As we learned in the recording of his outrageous conversation with the Georgia Secretary of State, Trump will stop at nothing in his crazed efforts to cling to his office. He has lost interest in governing, but not in ruling. His base believes whatever claptrap he spews. Some theorize that it was Trump who released the recording of the conversation where he bullied Brad Raffensperger and tried to persuade him to “find” enough votes to reverse the results in Georgia. The recording allowed him to get all his nutty conspiracy theories into the public space, magnified by massive coverage. Since Georgia’s electoral votes would not be enough to change the outcome of the election, we can safely assume that Trump had similar conversations with state election officials in other states. He doesn’t seem to understand that the election is over. The votes were counted and recounted. The Electoral College met, and Biden won. The process on January 6 is supposed to be ceremonial not consequential. Trump’s surrogates sued to try to give the Vice-President the power to overturn the duly certified slates of electors and recognize alternate pro-Trump slates instead, but that lawsuit was dismissed in Texas by a federal judge appointed by Trump; when it was appealed to the Federal Appeals Court, a three-judge panel (all appointed by Republican presidents) affirmed the lower court decision to toss out the lawsuit.
However, Politico says that the call was recorded and released by the Georgia Secretary of State, for his own protection. He was burned once before by Lindsay Graham. Let’s give credit where credit is due: Secretary of State Raffensperger, a lifetime Republican, refused to be cowed by Graham; he refused to be cowed by Trump. He stood strong for election integrity, despite the pressure. He is an American hero.
Here is the full recording and transcript.
Politico wrote:
The story of the extraordinary call of a president pushing a top election official to rig the Georgia results was broken by the superb reporting of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein and the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, but the backstory is almost as interesting.
It started on Saturday when Trump and his team reached out to talk to Raffensperger, who, according to an adviser, felt he would be unethically pressured by the president. Raffensperger had been here before: In November he accused Trump ally and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham of improperly exhorting him to meddle in the election to help Trump win Georgia. Graham later denied it.
So why not record the call with the president, Raffensperger’s advisers thought, if nothing else for fact-checking purposes. “This is a man who has a history of reinventing history as it occurs,” one of them told Playbook. “So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary. Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah, after that call, we decided maybe we should do this.”
The call took place Saturday afternoon. “Mr. President,” announced Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, at the top of the call, “everyone is on the line.” Little did he know. Trump made his ask and did most of the talking for the next hour, trafficking in the same conspiracy theories about election fraud that no court or criminal investigator has found credible. At the end of the call, Trump complains, “What a schmuck I was.”
Raffensperger’s team kept quiet about the call and the recording and waited. The president made the next move, claiming on Sunday morning via Twitter that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer” questions about his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true,” Raffensperger replied at 10:27 a.m. “The truth will come out.” It wasn’t an empty promise.
Now the best that Trump can hope for is to draw thousands of his rabid, armed supporters to the Capitol to threaten others and to create chaos. This won’t change the outcome of the election, unless Trump invokes the nineteenth-century Insurrection Act and declares martial law.
The Boston Globe published this editorial:
For worried residents of the District of Columbia, President Trump’s flailing efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election that he lost no longer seem quite so funny. With the prospect of unrest in the nation’s capital when Trump’s loss is formalized on Wednesday, Republicans have run out of excuses for continuing to indulge Trump’s anti-democratic rants.
Not a single state or federal court has accepted the preposterous conspiracy theories floated by Trump and his supporters to explain his loss, ranging from zany stories of North Koreans smuggling ballots into Maine to supposed Sharpie malfunctions in Arizona. No election has been as thoroughly scrutinized as the 2020 vote, and even Trump’s own Justice Department acknowledges it couldn’t find any serious fraud, much less the vast plots of Trump’s imagination.
To their credit, state Republican officials in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and other states rejected those fictions. National Republicans, from Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell on down, have (belatedly) also acknowledged Joe Biden as the victor. In fact, the election wasn’t especially close: Democratic candidate Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes, and with an Electoral College margin identical to Trump’s 2016 victory.Get Today in Opinion in your inboxGlobe Opinion’s must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. Enter EmailSign Up
But the president remains immersed in his conspiratorial fantasyland, careening from one delusional idea to another, apparently in hopes that one fringe theory will finally pay off, a deus ex whackina that changes the ending of the 2020 election.
And on Wednesday, when Congress meets to formally certify Biden’s victory, Trump has called for his supporters to descend on Washington for a protest he said would be “wild.”
Of course, protesting is any American’s right. But especially considering the way the last gathering of Trump supporters in Washington descended into violence, lawmakers need to stop giving oxygen to his efforts and firmly reject expected challenges to the vote-certifying on Wednesday. Trump’s fellow Republicans have mostly indulged him by treating his complaints as plausibly legitimate. But that’s only emboldened what would otherwise be a crackpot fringe. By doing so, they’re risking a greater likelihood of trouble on the streets of Washington in the short term, and more lasting damage to trust in democracy in the long term.
Certifying an election is a ministerial job, not a policy decision; it’s not Congress’s job on Wednesday to say whether they like the results of an election or the way that states conducted their votes. Still, if even a single House member and a single senator object to a state’s electoral votes, it triggers a mandatory two-hour debate in Congress and then a vote on whether to accept the state’s votes. As of Saturday, eleven GOP senators and senators-elect had pledged to join House members in objecting to some states’ electoral votes. Trump and his supporters had been pushing members of Congress to object to states Biden won, and demanding that Vice President Mike Pence — who will preside over the count in a ceremonial capacity — switch Biden states to Trump, which he does not have the power to do. (In another dead-end lawsuit, some GOP lawmakers tried to change the law dating back to the 19th century to give Pence the authority to override voters.)
