Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College.
Baby Steps: Trump’s First
“Stolen Election” Lies.
__________
“We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.”
Donald J. Trump
__________
YOU MAY NOT recall, but Donald has been
peddling “Stolen Election” lies for more than a decade. Again, what does
experience prove? Donald will always say elections are stolen if he
doesn’t like the results.
“We should have a revolution in this country.”
Early
2011: Donald hops the racist bandwagon, and spends the next five years insisting
that Barack Obama is an illegitimate president. He claims he can prove
Obama was not born in Hawaii.
Across
the right-wing universe the story spreads: Obama was born in Kenya.
(Millions of the future MAGA faithful,
believed this lie.)
(See: September 16, 2016.)
November
6, 2012 – Election Night: Twenty
minutes after
polls close on the West Coast, Trump has already worked himself up into a
tweeting tizzy. Millions of votes are still being tallied, but he jumps to the
conclusion that Obama has lost the popular vote. “He lost the
popular vote by a lot and won the election,” Donald howls. “We should have a
revolution in this country!”
“The phoney [sic] electoral college made a laughing
stock out of our nation,” he fumes. “The loser one [sic]! We can’t let this
happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is
totally divided!”
Obama
goes on, once all the ballots are counted, to win the popular vote. No revolution required.
(Trump,
of course, loses the popular vote four years later.)
Trump claimed the election was stolen from Mitt Romney.
February
3, 2016: Now running for president, himself, Donald finishes second in the GOP primary caucus in Iowa.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa,” he whines,
“he stole it.”
September 16: Trump realizes that his
perceived racism is hurting him with open-minded voters. “President Barack
Obama was born in the United States, period,” he finally admits. That’s
it. Nine f**king words.
He never apologizes
for spreading birther lies.
(Millions
of the MAGA kind don’t get the message.)
(They
still think Obama was born in Kenya.)
(Today,
some MAGA folk believe Biden is a robot – controlled by Mr.
Obama!!!)
Fall
2016: Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pays off Stormy, the
Bunny, and a doorman who knows about the impregnated housekeeper.
(Cohen later goes to jail for breaking campaign
finance laws.)
Candidate
Pussy Grabber is accused of grabbing the body parts of 16 or 22 different women, depending on how you
count.
Trump ally, Roger Stone, creates a group
called “Stop the Steal.” He’s preparing to spread the lie that the election in
November has been stolen.
(Stone
goes on to rack up seven felonies in service to President Trump.)
(He
later gets a Golden Pardon.)
Stone's tattoo says it all.
November 8 – Election Day, 2016: Donald insists, while
votes are still being counted, that the game is “fixed” against him.
Yet he wins.
November 9: Hillary Clinton calls Mr. Trump in the early morning hours and concedes defeat.
“We owe him an open mind
and a chance to lead,” she tells supporters.
November 27: The president-elect
decides claims he won the
popular vote. Donald insists millions voted
illegally, especially in California, and says machines
switched his votes to Hillary.
A reasonably intelligent individual would ask why Democrats bothered
to steal millionsof votes in California, but not 10,705 in
Michigan, a state which Mrs. Clinton lost by 10,704 votes.
Or 23,000 in Wisconsin.
Or 54,000 in Pennsylvania.
January 25, 2017: On Mr. Trump’s fifth day in office, he relates the sad
saga of Bernhard Langer, a golfing pro. Mr. Langer so wanted his vote to
count in the 2016 election, but he was denied his rights!
The free press checks out his story; and we learn that Mr. Langer never
tried to vote. Mainly because he wasn’t a U.S. citizen.
Two days
later, top White House aide Stephen Miller tells reporters that the problem of
illegal voters swarming to the polls is real. He insists that “millions of people who were registered
in two states or who were dead were registered to vote” and flocked to the
polls. The free press soon
reports that these criminals, registered in two states, include
White House aide Steve Bannon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, White
House Son-in-Law Jared Kushner, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Even
Tiffany Trump is registered twice,
in Pennsylvania and New York.
All politicians make exaggerated
claims, but during his 2016 campaign, Donald makes claims that defy all math. He
variously claims that the real unemployment rate under Mr. Obama is 18%, 28%,
or even 42%. He insists that 93
million Americans are still looking for gainful employ.
