What We Learned From The Trump Tape
Sixteen days that will test America.
“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
Welcome to the Countdown Journal. There are two days until Congress counts the Electoral College votes, and 16 days until the inauguration of Joe Biden.
It was, of course, another “perfect call” — the president of the United States pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn the election. We don’t yet know how many similar calls Trump may have made to officials in other states. But we know exactly what he tried to do on Saturday (days before the Georgia senatorial runoffs).
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump declared. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
“Well, Mr. President,” answered Raffensperger, “the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
You can listen to the entire call and read the transcript here. (It is amaaaazing.)
There is nothing subtle about his ask or about his low-grade gangster attempt to bully Raffensperger to change the outcome.
The president wants to cheat.
He doesn’t want another day in court. He doesn’t want a recount. There was no talk about the importance of democracy or upholding the constitution.
The President of the United States wants to steal the election.
He wants to throw out the votes of tens of millions of Americans.
This wasn’t about the “integrity” of elections.
Trump wanted to “find” the votes. He wanted a fellow Republican to “recalculate” the results.
As legal experts were quick to point out, Trump’s call was potentially indictable and certainly impeachable. It also left his band of congressional coup plotters exposed as lapdogs to Trump’s obsession with snatching an election by bluster, lies, and intimidation.
The call was also clarifying and alarming on another level. At this point, it’s silly to talk about whether Trump crossed any red lines. He crossed them all. He has obliterated the very concept of red lines.
The president on the tape is consumed, delusional, and deeply corrupt; he has marinated in febrile conspiracy theories, and is immune to information and facts.
Time and again the Georgia officials tried to set the record straight. No, Mr. President, dead people had not voted. No, parts of the voting machines had not been removed. No, it was not true that votes had been scanned three times.
But this is incandescently obvious from the tape: Trump’s mind is an impenetrable wall of denial. He believes it all. NBC’s Ben Collins noted:
To the extent that Trump engages in any sort of coherent thought process, he seems to believe that he did, in fact, win the election, and he is clearly determined to do anything to keep power.
And he will be president for another 16 days.
In that 16 days, America is going to be on the rack — subjected to a constitutional, political, and moral stress test.
How bad is the insanity, right now?
How worried did they have to be to put this out?
All ten living secretaries of defense — including Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and Donald Rumsfield — signed an open letter about the military and the peaceful transfer of power:
As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, “there’s no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.” Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.
David Frum has a question:
We haven’t yet heard all the logic twisting, narrative spinning, rationalizations, and what-aboutism from the usual Mollie-Hemingway-esque defenders. But even some of the most diligent turd-polishers appear to be appalled:
Don’t worry, they will come around. Because they always do.
Did the president commit a crime? This seems relevant: §20511. Criminal penalties
A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office-
(1) knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for…
(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held, shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
( Pub. L. 103–31, §12, May 20, 1993, 107 Stat. 88 .)
A series of shocks this weekend have changed the momentum of the coup. On Saturday we learned that as many as 140 elected members of the House might vote to overturn the election. That was quickly followed by the Cruz-led group of 11 senators who signed onto the objections.
This was shocking even to a political world that has seemed inured to shock. But it also provoked a backlash from the remnant of constitutionalists in the GOP, who pointed out the ghastly precedent their colleagues were setting.
So we now have a civil war between the Kraken Caucus and conservatives unwilling to nullify an election to keep the Orange Man in power.
The contrast is actually quite dramatic: take some time to read the constitutionalist objections, grounded in law, precedent, and a due respect for democratic norms. In contrast, the Trumpist manifestos are farragoes of innuendo, rumors, and Q-flavored conspiracy theories.
Disingenuously, some of the coup plotters (most notably the thoroughly deplorable Josh Hawley) suggested that they were simply asking questions because millions of voters doubted the legitimacy of the outcome.
But how had we gotten here?
Right wing media and folks in the Trump orbit had peddled bogus stories for weeks. The president’s legal team advanced one falsehood after another, and persisted despite being slapped down in dozens of courts. Their lies were amplified on right wing media from OANN to Newsmax to Mark Levin; and inevitably many Trump supporters came to believe those lies.
Now, Hawley-Cruz-Ronjon and others insisted that these false beliefs were, in and of themselves, grounds for rejecting the votes of contested states. (Irony alert: The fuck-your-feelings crowd now wants to overturn an election because of the feelings of Trumpist voters.)
The fig leaf for their putsch-attempt is a blue ribbon commission that would somehow perform an “emergency audit” of the election results in the 10 days between January 6 and January 16.
The obvious flaw: If Trumpists reject actual results, rulings of federal and state courts, the certification by GOP governors, the statement by Trump’s own attorney general, the results of recounts, and audits, why do we think that they will believe any findings by a commission? They are utterly post-fact at this point.
