Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu interviewed people who were in the “room where it happened,” the meeting where Trump’s lawyers duked it out with conspiracy theorists in the White House on December 18. Their account of the meeting is gripping.
Four conspiracy theorists marched into the Oval Office. It was early evening on Friday, Dec. 18 — more than a month after the election had been declared for Joe Biden, and four days after the Electoral College met in every state to make it official.
“How the hell did Sidney get in the building?” White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann grumbled from the outer Oval Office as Sidney Powell and her entourage strutted by to visit the president.
President Trump’s private schedule hadn’t included appointments for Powell or the others: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they’d come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
As Powell and the others entered the Oval Office that evening, Herschmann — a wealthy business executive and former partner at Kasowitz Benson & Torres who’d been pulled out of quasi-retirement to advise Trump — quietly slipped in behind them.
The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.
The Axios’ story is a dramatic account of a turning point that led to the Insurrection on January 6 and the second impeachment of Trump for inciting sedition.
The New York Times published a dramatic account of the 77 days in which Trump and his faithful allies planned and plotted to overturn the election he lost. I hope you can open the article. It’s Kong and well-worth the time to read. Trump has a faithful base of people who will believe anything he says, no matter how far-fetched, no evidence necessary. One thing they all have in common: they are ignorant about our Constitution and the norms of our democracy.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sorry, but when you are talking “Crazy Meetings of the Trump Presidency,” choosing any particular one is like trying to choose a trinket from Smaug’s horde. This one. No, this one. Yeah? but what about this one?
Granted, this meeting was attended by the craziest of the crazy–Trump, Powell, Flynn, Byrne. Bedlam meets Animal House.
But whaddabout. . . .
The meetings where Princess Sparkle and Slender Man convinced Daddy a) that he should run on his vast improvements to the economy (massive tax cuts for the rich and total trashing of federal environmental and consumer protection regulations to engorge the rich at a time of historic wealth and income inequality); b) that if he acknowledged the pandemic, this would hurt the economy; and c) so he should say that Covid19 was a hoax, that it would just go away any day now, and that this mask wearing and distancing was just a plot by Chaynuh and Socialist Democrats to turn the US into Venezuela?
The ones in which Stephen “Goebbels” Miller suggested that the best way to control immigration was to organize mass kidnapping of asylum-seekers children?
The meeting in which Trump SCREAMED at his Secretary of Homeland Security when she said she couldn’t just order Border Patrol Officers to SHOOT unarmed asylum seekers, with their children, fleeing violence and hunger at home and kept calling her “Honey”?
The meeting with fifty Evangelical Leaders all laying hands on Trump and thanking Jesus for Donnie? (I thought, OK, the nadir of civilization has been reached on this day.)
The one in which the same Propaganda Minister Miller decided that the proper message would be sent if, when returning to the campaign trail, if Trump held his first rally at the site of The Tulsa Race Massacre? Or the one in which it was decided that Trump should review the signature “success” of his maladministration (“immigration policy”) by going to Alamo, Texas, named after the Alama, where valient white supremacists died defending the right to bring Texas into the United States as a slave state? Or maybe the one where Ghouliani pitched the “perfect phone call”? or the one where the same paragon of legal decorum and competence set up the Mother of All Press Conferences between the crematorium and the dildo shop in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
One could go on and on. So much madness, so little time.
And if we’re talking number of nuts in the fruitcake, any Trump cabinet meeting would qualify–a meeting of persons chosen for the explicit purpose of totally trashing/vandalizing the department that he or she headed, and each given, first, 4 1/2 minutes to talk about how great Donald was and, then, 1/2 a minute to advance a policy proposal.
But for long-term consequence for the country as a whole? Well, on that, perhaps, to Trump, Powell, Flynn coven meeting wins after all, for what they were discussing was what means they might use to end democracy in the United States. Treason in the then Offal Office of the then Whiter House.