Sean Hannity thought
that number, 93 million would look even worse, if he just claimed the real
ranks of unemployed Americans numbered 95 million. Goddam that Obama!
(Millions
of the MAGA faithful accept these #’s without question.)
(Remember
these numbers. See below.)
February 2017: Speaker of the House of
RepresentativesPaul Ryanassures the American
people that there is “no evidence”to support the
new president’s claim that millions of illegal voters had shown up at the polls
in November. Sen. Lindsey Graham has not been neutered yet, and he agrees.
The election wasn’t stolen.
At the same time, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate is 4.7% in
January 2017, when Obama steps down from office.
Donald insists the
numbers are “phony,” and “rigged,” and warns that the people at the Bureau are
commies.
(I made
the “commies” one up.)
March 2017, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 206,000 jobs have been added in
February. Unemployment ticks down to 4.6 percent. Suddenly, Trump loves the numbers reported by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. At a minimum, however, we must believe that he has cut the
jobless rate from 18% to 4.6% in one month, by adding 206,000 jobs.
Who knows at that
point, that Donald has been lying? The people at the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
Also math teachers.
No one on Team Trump
ever explains what happened. If Donald added 206,000 jobs, what happened to the
other 92,794,000 Americans he swore were unemployed under Goddam Kenyan Obama?
(The
MAGA folk never puzzle over any of this.)
May 11, 2017: Trump signs an executive order to create a
Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity. The Committee is tasked
with uncovering all the skullduggery that Donald
says occurred during the 2016 election. Mike Pence is chair, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris
Kobach is vice chair. Kobach is famous for cleaning up “massive” voter fraud in
the “Sunflower State.” He secured nine convictions, over the course of multiple elections, in a
state with a population of 1.8 million. At least three of the nine are
known to have cast votes for Trump.
(The Committee meets only twice, never issues a final report, and
disbands in January 2018.)
The Russia investigation in a nutshell.
July 7, 2017: On this day, Trump meets with Vladimir Putin for the first
time. Putin is the man who likes to have political opponents thrown off high
balconies. Donald and Vlad hit it off from the start. Donald tells reporters he
believes Vlad when Vlad says Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election.
(Manafort and
Flynn will also get Golden Pardons.)
August
22, 2018: Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, takes a plea
deal in the case of the illegal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, Karen
McDougal, and a Trump Tower doorman. He gets sent to the slammer. Trump is
listed in court documents as “Unindicted Co-conspirator 1.”
(Department of Justice
protocol holds that a sitting president cannot be indicted.)
(Trump has now been
indicted for his role in this payoff scheme.)
Turnout in 2020 is going to be huge.
November 6, 2018 – Election Day: Trump has promised a
massive “red wave” is coming in the midterms. Instead, Democrats outpoll Republicans by 8.6 million votes in
all U.S. House races combined. Thirty million more voters turn out than in
2014. Every political advisor with an ounce of brains understands that voter
turnout is going to be huge in the 2020 election.
(Four years later, the
MAGA faithful still refuse to grapple with this reality.)
January 26, 2019: Fox News
sounds the alarm! Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says he can provethat
95,000 non-citizens are enrolled to vote in Texas, and 58,000 have!!! Mr. Trump
gazes upon that story
and freaks. “These numbers are just the tip of the
iceberg!”
Paxton rushes out lists of non-citizen
voters to all 254 Texas counties. Within days, county clerks find error
rates of 60 percent or more, and they’re not done. McClennan County has one of
the shorter lists: 366 names,
the “tip of the iceberg.” It turns out all 366 individuals listed are U.S.
citizens, giving Team Paxton an impressive 100% error rate.
Initial reports from across the state
are so embarrassing Paxton has to drop the whole mess and hope voters won’t
notice.
(Most MAGA folks don’t.)
There is no tip of the Texas iceberg. There is no iceberg.
Let's delay the next presidential election, said no other president in U.S. history.
Part III: “He’s gonna
Declare Himself the Winner.”
__________
U.S. officials and candidates “should use the absolute greatest
amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the
validity of an upcoming election into question.”
U.S.
Senate Intelligence Committee (unanimous)
__________
HAVING
dabbled in lying about U.S. elections
for years, as the 2020 contest approaches, Trump gears up.
