I’ve mostly ignored Donald Trump’s whining about alleged “election fraud.” His lawyers can’t show courts reasoned legal arguments or even a hint of factual evidence to support his claims. Recently, a district judge’s opinion trashing Trump’s case was unanimously upheld by a three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, all Republican appointees. The decision was written by the judge Trump had appointed.
Courts are laughing. Trump is laughing – all the way to the bank. His election-fraud fairy tales have brought in $200 million. People contribute to keep elections pure, and Trump will use the money as he likes. One big donor has sued Trump for fraud, having donated $1.5 million to fight election fraud before realizing there’s no there there. (Get in line, pal!)
Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell are downright comical. Facebook friends post Trump’s attorneys’ promises to provide evidence tomorrow that will rock the world. When no evidence gets provided, my Facebook friends fall silent about that, and repost some investigative report that Joe Biden shot Santa Claus in the gut and buggered one of the elves.
More serious people keep reminding me that not only do elections have consequences, but widely-disseminated manure can too. The analysis that has me breaking my resolution not to mention Mr. Trump is by Jochen Bittner, a co-head of the debate section for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
When Germany lost World War I, the conservatives who’d started the War refused to accept the loss. Their denial started the “stab-in-the-back” myth that liberals and Jews had betrayed the Nation. Like Trump’s denials, it made no sense; but it was emotionally satisfactory to returning soldiers, and, years later, Adolf Hitler brilliantly exploited it.
Notes Bittner, "Without a basic consensus built on a shared reality, society split into groups of ardent, uncompromising partisans. And in an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, the notion that dissenters were threats to the nation steadily took hold.” (Sound familiar?)
Already, Trump’s claims of cheating have inspired Trump partisans to threaten to execute civil servants who are counting the votes. The problem has become so serious that Georgia Republicans are begging Trump to stop, lest lives be lost. The backlash could affect Georgia’s two U.S. Senate campaigns, but Trump doesn’t care. He’s showing, yet again, that Trump cares only about Trump.
Even Trump’s lapdog, Attorney-General William Barr, who violated DOJ norms to help Trump, has had to admit there’s no sign of significant fraud. Meanwhile, two convicted felons Trump got out of jail are singing Trump’s song. Roger Stone (whom Barr got released early) stated this week, "I just learned of absolute incontrovertible evidence of North Korean boats delivering ballots through a harbor in Maine." Meanwhile perjurer Michael Flynn (pardoned by Trump) urged Trump to “temporarily suspend” the Constitution and redo the election. Says Flynn, “Today, the current threat to our United States by the international and domestic socialist/communist left is much more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has faced in its history – including the civil war.” (Say what!?!?)
People believe these clowns. Like poisonous chemicals oozing downhill from an industrial accident, this stuff will damage us. Meanwhile, the spectacle distracts from immediate and substantial harms: Trump eviscerating the non-partisan civil service and illegally pushing Congressionally-authorized emergency COVID-19 funds out of Biden’s reach.
- 30 -
[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 6 December 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website on the newspaper's website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]
[Trump’s graceless exit thoroughly matches his performance in office. As the nation hits new records for new coronavirus cases and deaths, Trump, depressed, is barely even pretending to work. By one count, he tweeted 145 times in a week about his hurt feelings from the election, and four times about the pandemic – basically to insist that he was right. There is little doubt that dozens or scores of the deaths could have been avoided had we had a grownup in the White House. Trump isn’t too interested in all the dead, let alone doing anything constructive about it, except to insist he isn’t at all responsible. He’s consistently valued his own interests above the nation’s.
But what’s also consistent is that in groaning over his absurd shenanigans, we give shorter shrift than we might to the ugly things being done in his name. For example, leftover emergency funds for coronavirus, authorized by law with any excess remaining in 2026 required to be returned,, could have been useful to folks who are struggling to deal with all this. Trump’s lackey, Mnuchin, insisted on returning what’s in the account to the Federal Reserve Bank, preventing the new administration from using it for its intended purpose. The Fed said “Please, don’t,” but Mnuchin insisted. Did Trump know or care? Meanwhile, an important protection we have against dictatorship is an independent civil service that is supposed to do what’s right, without partisanship, which minimizes the possible pressure by any President (Republican, Democrat, or Green) to do what’s right for the President’s pals or political future, rather than what’s good for the nation. Trump and Co. are trying to “reclassify” huge numbers of employees so that they – and ultimately we, the people – lose that protection. Meanwhile he abruptly withdrew all our troops from Somalia. I frankly haven’t looked into that, and have no opinion, except that it wasn’t a considered, thought-out, rational decision.]
[Meanwhile, his sulking and screaming are what they are. Peter Baker's story in the New York Times reported recent incidents, and the efforts by some Republicans to get Trump to focus on at least the election of two U.S. Senators from Georgia. Baker quoted Shakespearean scholar Jeffrey R. Wilson (author of Shakespeare and Trump):
“This is classic Act V behavior. The forces are being picked off and the tyrant is holed up in his castle and he’s growing increasingly anxious and he feels insecure and he starts blustering about his legitimate sovereignty and he starts accusing the opposition of treason.”
This morning (Sunday) we heard a former Georgia Senator trying to be delicate about Trump’s appearance at a rally for the two Republican Senatorial candidates. (Another story noted that Trump “briefly invited them up on the stage with him.”) Trump spent most of his speaking-time repeating vague and groundless claims he’d been cheated; but the alleged cheating was done in Georgia by a Republican Secretary of State (who
telling folks the process is controlled by evil Communists, so that his victory was stolen from him, doesn’t exactly motivate his fans to rush out to brave the pandemic and vote. The former Georgia Senator said he couldn’t explain what had motivated those two Senate candidates to echo Trump’s “election fraud” nonsense, when there was no evidence of anything beyond the usual isolated incidents (presumably on both sides) during the 3 November election.]
No comments:
Post a Comment