstrating how much power he still has with the base as he plans his next moves. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump’s inner circle sees an advantage in a narrative that Loeffler and Perdue were defeated because his base rejected Republicans who refused to put it all on the line for Trump.
It’s obvious that Donald Trump is in torturous psychological turmoil right now. Demonstrating a little dominance — over whoever happens to be vulnerable — might be just what the doctor ordered.
President Trump’s legal team seems bent on taking down not just Trump, but the entire Republican Party with it.
Having failed to make its case in several courts across the country, Trump’s legal team has begun to push baseless conspiracy theories that allege massive voter fraud. One of the many problems with this strategy is that it distracts from a real problem: Georgia’s two Senate run-off elections. Even worse, these accusations of fraud have actually begun to undermine Republicans’ chances in Georgia to a debilitating degree.
This weekend, attorney Sidney Powell claimed she was going to “blow up” Georgia with the “Kraken” of evidence that she refuses to give to anyone — even the rest of Trump’s legal team. She went on to accuse Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of accepting “financial benefits” to use Dominion Voting Systems, which she claims was used to switch nearly 7 million votes for Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. In other words, Powell accused Georgia’s Republican officials of actively working against the leader of their party.
Hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters will believe her. Indeed, immediately after Powell made her accusation, hundreds of pro-Trump users vowed on Twitter not to vote for either Georgia Republican senators because of Kemp’s alleged corruption. While Twitter may not be real life, this fiasco did prompt Donald Trump Jr. to urge his father’s base to show up in full force for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
It will be interesting to see if the cult will follow instructions from the likes of Don Jr or will follow the wingnut rabbit down the conspiracy hole:
Sidney Powell @SidneyPowell1 & I are more alike than we are different.
We are fighting different legal battles for the same clients – We The People.
I’m afraid that ship sailed a long time ago. Why couldn’t he see that Giuliani is a drunken embarrassment before now?
On Sunday, one of the team’s members, conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, was effectively fired after suggesting — again without any proof — that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia were part of a plot to rig the election for Biden.
Powell’s ouster came days after she made similarly over-the-top claims at a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington.
Trump has complained to White House aides and outside allies about how Giuliani and Powell conducted themselves at that event, NBC reported.
But when asked why Trump doesn’t fire Giuliani and other attorneys who remain on the team, a person familiar with the president’s thinking gave a profane shoulder shrug of an answer.
Giuliani, who was once a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also presided over the press conference at RNC headquarters, where he stood and watched Powell promote the campaign’s most far-fetched vote fraud allegations to date.
At that event, Giuliani perspired so heavily that sweat apparently blackened from hair dye conspicuously ran down his cheeks as he made baseless allegations of electoral skullduggery.
Trump, who is obsessed with television and the personal appearances of people on it, was not happy with Giuliani’s look at the press conference, a person familiar with the president’s reaction told NBC News.
I’ve always thought Trump’s patience with Giuliani was odd for someone so obsessed with appearance. (That Borat thing alone…)
Of course this is a guy who thinks troweling on make-up and wearing a bird’s nest on top of his head is attractive so his standards are a little bit obscure. But evidently, he wasn’t thrilled with the slimy, black rivulets running down Giuliani’s face when he was giving an insane press conference . Imagine that.
I don’t know where this is all going. But we have entered a new phase. The GSA has finally allowed the formal transition to begin now that today’s gambit to get the Michigan Republicans to refuse to certify the election didn’t work.
But stay tuned. I doubt Trump is throwing in the towel just yet.
The lunatic antics of the Trump legal team continued unabated over this past weekend. After his mysteriously oozing press conference last Thursday, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani kept an uncharacteristically low profile. Jenna Ellis, his partner in the “elite strike force,” took to Twitter to insult longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz, accusing him of “micropenis syndrome,” but beyond that she too stayed quiet. They left the public appearances to Sidney Powell, the member of the team best known as former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s least competent attorney.
Powell made a Saturday appearance on Newsmax that was downright historic. She vowed to deliver a “biblical” voter fraud case this week in the state of Georgia, claiming there were massive pay-for-play kickbacks from voting machine companies to public officials, including Bernie Sanders and Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state. The Trump faithful immediately began a campaign to boycott the Senate runoff races in January to pay back the GOP for failing their Dear Leader, which set off alarm bells in Washington.