February 2020: U.S.
intelligence experts, including Joseph Maguire, Director
of National Intelligence (DNI), warn Congress that the Russians are already meddling
in the coming election. Trump fires Maguire, a man he appointed.
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not
Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE &
FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA.
Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
(Imagine
the right-wing fury if Biden ever suggested the same.)
August 29: Trump warns that foreign nations (but not Russia!!) plan to manipulate
the mail-in vote. “It will be the scandal of our times.” The Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, headed up by a new Trump-appointee, responds: “We have no
information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in
any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots.”
September 17: Trump is already hedging
his bets. With polls showing he’s
going down to defeat, he claims we will never know who won the 2020 election.
He warns that the “result may never be accurately determined, which is what
some want.”
Sen. Marco Rubio explains that the Senate Intelligence Committee
has unanimously endorsed the conclusion that U.S. officials and candidates
“should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are
considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into
question.”
(Okay,
that didn’t happen!!!!)
September 22: Gen.
H. R. McMaster,
Trump’s second National Security Advisor – by this time replaced – warns that his old boss is “making it easy”
for Russia to interfere in the 2020 election.
October 1: Mr. Trump claims that absentee votes cast
for him in Wisconsin have been “dumped in the river.” In reality, three
trays of mail were found by a Wisconsin roadside, including “several” absentee
ballots, but none from Wisconsin voters. No flowing water is involved.
October 12: It is widely
reported that Pennsylvania has received 2.6 million mail-in ballot
requests. That figure includes 1,794,448 Democrats, but only 693,670
Republicans. Everyone knows that when the mail-in ballots are counted,
Democrats are going to get a huge bump. By law, Pennsylvania will be required
to count in-person ballots first, and mail-in ballots after polls close.
“He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
October 31: We won’t know this until later, but in a
secret meeting, three days before the election, Steve Bannon outlines
the Trump plan for Election
Night. Ironically, most of his listeners are Chinese
immigrants – one of whom records the discussion. Bannon sounds amused
as he explains. “What Trump’s gonna do,” he laughs, “is just declare victory.
Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s
just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Bannon expects Trump to build an early lead, as
in-person votes are tallied. Biden’s strength will come later when mail-in
ballots – as in Pennsylvania – are counted. “And Trump’s going to take
advantage of it. That’s our strategy [emphasis added, unless otherwise
noted]. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.” So, “at 10 or 11 o’clock Trump’s
gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’”
“If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock,” Bannon adds,
“it’s going to be even crazier. No, because he’s gonna sit right there and say,
‘They stole it. I’m directing the attorney general to shut down all ballot
places in all 50 states.’ He’s not going out easy. If Biden is winning,
Trump is going to do some crazy shit.”
Bannon eventually be
indicted in a scheme to bilk the MAGA dopes. He and three associates will
collect millions of dollars in donations on the promise to help
build a border wall! No wall will ever
be built, and those associates will go to jail; but Bannon dodges prison
when he receives a Golden Pardon.
(Even Bannon knows Trump is going to lie.)
Bannon gives away the game before any votes are counted.
NOTE ON METHODOLOGY: In all these
posts, we place names in bold, if an individual knows Trump cannot be
trusted. We do NOT use Democrats to prove our point – that Donald can never be
trusted.
November 2: With one day left until the election,
final polling averages show Biden witha +6.7point
lead. Trump claims the polls are phony.
(We should note that at
this editing, in March 2024, Trump loves the same kind of polls because they
show him ahead. Donald says Biden has no chance to win unless the coming
election is rigged.)
Polls were clear. Trump was going to get clobbered by women.
November 3-4, 2020 – Election Day/Night: As millions of
votes pour in it looks as if Trump may win a second term. Experts at Fox News,
however, watch Biden’s lead in Arizona grow to more than 88,000 votes. They call
the state for Biden. Only about 3,500 votes separate Trump and Biden in
Georgia. Pennsylvania, by law, has only started counting millions of mail-in
votes.
No matter. Just after 2 a.m., Mr. Trump
declares victory, nationwide. He insists counting of ballots must end
immediately.
Millions of votes are still being
recorded, mostly from Democratic-leaning areas. This always happens, not
because voting is rigged, butbecause most Democratic areas are heavily
populated, and getting accurate counts takes time. Fulton County in Georgia,
for example, will have half-a-million
ballots.