Bob Everyone who has left their jobs working at the White House has said how crazy it is. CBK
In educator terms…
Imagine a football coach, knowing the team is going to attack the other team after the game. Imagine the principal watching a group of bullies crossing the cafeteria to attack and doing nothing. What if the IT person monitoring the internet filter reads email/chat traffic that an assault is going to occur and doesn’t inform anyone.
Worse, what if that coach talked often about the other team with revenge and the team took the cue? What if the principal say in the ’60s bad mouthed those “long haired hippies” and provoked an attack knowingly or not?
The parents, public, and local news outrage would be out of the roof.
But not the EXpresident? Not the hawleys and cruzs who enabled it the lies and the EXpresident?
6 people died. Terror and trauma. Prior to that the public was being lied to by the President of the United States. Have we become so numb that that’s just like any regular person who may do something stupid? Is there anything more irresponsible (other than allowing 300,000 people to die because of stupidity and ignoring an attack on Americans)?
With few exceptions, every GOP legislator is complicit in the 77 days unpacked in the NYT article. Even Seinfeld taught them about Good Samaritan laws and that doing nothing is wrong. Keep donating to those republican accountability billboards!
Agreed: where’s the outrage?
The silence may be the worst outcome.
Time for unity…nothing to see here..keep moving.
Cruz said the other day that Dems are being “vindictive” by seeking accountability for insurrection.
Others tweeted to Cruz: what you call vindictive, we call justice.
It’s an outrage outage.
Greg nailed it the other day. After Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, Germany slapped him on the wrist.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Didn’t Hitler go to jail after the Beer Hall Putsch? Trump by contrast will get a friendly hug for inciting insurrection.
The Q people think that their riot was a great success.
Diane “The Q people think that their riot was a great success.”
Well, I guess that’s all we need to know about them. CBK
Yeah, but as you know, his jail cell was like Epstein’s. All the luxuries. And Hitler served only one year of a five-year sentence for what was EXPLICITLY an armed coup–an attempt to take over the government–in which a bunch of people died. Hitler took the brief sabbatical to write Mein Kampf.
If Trump isn’t convicted in the Senate, then it will have been. All those morons in the Capitol will take the fall for him. That’s the M.O. of the Teflon Don v2.0.
Bob Also, it looks to me like Taylor-Greene is channeling Trump’s fundamental ideology . . . a toxic optimism aimed at self-admiration, held together by the dogmatic idea that, on principle, I CANNOT BE WRONG, which is further fueled from below by an undeveloped AND distorted ego.
Andrea Mitchell put it this way this morning: Greene shows no contrition. CBK
Diane During the first impeachment trial, while watching the Republicans “just sit there,” even in the face of Romney’s utter sanity in the face of it, I remember thinking that, if ever we saw examples of what it means to have a “hard heart,” it was then.
It’s the metaphorical but REAL wall. Also, after seeing the events occur AFTER January 6, I don’t see much difference, if any, in their attitudes.
I saw on the news this morning that Georgia legislators are introducing bills to make it more difficult to vote in upcoming elections. CBK
An outrage outage. That’s good, GregB!
Technically Hitler was sent to jail, but it was actually more of a sabbatical. He was sent to the prison in Landsberg on the Lech, about 50 miles west of Munich in advance of his trial, which was to be held there. He was housed in a VIP wing that contained only one other prisoner, Count Arco-Valley, another right winger who assassinated the socialist head of the Bavarian Government, Kurt Eisner (there is a brass outline of where Eisner’s body fell on the street where he was killed in Munich). The warden of the prison roused Arco-Valley out of his bed, in the most comfortable room in the prison, and moved him to another room so that Hitler would get it.