On Sunday night, somebody apparently whispered in the Trump campaign’s ear that they needed a human sacrifice to calm things down. So Giuliani and Ellis distributed a statement insisting that Powell was not on their team after all. It remains to be seen, however, if Trump will try to help get out the vote in Georgia. He’s not known for helping anyone if it doesn’t immediately benefit him.
Once again we’ve heard mostly crickets from the Republican establishment. A handful of senators, such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (who is retiring), have timidlysteppedforward to say that maybe it might be best if the administration didn’t try to pressure Republican officials to overturn a legal election. Some, like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under George W. Bush, have suggested ever so politely that Trump’s legal team might not be up to snuff. But for the most part, Republicans have maintained their usual passivity in the face of Trump’s latest assault on democracy.
There are some erstwhile Republicans who are becoming apoplectic however: the Never Trumpers. This post-election gambit is driving them ever farther from their former party. I’m now doubtful they will ever find their way back.
We’ve all observed the usual suspects among this crowd throughout the campaign, from the Cicero of Never Trumpers, Steve Schmidt, to the cutting wit of Rick Wilson and the soulful self-analysis of Stuart Stevens (whose political memoir “It Was All a Lie” is one of the rawest mea culpas I’ve ever read.) There are plenty of others, and they understandably inspire a lot of cynicism and suspicion among liberals and leftists. Their life’s work, after all, was electing Republicans and laying the groundwork for Donald Trump.
But thanks to social media we are watching the veil fall from their eyes in real time. I find that fascinating because it’s just so rare to see anyone in politics ever change their minds, much less people whose careers have been built around not doing so. Take, for example, this incredible Twitter thread from Michael Gerson, a conservative evangelical Christian, former Heritage Foundation fellow, and speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush. He now writes opinion pieces for the Washington Post and has been appalled by Trump from the beginning. But until recently, Gerson has resisted the idea that the Republican Party itself is corrupt. On Sunday he tweeted:
We are witnessing the attempt by an American president to maintain power by overturning a fair election. We are seeing the persecution of public officials for the crime of doing their evident duty. And we are seeing most GOP legislators become bystanders or cheerleaders during a frontal attack on American ideals.
It is a good thing we are wearing masks, because the stench of GOP hypocrisy is overwhelming. ..
Elected Republicans who speak of patriotism can’t be bothered to speak up for American traditions, beliefs and institutions…Those who frown but say nothing are especially disgraceful. Knowing better does not exculpate, it incriminates.
Their conscience has ceased to be a guide and become an accomplice. At some point, patience with iniquity becomes complicity.
We are not asking much of elected Republicans. The fear of being targeted by a presidential tweet and gaining a primary opponent is real enough. But it is hardly the risk of a young soldier on D-Day, or a protester at a segregated lunch counter.
I like many Republican members of Congress. But those who sacrifice their ideals to the ambitions and insecurities of a single corrupt ruler have ceased to serve the country. Their failure to defend democracy at this moment of testing can’t be excused and won’t be forgiven.
That is quite an indictment. Then Gerson concludes, “I know this judgment is harsh. But I am angry with elected Rs because I believed in many of them. Because I know they can be better. Losing a public office is ultimately a small matter in the soul’s long adventure. And losing office in a just cause is one of history’s honors.” He asks them to remember who they are.
In fact, those people have showed who they were by collaborating with Donald Trump for the past four years in order to maintain power and achieve their own goals by exploiting his ignorance, ineptitude and depravity. The years before that were little better as they cynically obstructed every move by Barack Obama and acted in bad faith over and over again.
A few spoke out against Trump and retired or left the party, people like Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan. But most of them cynically took advantage of the power Trump conferred and offered cover for his obvious unfitness for their own ends.
The Republican Party has been dedicated to the degradation of American democracy for a very long time. Its commitment to total obstruction and the delegitimization of their opponents was laid out in detail by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich many years ago. The will to power was never hidden and the methods Gingrich employed were right out in the open. Once the racists and the nationalists all gathered in one party, Trumpism — with or without Donald Trump — became inevitable.