Greeley County, in red-state Kansas,
will poll 627 votes. Officials there can tally up
early and go out for beer.
(For
fun, look up voting for Loving County, Texas.)
There are wide swaths of Kansas where population is scarce. Author's photo, from cross-country bicycle ride - 2007.
November 5: Votes are still
being counted. Team Trump insists counting in Pennsylvania (where the
president has a lead) must stop.
In Nevada, and also in Arizona (where Biden leads), Team
Trump demands that counting mustcontinue.
He had the same idea four years earlier (see Part I), but
didn’t need to implement it.
November 6: Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) chastises Trump for claiming the
Pennsylvania vote has been rigged. “There is simply no evidence that
anybody has shown me – or anyone else I’m aware of – of any kind of widespread
corruption or fraud.”
(Unless otherwise noted, we are only quoting Republicans.)
November 7: Election experts at the major news outlets
agree. Joe Biden is declared winner of the 2020 election.
November 8: We won’t learn for years –
until Fox News gets hammered in a
defamation lawsuit – but Tucker Carlson texts his producer
and admits that allegations of massive vote stealing, which he and other Fox
hosts have been touting, are “absurd.”
(Fox News: “We keep the ill-informed ill-informed.”)
November 12: Members of the Election
Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including
Trump appointees, Director Chris Krebs of the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Bob Kolasky, and Benjamin
Hovland, issue this
unanimous statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American
history Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and
double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the
result.”
November 13: North Carolina sorts out its last votes and Mr. Trump is
declared winner. Donald is fine if votes take time to count, as long as he
wins.
Team Trump is busy pushing claims of massive voter fraud in Georgia. This
gets embarrassing quickly. The Trump
campaign cites the shocking case of James Blalock, Jr., a World War II veteran,
who voted in Georgia, despite having died fourteen years earlier. Mr. Blalock
had not in fact voted. His wife, Agnes, had, under her properly
registered name: “Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr.”
Team Trump throws out all
kinds of outrageous claims about the “Stolen Election.” A tale is told of a U.S. Army raid on the office of a
Spanish election software company, Scytl, with an office in Frankfurt, Germany.
When asked about the “raid” and the
“seizure” of mythical, rigged computer servers, an Army spokesperson
replies tersely, “Those allegations are false.”
(And thank you for your
service!)
Recounts show that Republicans keep losing.
November 16: Georgia Secretary of
State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, unloads in aninterview. With a hand recount of all
votes in the state nearing completion, he says he is being pressured to find
ways to exclude legal ballots. After a statewide recount, Trump is still losing by 12,284 votes.
Mr. Krebs continues to
stand by this statement: “There is
no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was
in any way compromised,” during the recent election.
Election officials in Clark County, Nevada (one of
several battleground states the president insists he won) announce that they
are unable to call one race
with confidence. Ross Miller, the Democrat, appears to have defeated Stavros
Anthony by 10 votes – out of 153,000; but 139 ballots have “discrepancies.”
Fox News is all over this “big” story. Trump is glued
to Fox, and tweets exultantly. “Big victory,” he shouts. “Large scale voter
discrepancy” He claims this case will have a “major impact,” nationally, and
prove the whole election system is rigged and there are poltergeists in the
machines. An automatic recount follows. Mr. Miller’s lead grows to 30 votes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(I added exclamation points for each vote Miller gained.)
November 19: Rudy Giuliani, accompanied by two other lawyers, Sidney Powell and Jenna
Ellis, holds a press conference. Ellis refers to efforts to prove massive voter
fraud as work that must be performed by an “elite strike force.” That “elite
strike force” includes Rudy, Sidney, and herself.
During
that press conference, Powell describes the plot against President Trump. There
has been,
massive influence of communist
money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China [emphasis added] and the
interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting
systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure
he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way
he didn’t want it to come out.
Jumping ahead, just for the fun of baffling the MAGAs,
Ellis will later be forced to admit, during a disciplinary hearing in Colorado,
that she was doing some bigtime
lying about the 2020 election being stolen.
Then Ms. Ellis will cop to a
felony, for her part in a conspiracy to steal Georgia’s
electoral votes for Trump.