Ronjon’s horrible day. My home state senator has been on a downward spiral, but Sunday was . . . brutal. The day after he announced that would vote against counting the votes of his own state (!) Johnson appeared on Meet the Press. It really didn’t go well.
CHUCK TODD:
All right. Senator, I want to quote Senator Ben Sasse for you. Because what you're alleging is, essentially you and your colleagues have created this controversy. So right now, we are locked into a destructive, vicious circle, in some ways as you kind of outlined, except -- which is, you made an allegation that there was widespread fraud. You have failed to offer specific evidence of that widespread fraud. But you're demanding an investigation on the grounds that there are allegations of widespread fraud. So essentially, you're the arsonist here. President Trump is the arsonist here.
SEN. RON JOHNSON:
No, that --
CHUCK TODD:
You've started this fire. And now you're saying, "Woah, look at this. Oh my God. All these people believe what we told them," because you didn't have the guts to tell the truth that this election was fair.
SEN. RON JOHNSON
…This fire was started when you completely ignored, for example, our investigation of Hunter Biden. You know, no evidence of wrongdoing there. And now we find out after the election, no, there is a fair amount of evidence to the point that we have a real FBI investigation. So --
CHUCK TODD:
Senator. All right, I've had enough --
Even before the appearance, longtime Wisconsin conservative commentator, James Wigderson, the editor of Right Wisconsin tweeted:
The Blowback. Paul Ryan emerged from semi-retirement to issue a statement:
"It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans.
"The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy. "The Trump campaign had ample opportunity to challenge election results, and those efforts failed from lack of evidence.
"The legal process was exhausted, and the results were decisively confirmed. "The DOJ too, found no basis for overturning the result. If states wish to reform their processes for future elections, that is their prerogative. But Joe Biden’s victory is entirely legitimate."
Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey pushed back against Hawley and Cruz by name.
“A fundamental, defining feature of a democratic republic is the right of the people to elect their own leaders. The effort by Senators Hawley, Cruz, and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in swing states like Pennsylvania directly undermines this right.
“The senators justify their intent by observing that there have been many allegations of fraud. But allegations of fraud by a losing campaign cannot justify overturning an election. They fail to acknowledge that these allegations have been adjudicated in courtrooms across America and were found to be unsupported by evidence. President Trump’s own Attorney General, Bill Barr, stated ‘we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.’
Liz Cheney issued a lengthy deconstruction of the coup attempt.
The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking – first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress – to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.
Let’s be clear what is happening here: We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage. But they’re wrong – and this issue is bigger than anyone’s personal ambitions. Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.
Mitt Romney called Cruz’s argument, “nonsense.”
“My fellow Senator Ted Cruz and the co-signers of his statement argue that rejection of electors or an election audit directed by Congress would restore trust in the election. Nonsense. This argument ignores the widely perceived reality that Congress is an overwhelmingly partisan body; the American people wisely place greater trust in the federal courts where judges serve for life.”
A group of quite conservative congressmen including Thomas Massie R-KY; Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D.; Ken Buck, R-Colo.; Mike Gallagher, R-Wis.; Nancy Mace, R-S.C.; Tom McClintock, R-Cal.; and Chip Roy, R-Texas, issued a joint statement denouncing the ruse.
"To take action otherwise — that is, to unconstitutionally insert Congress into the center of the presidential election process — would amount to stealing power from the people and the states. It would, in effect, replace the electoral college with Congress, and in doing so strengthen the efforts of those on the left who are determined to eliminate it or render it irrelevant."
Even Lindsey Graham:
Trump loyalist Tom Cotton also bailed out of the coup.
If Congress purported to overturn the results of the Electoral College, it would not only exceed that power, but also establish unwise precedents. First, Congress would take away the power to choose the president from the people, which would essentially end presidential elections and place that power in the hands of whichever party controls Congress. Second, Congress would imperil the Electoral College, which gives small states like Arkansas a voice in presidential elections. Democrats could achieve their longstanding goal of eliminating the Electoral College in effect by refusing to count electoral votes in the future for a Republican president-elect. Third, Congress would take another big step toward federalizing election law, another longstanding Democratic priority that Republicans have consistently opposed.
Impeach Him.. Again? This is what I suggested two weeks ago:
The obvious objections are… well, obvious. Time is short, and nobody has an appetite for this with a just a few weeks to go.
But…
We are clearly in dangerous waters, and no one can be sure what a president desperate to hold onto power and terrified of defeat might be capable of attempting. What actual checks remain?….
At a minimum, someone should be thinking about the ultimate Trumpsday scenario, and start drafting the articles that could be quickly acted upon (maybe with snap votes in both the House and Senate?).
The smart set has been telling us that we don’t have anything to worry about. The guardrails will hold, they assure us. There’s no time, they tell us.
But Trump is in the White House talking about coups. Maybe we need to have to the hammer ready to break glass in case of emergency.