It would be easy to dismiss the Never Trumpers outright and tell them to take a hike for having been part of this degradation of our politics. I think that’s foolish. Whatever they may have done to contribute to what the GOP has become, they were not willing to take that final step and submit to the insanity of Donald Trump. That’s not something you can say about the rest of the Republicans in power, who will still be here after Trump is gone and will be more powerful than ever, having discovered that there are no limits, no boundaries and no consequences.
People like Gerson and the Lincoln Project, their own former colleagues, are holding a mirror up to the Republican Party and showing them what they have become. That is a valuable thing and they seem to be serious about continuing that project:
There are Republicans waiting in the wings, waiting for their turn to dismantle democracy.
As we can see with the Republican establishment’s acquiescence to Trump’s crude but dangerous attempts to overturn the election and Mitch McConnell’s determination to sabotage the incoming Democratic administration, this isn’t over. Donald Trump isn’t the real problem. His army of cynical enablers is. If the Never Trumpers want to devote themselves to fighting them, I’m certainly not going to wave them away. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Update:Tim MIller’s “Goodbye To All That” piece from the weekend is worth reading. I don’t know where any of these guys ends up. But I do know that we’re all better off with them off the GOP team.
Michigan Republican Party Chairman Laura Cox and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel issued a letter on Saturday asking the Michigan Board of State Canvassers to delay the certification of election results for two weeks.
A former reality TV star eight years ago tweeted of President Barack Obama, “He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!” The first statement was a lie — Obama won by almost 3.5 million votes. But that lie exhibited the facility with lying for which the faux billionaire would become infamous. He tweeted, “The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!” and “More votes equals a loss…revolution!”
Those November 7, 2012 tweets followed others fired off the night before:
We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!
That last tweet is as true now as it was not then. And it is Donald J. Trump’s doing. Having lost the popular vote twice himself, the now-outgoing president suddenly he has use for the electoral college. His legal team is the laughingstock. But no less a threat to the country.
While the republic still stands, it is not for Trump’s and the Republican establishment’s lack of of trying to demolish it. Election law expert Rick Hasen has reassured voters those efforts to game the electoral college ultimately will fail:
The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20. The bad news is that Mr. Trump’s wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts. New judicial doctrines will put more power in the hands of Republican legislatures to suppress the vote and take voters, state courts and federal courts out of key backstop roles.
Team Trump’s gonzo lawyering might fit well within a hallucinogen-laced, Hunter S. Thompson novel. Judge after judge recognizes the frivolousness of the conspiracy-fueled effort to undo Trump’s loss through litigation aimed at altering the electoral college count.
Judge Matthew W. Brann in Pennsylvania on Saturday dismissed Trump’s demand to throw out almost 7 million votes. A “conservative Republican” before his appointment, the Washington Post reminds, Brann wrote in his opinion:
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens.
“That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
But that harsh rebuke is not enough to alleviate Hasen’s concerns:
All of that is indeed good news, but I am quite concerned about what comes next. By the time President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, millions of people will wrongly believe he stole the election. At least 300 times since the election, Mr. Trump has gone straight to his followers on social media to declare the election rigged or stolen and to claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, himself as the real victor. Mr. Trump’s false claims will delegitimize a Biden presidency among his supporters. It should go without saying that a democracy requires the losers of an election to accept the results as legitimate and agree to fight another day; Republican leaders echoing Mr. Trump’s failure to support a peaceful transition of power undermine the foundation of our democracy. It’s not only the fact that we have had to say this, but that we keep having to repeat it, that shows the depths that we have reached.
Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy also will make things worse when it comes to voting rights. The common thread in his campaign’s postelection litigation connecting Trump allegations of people of color illegally voting in Democratic cities in swing states and corrupted voting machines is a lack of any evidence to support the claims. Many of the lawsuits have been laughed out of court for lack of evidence, voluntarily dismissed, or involve so few votes that they could not plausibly change the outcome. These unsuccessful lawsuits will nonetheless provide a false narrative to explain how it is that Mr. Biden declared victory and serve as a predicate for new restrictive voting laws in Republican states. They already provided a basis for the now-aborted attempt of Republican canvassing board members in Wayne County, Mich., to reject votes from Democratic-leaning Detroit, and could be the basis for a similar move by Republicans when the Michigan state canvassing board meets Monday.
