With fewer than 16 days left in his term, Donald Trump continues to try to wheedle, bully, beseech, and whine his way into staying in office beyond January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in — as revealed in the recording of an hour long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (reminiscent of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky).
“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made any sense.”
In addition to rally size, Trump made many disparate appeals — to rumors, social media trends, conspiracy theories, and lies, none of which were grounded in fact, evidence, or reason.
A rambling Trump brought up 250-300,000 mysteriously lost ballots; a couple hundred thousand forged signatures; the promise of providing an accurate number – in the 50s of thousands – “with certified accountants”; 4,504 voters who weren’t registered; 18,325 vacant address voters; 904 with only post office box numbers; a burst water main (and vanishing Republican poll watchers); suitcases or trunks with ballots, rather than official ballot boxes; 4,925 out-of-state voters; 2,326 absentee ballots with addresses, but no names; drop boxes that were picked up, but not delivered for three days according to affidavits from many people; ballots dropped in massive numbers; close to 5,000 ballots from dead people; 300,000 fake ballots; 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots; a big issue with Dominion removing voting machines, or replacing the internal parts; a person identified on the internet as responsible for 18,000 to 56,000 phony ballots, including a “devastating” new tape showing the ballots fed through voting machines 3 times; and a “corrupt” Fulton County taking advantage of Raffensperger.
The vote margin of Biden’s win — 11,779 — is referenced multiple times, including the ask that Raffensperger somehow, someway find 11,780 votes to put Trump ahead in the count.
Trump reminds the Secretary of State that he is a Republican, calls him a child, objects that the GBI and FBI (who have found no evidence of voter fraud) are “either dishonest or incompetent,” and mocks him: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell ya.”
Trump references “corrupt” ballots, warning Raffensperger:
And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.
Whatever else this call reveals about the pathetic, incoherent, flailing narcissist who sits in the White House, it exposes something else: an abuse of power that clearly constitutes impeachable conduct.
The President of the United States is actively, compulsively (albeit fecklessly) intent on overturning the results of a democratic election.
A majority of the Republican caucus in the House is on board with this theft, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, while nine-term member (and former judge), Louie Gohmert, responded to his loss in federal court (where he sought to overturn Trump’s defeat) with these words: “But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not gonna touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.”
In the Senate, a dozen Republicans intend to resist Biden’s victory.
A handful of Senate Republicans have spoken out against these attacks on an election that was free and fair, and in which Donald Trump lost decisively. Most prominent among these dissenters are Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. But most national Republicans are Trump enablers — actively endorsing his conspiracy theories that Biden’s election was fraudulent; pretending that the election is in doubt, while dodging and weaving to avoid embracing the lie that Trump won; or maintaining silence, so as not to offend their vindictive leader.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose a grave threat to democratic governance. The GOP is seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, cast aside the votes of millions of Americans, and keep the Republican loser in power. That is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
A full recording and transcript of the call is available from the Washington Post; the link to the recording in the first paragraph is from Atlanta’s 11Alive on YouTube.
(Screengrab of firefighter extinguishing an arson fire at a ballot drop box in Los Angeles from KCBS report.)