Trump
knows no limits as he tries to overturn the election
By
Jan. 3, 2021 at 5:44 p.m. CST
There are but 16 days
left in President Trump’s term, but there is no doubt that he will use all of
his remaining time in office to inflict as much damage as he can on democracy —
with members of a now-divided Republican Party acting as enablers.
That there are no
limits to the lengths to which he will go in this ruinous effort was made clear
from a phone call he made Saturday to Georgia
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. In the call, Trump repeatedly urged
Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to allow the secretary to recalculate the
election results to show that the president, rather than President-elect Joe Biden,
won the state.
The call, an audio of which was obtained by The
Washington Post’s Amy Gardner, was as outrageous as it was chilling. Legal
experts can debate how close to the line Trump was with the telephone call.
Others can speculate about the president’s current state of mind. The contents
of the call speak for themselves, and the audio excerpts should be heard by
anyone who cares about the integrity of elections in America.
Here was a desperate
president alternately begging, pleading, cajoling and, yes, seeming to threaten
a state official — and fellow Republican — by asking for a change in the
outcome of an election that already had been recounted and then certified.
The president was not
arguing facts or offering evidence. Having failed time and again with multiple
lawsuits brought by his campaign’s legal teams or their allies, all of which
were rejected by the courts, Trump had nothing of substance to offer, just
bluster and baseless claims that he has made nonstop since he lost. He was
trolling with rumor, innuendo (and the muscle that comes with calling from the
White House), attempting one more time to bully and intimidate Raffensperger.
At one point, Trump
said told the secretary of state: “All I want to do is this. I just want to
find 11,780 votes [Biden won the state by 11,779 votes], which is
one more than we have. Because we won the state.” At another point, he claimed
that he had won by “hundreds of thousands of votes.” At another he offered that
he had heard rumors of ballot shredding in Fulton County, home to Atlanta.
Raffensperger has
endured verbal abuse and threats to his safety throughout the entire process of
counting, recounting and certifying Georgia’s results. He has stood firm, as he
did once again on Saturday, pushing back politely and repeatedly saying that
the president’s statements were incorrect.
Ryan Germany, the
general counsel to the secretary of state, was similarly direct when Trump
claimed that voting machines had been removed or in some way tampered with.
“No,” he said. Asked whether he was sure of this, he said, “I’m sure. I’m sure,
Mr. President.”
Trump will never let
this go, not between now and the day he is forced to give up the office and
Biden is sworn in, not in the days and weeks and months after that. That he is
on a mission is evident, but to what end, other than to avoid the ignominious label
of “loser” after a single term in the White House? That, at least, is
consistent with the behavior he has exhibited throughout the four years of his
presidency. He cares nothing about collateral damage to democracy.
The president,
however, is not on this mission alone. Instead, he continues to gather support
from members of a party he has remade in his own image. On Wednesday, members
of the House and the Senate will meet to approve the results from the electoral
college. Those results show that Biden won 306 votes to Trump’s 232. Vice
President Pence will be in the chair, ultimately to read out that he and Trump
have lost the election, as a few other vice presidents have done in the past.
But there will be
objections in both chambers, debates and votes, prolonging what is normally a
pro forma process and a brief way station to the transfer of power. Trump’s
many allies in the House have made it clear that they will object to the
results from a handful of states.
For a time, it was
questionable whether any member of the Senate would do so. Now there are a
dozen, led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who plan
to challenge those results. Pence added his support to those efforts.
Their argument is
that, because there are allegations of improper voting or counting, Congress
should step in by appointing a commission to run a 10-day “audit” of disputed
states and then those states could call special sessions to evaluate the
findings and, if necessary, certify new results. It’s difficult to imagine that
this crash investigation of states, some of which have already scrubbed and rescrubbed
their results, would produce something new.
For the most part,
these Republicans claim they are not actually seeking to overturn the election
results but only want to give voice to the allegations and the concerns of
people who question the results — people who have been told repeatedly by Trump
and his allies that the allegations of fraud are in fact actual fraud. Yet they
persist.
The Republicans who
will object are acting on the basis either of fear of the president or sheer
political opportunism, or both. Some are weighing a 2024 presidential campaign
and know that being on the wrong side of Trump could mean certain defeat.
Some of the
Republicans who have joined this effort point to 2004, when a few Democrats
objected to the election results in Ohio. But in that case, John F. Kerry, the
Democratic nominee, disavowed the effort. Others point to 1877, when a
commission was appointed to resolve a dispute about the 1876 results. But in
that case, unlike now, several states had not been certified in the electoral
college.
The party is now
fracturing over the efforts to disrupt Wednesday’s procedure. After Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-Mo.) became the first senator to announce that he would raise
objections when Congress meets this week, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Mo.) rebuked the
“institutional arsonist” members in both houses, saying they were “playing with
fire” by raising objections without evidence of fraud on a scale that would
overturn the election.
In the wake of the
announcement on Saturday by Cruz and his colleagues, other Republicans have
weighed in with caustic criticism. Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) called what Cruz and
the others are doing “an egregious ploy” that “dangerously threatens our
democratic Republic. … I could never have imagined seeing these things in the
greatest democracy in the world. Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”
Former House speaker
Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) issued a statement Sunday that said that the efforts to
upend the electoral college results “strike at the foundation of our republic,”
adding that he could not think 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.”
Contrast Ryan’s
statement to the behavior of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.),
who added his name to the more than 100 House Republicans who joined an
ill-fated Texas lawsuit to overturn the results in four states, a move that was
summarily dismissed by the Supreme Court, and who by some accounts had lent
quiet support to the efforts by House members to object on Wednesday.
Trump appears
determined to do everything he can to disrupt the last formal step ahead of
Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, including urging supporters to rally in the
capital on Wednesday. The efforts by the president and his allies further
threaten to undermine Biden’s presidency. Even more so, they add to the
discredit Trump has brought on himself by trafficking in conspiracies and
playing the victim.