The trial was a farce. Hitler was one of ten defendants, and not the most prominent. That was Erich Ludendorff, the second-in-command of the German Army in the last two years of WWI and also the source of the knife-in-the-back lie that socialists undermined the military leading to defeat and the most prominent person who participated in the Putsch. As Charles Bracelen Flood noted in Hitler: The Path to Power, the trial was quickly derailed; it was not a trial of the ten for treason, instead, “the question at issue was not Ludendorff’s conduct, but the nature and policies of the national government whose attitudes had driven Ludendorff to such desperate measures.” Additionally, “the atmosphere was rather that of a right-wing testimonial dinner than a trial in which he was accused of the crime of high treason.”
International coverage of the trial catapulted Hitler’s name from a regional pest to a national figure. He denied that his acts were treasonous but rather that he was “a German who desired what was best for his people” as he went to lengthy, sometimes hours long diatribes as he turned the trial into a farce. During the sentencing, the judge said, “The Court has also become convinced the motives of he defendants were genuinely patriotic, noble, and selfless…This does not justify their plans, but it does provide the key to understanding their actions.” When he was convicted, he was slapped on the wrist, given a five-year sentence that would make him eligible for parole in six months.
During those six months, extra telephone lines were brought into the prison, some of his fellow inmates, including Rudolf Hess, transcribed his hours-long ravings into what would become Mein Kampf, which was mostly ignored until it became required reading after he came to power. He could receive guests, they brought food and news from the outside, and when he was released, the prison warden became one of his most ardent adherents. When he left, he was national figure who was seen as a martyr by his followers, not a criminal.
Greg,
It sounds like summer camp, not prison. Trump won’t get even that minimal detention.
Perfect analogy, What, Wait! Would that one or more of our elected leaders will make the point as clearly and precisely and vividly as this!
Some of Trump’s powerful supporters have been swept up in the mass sycophancy and hysteria. Others are fully aware that they are violating law and the constitution. They want power and will do anything, anything, anything to gain or hold it. For them democracy is a dispensable inconvenience. It is not possible to negotiate with either group.
Watch Trump Mini-Me Governor DeSatan in 2024. He ordered the state to stop collecting and posting information on Covid hospitalizations and deaths. When the official in charge left and started doing it on her own, he sent a SWAT team into her home. When the people of Florida show their will via a referendum, he devises a way to subvert it. And he just put forward legislation enabling using goons to keep lawful protest and assembly from occurring.
A smarter, more articulate, better looking fascist than Trump ever was, and so even more dangerous.
DeSatan knew that leaving the beaches and bars open during Spring Break at a time of a deadly, airborne pandemic was extraordinarily dangerous–he’s smart enough and educated enough to know that, but he just didn’t give a Trump.
The crazy will soon be on a bus tour organized by Bannon, et al. Fools will soon be parted with more of their money to underwrite and spread it.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/jan-rally-organizer-planning-maga-sellout-tour-targeting/story?id=75620438
Trump, as we all know, is profoundly ignorant and profoundly stupid. However, Bannon is simply insane. Mate Wierdl posted here a link to Bannon’s YouTube podcast in which Bannon laid out, at the beginning of this, the whole Trump plan: a) get states to appoint Trump electors instead of the ones that were voted for, b) appeal the election results to the Supreme Court, c) take it to the streets. And Bannon was clear that in his mind, this was war, and the Trumpties would win. It was Bannon, Sessions, and Miller who plucked Trump out of the sewer and coached him to run for the presidency to carry their white supremacist agenda forward. Bannon and Miller have always been what passes, in Trump, for a brain.
The Manhattan DA may prosecute Bannon for the charges that Trump pardoned.
awesome
Four conspiracy theorists (CTs) walk into the White House
CT 1: Have I got Conspiracy for you: Democrats fixed the vote
CT2 That’s nothing: Democrats worship Satan
CT 3: I can do better. Democrats eat their own children.
CT 4: I can top you all: A lying, p***grabbing reality TV star who encouraged rioters to lay siege to the Capitol has taken over the White House and Republican party
You see, not all conspiracy theories are false.