When our system works as intended, citizens have the luxury of largely ignoring it, the Washington Post Editorial Board observes. People entrusted with its operation, for the most part, act with integrity: “Secretaries of state of both parties, county judges, tireless vote counters and state boards like Michigan’s have managed a successful election, with a record number of Americans voting despite the challenge of a pandemic. Some of these officials undoubtedly rejoiced at the results, some undoubtedly despaired; they all did their jobs.”
Yet integrity is of no use to the outgoing president, nor to members of his cult of personality, nor to a disturbingly large fraction of his party’s members of Congress and in the states.
Despite failure after humiliating failure in court, Trump persists, the Post continues:
His target Monday is the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is scheduled to meet to certify the results in their state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by the healthy margin of 154,000 votes. Ronna McDaniel, the servile chair of the Republican Party, and her Michigan counterpart, Laura Cox, on Saturday called on the board to delay certification. Their ostensible justification: “numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities.”
Never mind that overturning the counting tables in Michigan will not undo his loss. Trump hopes to inspire similar delays in enough states to somehow turn failure into success. Never mind that it would turn the republic into a petty dictatorship.
But more than that, Trump’s targets are as old as his demand innocents be put to death, no matter the weight of exonerating evidence. Nonwhite Americans are in his view suspect by definition, as are cities with large, nonwhite populations, Trump’s targets of opportunity.
Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times write:
“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”
This ain’t over with the settling of this election. Nor with the inauguration of Joe Biden as president in January. One major party is committed to a de facto rolling back of the Reconstruction amendments as Jim Crow did for 100 years, and relegating nonwhite voters again to the back of the electoral bus, even those nonwhites who vote with them. Republicans will, as they have demonstrated time and again, sacrifice their own to secure power.
Supporters of President Donald Trump have called for a boycott of the crucial Georgia Senate runoff elections in a move that threatens Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s plan to restrain President-elect Joe Biden.
The two Georgia runoff elections, scheduled for January 5 with early voting starting on December 14, will determine control of the Senate, meaning Biden’s ability to push through a Democratic agenda under his first term. But a number of pro-Trump Republicans have taken to Parler, the “free-speech” social media platform, to discourage members of their own party from voting.
Screenshots shared by reporter Marcus Baram showed Trump supporters invoking a conspiracy theory about “rigged” voting machines to urge a boycott of the upcoming elections in Georgia. “Don’t vote! Don’t be part of the corruption” one post read.
“DO NOT VOTE IN THE GEORGIA RUNOFFS, THE DEEP STATE WILL BE COLLECTING EVERYONE’S INFO. THIS IS A CHARADE, MEANT TO IDENTIFY PEOPLE WHO DON’T VOTE DEMOCRAT,” another user wrote. “STAY HOME. OSSOFF AND WARNOCK ARE A SMALL PRICE TO PAY.”
This formerly respected defense lawyer, Lin wood, (who is defending Kyle Rittenhouse) is one of those leading the charge:
Politicians love votes & money (not necessarily in that order).
Want to get @SenLoeffler & @sendavidperdue out of their basements to demand that action must be taken to fix steal of the 11/3 GA election?
Why are they doing little or nothing to support efforts by GA citizens to address unlawful election & need for @BrianKempGA to order special session of legislature?
In case you are wondering why this member of the “elite strike force” has been exiled, it’s because she’s been the one spearheading the idea that Loeffler and Perdue are in cahoots with Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to steal the election in Georgia.
For real.
Here is Powell’s interview on Newsmax on Saturday in which she threatens to screw up the Georgia Senate election:
https://youtu.be/VzzXZ2hhgrA
Levying explosive claims of widespread voter fraud specifically tied to Dominion Voting Systems and potentially a pay-for-play scheme with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell on Newsmax TV vowed to deliver a “biblical” voter fraud case this week.
“We’ve got tons of evidence; it’s so much, it’s hard to pull it all together,” Powell told Saturday night’s “The Count” co-hosted by Rob Schmitt and Mark Halperin, teasing the explosive allegation of the Georgia governor in a contested and key battleground state.
“Hopefully this week we will get it ready to file, and it will be biblical.”