Seeking to avoid a debacle, McConnell lobbied Republican senators not to raise objections to Biden’s victories, apparently unsuccessfully. Meanwhile, according to a top aide, Pence supports the GOP lawmakers’ egregious plan to legitimize the president’s conspiracy theories on the floor of Congress.
Ever since election day, Republicans have generally defended Trump’s challenges to the outcome as within his legal rights. Likewise, insisting on a floor debate on individual states’ presidential votes is perfectly legal. But what is legally permissible and what is right for a polarized and frazzled country aren’t the same.
The country needs to turn the page not just on Trump, but also the toxic brand of conspiracism that he’s mainstreamed into American politics. That won’t be easy. But members of Congress ought to do their part by publicly rejecting Trump’s conspiracy-laced demands to subvert the electoral count, and recognizing Biden’s clear victory. Those who do not don’t deserve to be in public office in a democracy.
The rising crescendo of far right voices is evidence that there are plenty of republican politicians that think that the only way to stay relevant to their voters is to join in this ridiculous charade. Whether this bodes well for the stability of the republic is one question. Whether it is not a death knell for the republican party is quite another.
We could be watching the decline and fall of the Republican Empire.
What power would emerge from the ashes of this once proud group? Can they survive the next round of elections without appealing to an increasingly radical fringe? Will centrist Republicans bolt and create their own party if they are unable to purge the wackos from their midst?
And how will Democrats react? Will progressives continue their alliance with the middle of the party?
Roy And then there is Stacy Abrams. CBK
View in browser | nytimes.com
The New York Times
BREAKING NEWS
President Trump falsely asserted that Vice President Mike Pence can unilaterally throw out electors. Here’s how the election tally actually works.
Tuesday, January 5, 2021 12:04 PM EST
Mr. Trump escalated his efforts to force Mr. Pence to overturn President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, but the vice president plays a crucial but largely ceremonial role in certifying the election results in Congress.
It’s code red disturbing, and there’s so much that’s disturbing about this whole Trump fiasco, that too many Americans are buying into Trump’s lies, fantasies and conspiracy theories. And then there are the crazies who are ready, willing and able to resort to violence in service to this amoral worthless sack of human flesh otherwise known as Trump. Trump will do anything to maintain power including destroying what’s left of our democracy and inciting a civil war.
Thanks, Joe. New Lang Hughes poem for me!
This was supposed to thank LCT below. See what can happen when you are back in school.
No prob, I also thank LCT for the Langston Hughes poem.
There is a Langston Hughes poem that is simply, maybe even shockingly perfect for the MAGA Boy-King:
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Not sure how much of a hero he is when 198,000 voters were thrown off in Georgia. There is more to this story.
Could Trump be giving Raffenfsberger cover for his purge of voter rolls by making him look like a stand up guy despite the purges described in the Democracy Now article?
Stacey Abrams won’t say anything positive about Kemp or Raffensperger. She lost the governorship because so many black voters were purged when she ran.
But it still took a very strong spine for Raffensperger to say no to Trump. Listen to the call.
I agree with your last paragraph, Diane, & Raffensperger has been getting death threats (his family, as well) for the certification of the GA votes (Sterling, as well). They did do the right thing this time.
I have to wonder, though, if some of this is creating smoke & mirrors in GA (not on the part of Raffensperger, but from it45, et.al.) to skew/cover up the Senate elections. I am hoping–if it’s not in favor of either Ossoff or Warnock or both–that they will mount a challenge.
I know this has been a downfall in the Dem arena all over: close elections going unchallenged. Having worked with election protection groups yes, Virginia, election fraud does exist. (Not talking voter fraud–extremely rare, as we know.) So many states suppressing the Black vote–esp. GA (Stacey Abrams should have been Gov. but for that–& so many people would not have contacted Covid/died.)
Believe me, the numbers were waay off in KY.
So–is itch legit?!
I just read that 80% of Georgia Republicans think the presidential election in their state was not fair.
Diane At least in this abstract event, it seems Raffensperger just didn’t let his political views get in the way of just doing his job as an elections official . . . as Pence seems to be ready to do today . . . his job as vice president in this Constitutionally prescribed event. CBK
The 1,500 strong DC National Guard has been activated to respond to pro-Trump protests.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/01/04/dc-national-guard-activated-for-protests-as-mayor-urges-calm/
The U.S. Capitol Police force that protects Congress has more than 2,300 officers and civilian employees, and they have increase security for January 6th.
https://www.rollcall.com/2020/12/31/capitol-police-to-enhance-security-at-jan-6-session-to-certify-election/
The DC Metro Police Department has about 4,000 uniformed officers.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/photos-dc-braces-for-conflict-as-trump-supporters-descend-on-the-capitol/2529596/
And, less than two hours from DC by air is the headquarters for the US Army’s Special Operations Command at Fort Benning, straddling Alabama and Georgia.
https://www.soc.mil/
It would be ironic if the almost 30,000 active-duty troops stationed at Fort Benning Georgia were called to DC to put down Trump’s racist militias attempting to pull off a violent coup to take over the U.S. for their Dear Leader the Lowly Donald Trump.
https://installations.militaryonesource.mil/military-installation/fort-benning/base-essentials/major-units
Great post Diane, that just sums up the day and the moment.