Trump’s Flailing But Still Despicable Attempt to Steal Election - Horowitz

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™

 

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President Donald Trump’s flailing and manifestly incompetent effort to overturn the will of the people and somehow finagle a way to serve another term after losing an election that was not even all that close certainly has had its fair share of memorable comic moments. The Trump advance team confusing the Four Seasons Hotel for the Four Seasons Landscaping Company, leading to a Trump legal team media conference with an adult bookstore in the background; the claim that the long-dead Hugo Chavez is participating in a far-flung conspiracy to change votes with Brian Kemp the current Republican Governor of Georgia; and the black hair dye dripping down Rudy Giuliani’s face as he made evidence-free wild allegations come to mind. 

Even more delicious is Giuliani and Jenna Ellis ejecting Sidney Powell from the self-described “elite legal strikeforce team” representing the president. This is like getting kicked out of the bar in Star Wars for being too odd. 

However, just because President Trump and his hapless legal crew have supplied enough new material for an entire year of Saturday Night Live, doesn’t make what he is attempting to do any less despicable. As Jonah Goldberg, a conservative critic of Trump, accurately put it, “The president of the United States is trying to steal an election he clearly and unequivocally lost.”  Even worse, most of the elected officials in the Republican Party are still along for the ride.

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President Trump’s main play is to create enough confusion and chaos as well as use his political leverage to get Republican legislatures in states he lost to appoint a new set of electors or to simply have the results not certified so that even if Trump can’t manufacture a majority in the Electoral College, he can  deny Joe Biden one, kicking the election into the House of Representatives, where each state delegation has one vote, and the Republicans control a narrow majority of the state delegations.  In other words, given the fact that he has supplied no evidence of widespread fraud, the president is working to stage an undemocratic coup, overturning the will of the people.

Senator Mitt Romney, one of the few elected Republicans to break with the president on his refusal to concede, aptly described the president’s actions. “Having failed to make even a plausible case of widespread fraud or conspiracy before any court of law, the President has now resorted to overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election. It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American President.”

Another lonely Republican voice, Senator Ben Sasse argued that the “tell” that the president’s lawyers are lying to the public when they claim there was major voter fraud in television appearances  is they will not make that same argument in a court of law: “When Trump campaign lawyers have stood before courts under oath, they have repeatedly refused to actually allege grand fraud — because there are legal consequences for lying to judges.”

Trump is recklessly proceeding with this undemocratic and constitutionally suspect maneuver and backing it up with even for him outrageous lies about how the election was ‘rigged’ against him.  As his own appointed director of the Department of Homeland Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Christopher Krebs stated, together with a bi-partisan group of election security experts, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

In attempting to deflect from Trump’s outrageous and dangerous conduct,  Trump’s media allies and many Republican elected officials point to the Russia investigation and impeachment and seem to argue that turnabout is fair play because Democrats spent four years attempting to delegitimize Donald Trump. Of course, the apples-to-apples comparison is that in a much closer election where she won the popular vote, Hillary Clinton conceded on election night and Barack Obama invited Trump to the White House two days later and fully cooperated on the transition.

In fact, as opposed to repeating those thread-bare talking points, Republican elected officials and Trump's media allies should take a hard look in the mirror. If more elected Republicans and Trump media allies had been willing to criticize Trump’s unethical, if not illegal, welcoming of Russian support in the 2016 election, his documented obstruction of justice, and his unethical and illegal withholding of military aid to Ukraine as they confronted Russian aggression in a failed effort to get the Ukrainians to announce an investigation of Joe Biden, the president may not have felt emboldened to nakedly try to steal this election.

Trump will fail in this disgraceful attempt to subvert our democracy. Joe Biden’s six million plus and counting lead in the popular vote and his 306 electoral votes simply cannot be erased by the president’s shambolic tactics.

Still, the plain fact that this is proceeding and that the Republican Party is not standing up to the president and forcing a stop to it sets a dangerous precedent and sends a terrible message to the rest of the world.  And with the coronavirus pandemic raging, the president’s refusal to even allow any cooperation on the transition is indefensible and puts more American lives at risk.

So, while this bizarre post-election ride has provided its fair share of amusement, make no mistake, it’s no laughing matter.

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Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.
 

 

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