Then Powell will cop to
six misdemeanors, in the same case, and be fined and placed on
probation for six years.
As for Rudy, he will tell so many lies about two
Georgia poll workers “stealing votes” that he will get his dumb ass sued for
defamation. He will refuse to supply documents the court demands; and a jury
will award the plaintiffs – the two workers, who end up facing a storm of death
threats – $148.2
million.
(He remains under indictment in the Georgia case.)
Rudy melts live on television.
November 19, 2020: Team Trump gets one of many black
eyes in court. A suit is filed in Georgia by a prominent
private attorney, L. Lin Wood, calling on a federal court to block
certification of the state’s electoral votes. U.S. District Court Judge Steven
Grimberg, a
Trump appointee, chops the Wood case into kindling. Grimberg rules that
“evidence of improprieties,” as presented by Mr. Wood, falls far short of what
would be needed to justify stepping in to alter the state’s election results.
“It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action.”
November 20: Trump summons Republican
lawmakers from Michigan to the White House. Privately, he suggests that they
declare him winner of that state’s electoral votes, despite Biden’s
154,000-popular vote lead.
After exiting, the lawmakers announce: “We have not yet been made aware of
any information that would change the outcome of the election in Michigan,
and as legislative leaders we will follow the law [emphasis added] and
follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors just as we have said
throughout this election.”
Referencing the
president’s ploy to convince those legislators to do his bidding, Sen. Mitt
Romney is brutally honest. “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic
action by a sitting American President,” he says.
Stephen Saltzburg, who served in the
Justice Department under Reagan and Bush 41, tells ABC, “If any other president
were to have ever attempted what this president has been doing, people would
begin to look at conspiracy to violate election laws.”
(Again, we only quote Republicans.)
November 21: Reutersnotes that
a suit filed by The Election Integrity Project, an organization led by a
pro-Trump activist, has been tossed by Clark County District Judge Gloria
Sturman. The suit alleged that 1,400 people who had registered to vote in
Nevada, moved to California, and still voted in Nevada.
The judge explains. A person who moves out of a state
within 30 days of an election may legally vote in either the state where
they lived, or in the state where they reside. Also: Military personnel, at
bases like Camp Pendleton in California, but whose permanent homes are
in Nevada, might send in a vote from a California address. Same for their spouses
and adult children.
November 21: Team Trump takes another slap upside the head. The president’s lawyers
ask for election returns for the entire state of Pennsylvania to be voided. U.S. Middle District
Judge Matthew Brann rules that the campaign has presented “strained legal arguments without
merit and speculative accusations.”
Sidney Powell now “realizes” – after
the statewide Georgia hand recount goes against Trump – that Brian
Kemp, the Republican governor, is
in on the fix. She tells reporters for Newsmax that an election lawsuit she has
filed in Georgia will “be biblical.” She promises to “unleash the Kraken.”
The mythical "Kraken."
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says the president’s
refusal to concede is harming
the country. It’s time for Trump to “stop golfing and concede.”
November 23: Next we have a
statementsigned by more than 100 leading Republican national
security experts: “We believe that President Trump’s
refusal to concede the election and allow for an orderly transition constitutes
a serious threat to America’s democratic process and to our national security.”
November 27: Another
challenge to Pennsylvania election results is tossed. Judge
Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, with the concurrence of two other
Republican-appointed judges, makes mincemeat of the case. “Free, fair
elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Bibas writes. “Charges
of unfairness are serious, but calling an election unfair [emphasis
added] does not make it so.”
(President
Trump never gets the memo.)
November 28: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court throws out Team
Trump’s lawsuit asking for 2.5 million mail-in ballots to be disqualified.
(When Pennsylvania changed its law
to allow mail-in balloting, in 2019, Republican House Majority Leader Bryan
Cutler was clear. “This bill was not written to benefit one party or the
other, or any one candidate or single election,” he said. “It serves to
preserve the integrity of every election and lift the voice of every voter in
the commonwealth.” The majority leader in the Pennsylvania Senate, also
a Republican, praised the new voting system.)
