Bess Levin: “Just Say That the Election Was Corrupt, and Leave the Rest to Me”: In Georgia, Donald Trump Appears Beyond F--ked

Trump was plotting to overturn the election before the election even happened

As Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis indictment notes, Trump’s false claim on November 4, 2020, that he had won the election was not some off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment declaration made in the heat of the moment.

Rather, approximately four days earlier, on or about October 31, 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP discussed a draft speech with unindicted co-conspirator Individual l…that falsely declared victory and falsely claimed voter fraud. The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Trump and then chief of staff Mark Meadows wanted an actual memo written re: blocking the certification of Joe Biden’s win

Note to anyone thinking of trying to overturn a free and fair election: maybe don’t commit your plan to pen and paper? From the indictment:

On or between the 1st day of December 2020 and the 31st day of December 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP and MARK RANDALL MEADOWS met with John McEntee and requested that McEntee prepare a memorandum outlining a strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, the day prescribed by law for counting votes cast by the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from Georgia and the other states. The strategy included having Vice President Michael R. Mike Pence count only half of the electoral votes from certain states and then return the remaining electoral votes to state legislatures. The request was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

Trump’s henchmen told a whole bunch of patently absurd lies—which they knew were lies—to Georgia state lawmakers

Here’s Willis on Rudy Giuliani, and just one of the many instances in which he allegedly told a bunch of ridiculous lies in an attempt to keep Trump in power:

On or about the 3rd day of December 2020, RUDOLPH WILLIAM LOUIS GIULIANI committed the felony offense of FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS, in violation of O.C.G.A. § 16-10-20, in-Fulton County, Georgia, by knowingly, willfully, and unlawfully making at least one of the following false statements and representations to members of the Georgia Senate present at a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee meeting:

1. That at least 96,600 mail-in ballots were counted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia, despite there being no record of those ballots having been returned to a county elections office.
2. That Dominion Voting Systems equipment used in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Antrim County, Michigan, mistakenly recorded 6,000 votes for Joseph R. Biden when the votes were actually cast for Donald John Trump.

1. That it is quite clear from the State Farm Arena video from November 3, 2020, that Fulton County election workers were stealing votes and that Georgia officials were covering up a crime in plain sight
2. That at State Farm Arena on November 3, 2020, Democratic officials got rid of all of the reporters, all the observers, anyone that couldn’t be trusted, used the excuse of a watermain break, cleared out the voting area and then went about their dirty, crooked business
3. That between 12,000 and 24,000 ballots were illegally counted by Fulton County election workers at State Farm Arena on November 3, 2020
4. That in Michigan, there were 700,000 more ballots counted than were sent out to voters in the November 3, 2020, presidential election, which was accounted for by quadruple counting ballots
5. That Ruby Freeman, Shaye Moss, and an unidentified man were quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine at State Farm Arena to be used to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines
6. That 96,600 mail-in ballots were counted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia, despite there being no record of those ballots having been returned to a county elections office

The phone call heard round the world

Remember when Donald Trump called up Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger and demanded the state official magically find the specific number of votes needed to overturn Biden’s win in Georgia? Well, Willis does—and she says it constituted a felony, as did other things said on the call:

On or about the 2nd day of January 2021, DONALD JOHN TRUMP committed the felony offense of FALSE STATEMENTS AND WRITINGS, in violation of O.C.G.A. § 16- 10-20, in Fulton County, Georgia, by knowingly, willfully, and unlawfully making at least one of the following false statements and representations to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, and Georgia Secretary of State General Counsel Ryan Germany:

1. That anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000 ballots were dropped mysteriously into the rolls in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia
2. That thousands of people attempted to vote in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia and were told they could not because a ballot had already been cast in their name
3. That 4,502 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who were not on the voter registration list
4. That 904 people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia who were registered at an address that was a post office box
5. That Ruby Freeman was a professional vote scammer and a known political operative
6. That Ruby Freeman, her daughter, and others were responsible for fraudulently awarding at least 18,000 ballots to Joseph R. Biden at State Farm Arena in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia
7. That close to 5,000 dead people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia
8. That 139% of people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Detroit
9. That 200,000 more votes were recorded than the number of people who voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Pennsylvania
10. That thousands of dead people voted in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Michigan
11. That Ruby Freeman stuffed the ballot boxes
12. That hundreds of thousands of ballots had been dumped into Fulton County and another county adjacent to Fulton County in the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia
13. That he won the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia by 400,000 votes.

Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me

According to the indictment, on or about the 27th day of December 2020, DONALD JOHN TRUMP solicited Acting United States Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting United States Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue to make a false statement by stating, ‘Just say that the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.'

Really, does it get any more incriminating than this?

Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong, claiming, as per usual, that he is the victim of a witch hunt. As for Giuliani, he recently said, "This is a completely unjustified and disgusting act of retribution, as I had the temerity to unveil the biggest scandal in American history—and for that, my parents are proud of me, and I don’t give a damn about the rest." https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/donald-trump-georgia-indictment

Jonathan Last: Republican Elites Only Want the Easy Way Out

There is no easy way out for Good Republicans. Extricating the party from Trump was always going to require pain.

They declined to accept that pain in 2016. They declined again in 2020. And 2021. I see no reason to believe that they’ll finally bite the bullet in 2024. Instead, I suspect that guys like Chris Sununu will try to get along by doing the bare minimum while hoping (again) that Democrats and the rest of America bail them out and clean up the mess for them.

They fail to understand that even if Trump loses to Biden again, he’ll still own the Republican party. More at https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/republican-elites-only-want-the-easy

Jonathan Last: Would Anyone Believe You?

Let me pretend we could go back in time, to January 2017, and tell people that in six years:

• Trump will have been impeached twice.
• He will have been found guilty of rape by a jury of his peers.
• He will have been soundly defeated for re-election, but refused to concede the loss.
• In an effort to remain in power he will put in motion a vast conspiracy to overturn the result through extralegal methods.
• When this conspiracy fails he will incite a violent insurrection in which he directs his armed supporters to invade the Capitol and prevent the certification of Electoral College votes.
• He will be indicted in four separate criminal cases.
• He will seek a return to the White House explicitly for the stated purpose of retribution.
• And he will be leading the Republican field by >30 points.

The point is that six years ago I don’t think many people on either side would have believed that today’s reality was likely. Or even possible. Yet here we are, actually living in something close to the worst-case scenario.

And yet we are so habituated to this dark reality that we’ve come to see it as normal. https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-resistance-was-right

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Sidney Blumenthal: Trump’s legal woes are part of his quasi-religious mythology of martyrdom

The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).

But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else.

The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed ‘deplorables.’ He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/21/trump-election-giuliani-sidney-blumenthal

Jonathan Chait: ‘Lock Them Up’ Is Now the Republican Party’s Highest Goal

The answer is that Republicans are genuinely obsessed with the potential for using the criminal-justice system as a political weapon. They are so obsessed they don’t even wish to imagine leaving behind a world in which prosecution is linked with political identity. Victory or prison is the political environment they affirmatively wish to inhabit. Trump’s predicament hands them permission to do what they have always craved. And now the campaign, which will be anchored around a series of criminal trials, will be framed around their desire not only to keep Trump out of prison, but to lock up as many of their political opponents as they can.

If you haven’t drunk deeply from the fetid waters of the conservative fever swamp, this impulse might seem incomprehensible. Trump’s legal jeopardy is easily explained: His private sector record was a long history of shady associations with gangsters and running scams. His presidency was a continuous procession of his own advisers pleading with him not to do illegal things while he complained that his attorneys weren’t as unethical as Roy Cohn, the mob lawyer he once employed.

Within the sealed world of partisan Republican-curated news, Obama was a criminal. Hillary Clinton was a criminal. Bill Clinton was a veritable criminal mastermind. (Conservative organs as respectable as The Wall Street Journal editorial page, not to mention its seedier competitors, routinely accused Clinton of murdering Vince Foster and running a secret drug-smuggling operation out of Arkansas.)

It is a strange twist of fate that years of hysterically accusing every leading Democrat of criminality culminated in Republicans falling behind a presidential candidate who came to politics from the world of crime.