“It’s a massive project to pull this fraud claim together with the evidence that I want to put in,” she added.
“You name the manner of fraud and it occurred in Georgia.”
Among the most explosive claims alluded to by Powell were:
Joe Biden votes being “weighted” at 1.25 times and President Donald Trump votes being parsed at 3/4.
Algorithms that gave Democrats 35,000 extra votes.
Modifications made to voting machines after statuatory cutoff dates for changes.
Past election victories, including Hillary Clinton’s primary victory over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., being forced decided by Dominion Voting Systems.
Alleged pay-for-play kick backs to public officials, potentially even Georgia GOP Gov. Kemp for a late grant to use Dominion Voting Systems.
“Georgia is probably going to be the first state I’m gonna blow up,” Powell said rhetorically with her pending lawsuits alleging massive voter fraud.
See Newsmax TV now carried in 70 million cable homes
And to think just a few days ago the RNC was singing her praises:
"We will not be intimidated…We are going to clean this mess up now. President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it. And we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom."—Sidney Powell pic.twitter.com/8KCEOGuL7w
It sounds as though Mitch and the rest of the GOP finally stepped in but only because of the potential to suppress the vote in Georgia in the runoff. I hate to say though, they may be too late. This is the kind of conspiracy theory that once let out of the bottle on social media is very hard to contain. Unless Trump himself comes out and says its all a big lie — and I just can’t see him doing that — this could be a big problem even if Powell is deep-sixed.
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 26: U.S. Attorney General William Barr as U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signing ceremony for an executive order establishing the Task Force on Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives, in the Oval Office of the White House on November 26, 2019 in Washington, DC. Attorney General Barr recently announced the initiative on a trip to Montana where he met with Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe leaders. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The Justice Department has met President Trump’s fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud with two weeks of skeptical silence, not taking any overt moves to investigate what Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, claims is a globe-spanning conspiracy to steal the election.
Such deafening silence from one of the government’s main enforcers of election law indicates just how little evidence there is to support the wild, wide-ranging claims made by Trump and his supporters, most notably Giuliani in a Thursday news conference held inside the Republican National Committee headquarters.
Privately, Justice Department officials have said they are willing to investigate legitimate claims of vote fraud; Attorney General William P. Barr even loosened some restrictions that might otherwise have discouraged prosecutors from doing so before results are certified.
But current and former officials said they thought Giuliani’s accusations sounded “crazy,” and they have not seen or heard of any evidence suggesting large-scale fraud, let alone the kind of intercontinental conspiracy described by the president’s lawyer. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a politically sensitive matter.
The Justice Department’s silence is “a tiny sliver of normalcy, and frankly a positive sign that we are on our way back to a better place,” said Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department voting rights official in the Obama administration who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
“In a way, that’s hard to say because it feels like lowering the bar to below the floor, to say we should all be pretty pleased that the institution of law enforcement for the United States didn’t go either full-on partisan talking-point machine or full-on conspiracy theorist. In normal times, that wouldn’t be something to celebrate, that would just be a given. . . .
The Justice Department also hasn’t come out and said the world is round, because they don’t need to.”
Actually:
I was at this rally in Georgia yesterday — one of the guys on a mic was talking about the Earth being flat. https://t.co/zS3bQWpjtC
Donie O’Sullivan is a CNN correspondent who covers the right wing disinformation stream.
The truth is that Barractually gave them special permission to look into illegal activity during this counting period which is outside the normal purview of the DOJ. (They generally wait until the election is settled before investigating so as not to influence the election results.)
So, this isn’t really evidence of restraint because it’s Trump who is trying to influence GOP officials, possibly bribing or blackmailing them, into changing the results of the election on his behalf. A Justice Department that was following Barr’s directive would be looking into all the shenanigans from the Trump campaign.
But really, they should stay out of this altogether and Barr should have kept his mouth shut. The feds don’t need to be involved at all at this stage. But if they choose to take a look later at the massive amount of pressure being put on GOP officials to throw out legal votes once this thing is over, they would well within their purview. In fact, they should. This is outrageous.