Same
day: A two-county recount
demanded by the Trump campaign in Wisconsin ends. At a cost of $3 million, paid
by Team Trump, the recount in heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane counties
proves that if there was massive voter fraud, and machines magically cheated
Trump out of millions of votes, it didn’t happen in Milwaukee and Dane. Joe
Biden gains a pocketful of votes.
Trump
phones in to Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business. He offers up a litany of
“stolen votes” claims, insisting that a story he read proves tens of thousands
of dead people voted in Michigan. CNN does what Maria
won’t.
They follow up on the same story. They check the list of “Dead Men Walking” to
the polls. They check the first 25 names. Then they check 25 at random.
Thirty-seven of the alleged dead voters were in fact dead. Sadly, none had
arisen, Christ-like from the grave.
Five
of the fifty had voted – those dead rats – except that CNN found those
five very much alive.
That
left eight, all still walking the earth. Sadly, none had bothered to vote.
Mr. Trump switched to yipping about voting in Georgia. Bartiromo only listened. Donald warned that
Democrats were about to steal two U.S. Senate seats, which would be decided in
special elections. “You’re using the same garbage machinery, Dominion,” he
complained. “And she’s going around, [Stacey] Abrams [a leading Georgia
Democrat], she’s going around screaming that she’s got 800,000 or 850,000
ballots.”
In
reality, Abrams is actually “screaming” that voters have already sent in 750,000 requests for mail-in ballots
for the election on January 5. In every tweet she links to Georgia’s online
“Absentee Ballot Request Form.”
This no-nonsense blogger checks the website for the National
Council of State Legislatures. It turns out that even red states like Ohio,
Texas, and Florida, allow early voting by mail.
Mr. Blogger does some deep diving while editing this blog. He discovers that
in the 2020 election, Democrats piled up 77,529,619 votes for 435 candidates
for all seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans polled
72,760,036. As was true, regarding Trump vs. Biden, Democrats piled up millions
more votes.
November 30, 2020: Arizona Gov. Doug Duceymakes it clear.
Trump lost his state.
(This fact ricochets off MAGA skulls.)
In
Georgia, Team Trump enjoys a brief glimpse of
sunshine. A federal judge agrees to freeze
Dominion voting machines used in three of the most populous blue counties. This
comes in response to a lawsuit brought by Ms. Powell. Alas, the skies darken again when U.S. District Judge
Timothy Batten notes that there is “precious
little proof” to back Powell’s claims of haunted voting machines.
“No evidence of widespread voter fraud.”
December 1, 2020: Attorney
General Bill Barr announces that the Justice Department has uncovered no
evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020
election.
It doesn’t matter. Unproven allegations that Dominion
Voting Systems machines were rigged lead to crazy right-wing
types offering a $1,000,000 bounty to be paid for the
“comeuppance” of Dr. Eric Coomer, head of security for the company.
This leads to a wave of death threats.
Dr. Coomer will later win a damage settlement, after
One America Newsis shown to have had no evidence for such claims.
(Coomer still has a massive defamation
suit working its way through the Colorado courts.
Defendants include former President Donald J. Trump, Rudy Giuliani,
Sidney Powell, Gateway Pundit, and others.)
December 2: Trump offers up a multitude of false
claims in a speech, insisting that he won the election. “As
President,” he says, “I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the
Constitution of the United States.”
For
months, leading up to the Presidential election, we were warned that we should
not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take
weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots
and to verify the results. … Within days after the election, we witnessed an
orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still
being counted.
Donald,
who never checked a fact in his life, if a lie would better serve, continued:
In one Michigan
County [Antrim], as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that
nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is
just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch?
Are there 100s of other examples throughout the country? Are there 1000s? We
just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that
evening.
This
turns out, once again, not to be the tip of any iceberg. The mistake Trump
refers to occurred in a county where the Board of Elections was and probably
still is in GOP hands. The mistake had nothing to do with Dominion systems being
rigged.
In
Detroit, Donald fumes, “there were more votes than there were voters. Think of
that. You had more votes than you had voters.” The blogger does “think of
that.” He thinks Donald is bullshitting and decides to check.
Detroit
is in Wayne County. The population of the county is two million. A total of 867,409
votes were cast in 2020. As for Detroit, turnout in the city was
grim. “According to unofficial election
results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the Associated Press explains, “on
Nov. 3, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters
[emphasis added]. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.”