For some Republicans, the ascension of a transparently amoral swindler precipitated a psychic break from their party. But for most of them, it served merely to deepen the belief system they already subscribed to. Trump’s campaign and presidency followed directly from a mentality that detached the notion of criminality from any actual behavior and turned it into a partisan identity. Trump’s mantra — The crimes are being committed by the other side — has become a partywide doctrine.

But this idea, which has tightened its grip on conservative minds over the last generation, is now the dominant theme of the campaign. Trump’s indictments have intensified their humiliation and created an insatiable demand for revenge. The party is no longer running on policy or even culture war. It is now consumed above all with turning the criminal-justice system into an instrument of revenge. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/08/lock-them-up-is-now-the-republican-partys-highest-goal.html

Robin Abcarian: Lies, damn lies and social media — there’s a reason this country is so deeply polarized

Many unsettling statistics jumped out at me as I watched “Trustworthy: All Voices Heard,” a new documentary about how mistrust in media, exacerbated by rampant misinformation and disinformation on social media, can corrode our faith in democracy:

More than two-thirds of all Americans perceive a serious threat to our democracy.

Half of all Americans believe there will be civil war in the United States in the next few years.

And — no surprise here — two-thirds of Americans feel worn out by the news they are getting today.

“We are 100% the Divided States of America,” says Kevin Geffers Sr., a Texas painter interviewed by Stephany Zamora, a first-time filmmaker who was so unsettled by the events of Jan. 6 that she loaded up a bus with her crew and traveled more than 5,000 miles across the country interviewing journalists, media experts and civilians. Was it possible, she asked, for people on opposite sides of the political spectrum to find common ground when we can’t even agree on what is true?

“The American people are confused and frustrated,” former Fox News anchor Laurie Dhue tells the filmmaker.

“Not knowing what the truth is is terribly hard for our democracy, it scares me a lot,” says Columbia University journalism professor and historian Andie Tucher.
 
We also encounter MIT management professor Sinan Aral, who wrote “The Hype Machine,” a 2020 book about the “perils and promise” of social media. Aral, who has studied social networks for 20 years, made three predictions in the book: that fake news would catalyze political violence, that anti-vaxx misinformation could disrupt the rollout of vaccines and that social media had the power to sway equity markets. All of three came true, and it didn’t take long.

The Jan. 6 insurrection was the direct result of the execrable lie that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election from former President Trump.

In January 2021, a major vaccination effort at Dodger Stadium was interrupted when anti-vaxx protesters shut it down for nearly an hour.

Also in January 2021, a Reddit-driven effort to revive the stock price of the struggling video game retailer GameStop resulted in the stock rising 1,000% in two weeks.

“Social media is rewriting the central nervous system of humanity by algorithmically connecting, informing, nudging, persuading, mobilizing, and yes, entertaining us,” writes Aral in a new preface to “The Hype Machine.” “It’s been doing so for years, with clear, measurable and profound implications for our democracies, our economies and our public health. And it’s time we woke up to these realities.”

Where, oh, where is Walter Cronkite when you need him?

I kid.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-08-20/social-media-trustworthy-disinformation-fake-news-polarization

Alan Abramowitz: Explaining Republican Loyalty to Trump: The Crucial Role of Negative Partisanship

Negative partisanship is the key to understanding the continuing loyalty of Republican voters to former President Donald Trump. Attacks on Trump by Democrats, liberals, and mainstream media figures and even indictments by federal and state prosecutors on serious criminal charges have only served to reinforce the loyalty of Republican voters to Trump. Republican voters see these attacks and indictments as efforts by the hated opposition party and its allies to weaken the former president and prevent his return to the White House.

Similarly, in a general election matchup between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, even Republicans who have reservations about Trump overwhelmingly prefer him to Biden because they believe the portrayal of Biden by Republican leaders and conservative media outlets as a radical leftist and a threat to the survival of the nation.

As a result, it appears likely that a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 will remain highly competitive with the outcome hinging on a small number of swing voters in a handful of closely contested states — an outcome that could lend itself to attacks on the integrity of the election by the former president and his allies. https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/explaining-republican-loyalty-to-trump-the-crucial-role-of-negative-partisanship/