[T]he Trumpist effort to steal the election in broad daylight doesn’t rely on whether its arguments can stand up to scrutiny in court. It is a fundamentally political effort. Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team are propagating a shambling mass of lies and deranged conspiracy theories about the election. They hope to create enough confusion to give cover to Republican officials at the local, state, and federal level working to subvert the will of the electorate and use their power to preserve the president’s. They want local and state Republican officials to refuse to certify election results in key states that Trump lost, in hopes that either Republican state legislators in those states will overturn the results and hand the president a victory or the election is thrown to Congress, where Republicans can grant him a second term.
This seditious conspiracy to shatter American democracy relies on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble: The facts are not on their side, and the law is not on their side, but the Trumpist media is on their side, so they are banging the table as loudly as they can. They will likely fail — in no small part because the key players in the would-be coup are incompetentloons — but the cost America pays will be high nevertheless.
GOP leaders spent decades building an elaborate disinformation network of partisan media outlets and telling their supporters not to believe reporting from mainstream news sources. It worked — polls show that Republicans overwhelmingly trust right-wing outlets with low or nonexistent journalistic standards and scorn more credible news outlets, and the president’s most fervent supporters are Republicans who trust Fox News. A vast swath of the public is now firmly ensconced within an alternate reality, making decisions about not only politics but their personal health and safety based on propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Within that right-wing information bubble, it is virtually uncontested that Trump is correct that the 2020 election was rife with voter fraud and that he actually won if you only count the “legal votes.” The result is that polls show a majority of Republicans say that the election was stolen from Trump.
Fox declared Biden the president-elect on November 7. But since then, both its news and opinion sides have pushed conspiracy theories about the election and cast doubt on its results hundreds of times.
Fox hosts, contributors, and guests have claimed that “many are trying to steal this election from President Trump”; asserted that “many Americans will never again accept the results of a presidential election”; declared that “there’s good reason here not to have confidence or not to believe this is fair”; argued that “this is a war, this is a battle for the control of our government and for the future of this nation”; attacked Republican officials for being insufficiently committed to Trump’s scheme; called for the arrests of election workers; suggested that Republican state legislators in states Trump lost should “appoint a clean slate of electors” who support him; and demanded lawsuits and congressional investigations. The network has aired promos that hype its prime-time line-up casting doubt on the election.
Fox’s work to systemically delegitimize the election is important not only because the network remains the largest and most powerful entity within the right-wing media machine, but because Trump himself frequently watches its programming and amplifies it to his Twitter followers. The president has cast doubt on the election dozens of times in response to Fox’s coverage, including by promoting deranged conspiracy theories the network’s stars pushed about computer systems changing votes to benefit Biden.
The Republican officials targeted by the president’s scheme are likely to be either swimming in that fever swamp or dependent on those who do.
At the low end they look like William Hartmann, the Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who temporarily blocked certification of the county’s election results and subsequently signed an affidavit seeking to rescind the certification. His social media feeds are filled with conspiracy theories about the election from OAN and other far-right sources.
Further up the food chain, Republican members of Congress are going on Fox to promote Trump’s election theft.
At every step in the process, at the local, state, and federal level, Republican officials can be pressured by the president’s supporters consuming this disinformation. Those are GOP primary voters who likely believe Trump actually won and can threaten the jobs of any politician who takes action to prevent him from staying in office.
This coup is likely to fail; Biden’s lead is too great, Democrats hold key offices that can foil the attempt, and the plotters are too nutty. But the Republican base is being primed to treat Biden as illegitimate — and to question the results of any future elections the party loses. If this behavior is normalized, the next time the right-wing media machine pushes for an anti-democratic solution to an election defeat, the margin may be narrower, the playing field more favorable to Republicans, and the plotters more disciplined.
Our democracy is fragile, and it is under attack. If the truth of the election results can’t break through the right-wing information bubble, it may not survive for long.
I think I feel more despair about this problem than anything else. I believe in free speech and do not believe that we can use any kind of government control to suppress this or we risk even worse than what we have. But this propaganda network is killing our politics and Trump has shown that it’s powerful enough to keep the truth from permeating it for more than 70 million people (and who knows how many other?) I don’t know how democracy can survive this level of disinformation, particularly when you have a political faction that sees it as a boon to maintaining their power. How does reality break through? I just don’t know.
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