A
federal judgeorders Team Trump lawyers to pay the State of Michigan and
the City of Detroit $175,000 for filling a “frivolous” lawsuit in
an attempt to challenge voting results there.
December 3:Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers is
taking regular phone calls from Rudy Giuliani and President Trump. They want
him to help overturn state election results. He says he won’t – because he took
an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. “It would violate that oath,” he later
explains, “the basic principles of republican government and the rule of law if
we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of
fraud.”
Bowers is an honest man.
Testifying
before a panel of Michigan lawmakers, a star witness in the fight to overturn Biden’s victory in that state turns
out to be quite the disreputable character. Mellissa Carone, who swore she had
been witness to massive voter fraud, is on probation in an earlier case,
involving a sex tape in which Carone played a starring role, her boyfriend
(co-starring), a computer, and her boyfriend’s ex-wife. Carone sent the video to
the ex-wife and then tried to frame her and make it seem as if she had stolen
the tape.
Her testimony proves so bizarre, Saturday
Night Live offers a
parody. And, yes, Rudy did punctuate her claims with a barrage of gaseous
omissions, caught on microphones in the hearing room.
December 4: Team Trump suffers five
brutal court defeats in a matter of hours. At 4:30
p.m. the Minnesota Supreme Court tosses a suit, after Team Trump lawyers
ask that the state’s electoral vote not be certified.
The Michigan Court of
Appeals tosses a challenge to certification of the vote in Wayne County.
A Nevada judge shitcans a
claim by several “alternate Republican electors” that there had been widespread
fraud in the vote. Judge James T. Russell
rejects their argument, writing that he can find “no credible or reliable
evidence that the 2020 general election in Nevada was affected by fraud.”
At 6 p.m. a Wisconsin judge blows up another
lawsuit. Asked to overturn the state’s entire popular vote and let a
Republican-led legislature decide who gets the electoral votes, Judge Brian
Hagedorn expresses shock. “Judicial acquiescence to such
entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation [emphasis added, unless
otherwise noted] would do indelible damage to every future election. This is a
dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”
(This is exactly the path Team Trump
wanted to take us down.)
(And they will ask again in November.)
At 7 p.m. a judge in Phoenix denies a request by
Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward to invalidate the results of
that state’s election. Judge Randall H. Warner rules definitively: “The
court finds no misconduct, no fraud, and no effect on the outcomeof the
election.”
“Which inevitably will subvert
constitutional democracy.”
December 7: Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan complains, during an
appearance on CNN, that Trump’s “mountains of misinformation” are hurtingthe Republican Party in
his state. “If I had a chance to spend five
minutes with every single person in Georgia that doubted the election results,”
he explains, “I think I’d be able to win their
hearts over, show them the facts and figures, separate fact from fiction”
A federal judge and a
Trump appointee, throws out a lawsuit, asking to overturn
Biden’s victory in Georgia. Plaintiffs, Judge Batten rules, were asking,
“this
court to substitute its judgment for two-and-a-half million voters who voted
for Joe Biden. And this I am unwilling to do.” With that, Team Trump’s only
“tie” in court, an earlier decision by Batten, becomes a loss.
Their record
is reduced to 0 for 2020.
U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker tosses another lawsuit seeking to overturn the Michigan vote. Parker
is scathing in her rebuke. “This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief
Plaintiffs seek – as much
of that relief is beyond the power of this Court – and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith
in the democratic process and their trust in our government.”
Fifteen hundred attorneys, from across the country,
Republican, Democrat, and independent alike, sign a letter condemning the antics
of the president’s legal team. “President Trump’s barrage of
litigation is a pretext for a campaign to undermine public confidence in the
outcome of the 2020 election,” they warn, “which inevitably will subvert
constitutional democracy.”
(This is the first
time I have used any Democratic voices to prove my case. As before, names in bold
are people who know, or have ample cause to believe, that Donald John Trump is
a shameless liar.)
“Less than one in a quadrillion.”
December 8, 2020: TheTrump campaign briefly advances a case to the U.S.
Supreme Court, asking the justices to block certification of Pennsylvania’s 20
electoral votes. In a bizarre
development Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has
filed suit, on behalf of his state – against
sister states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Paxton claims
that those states’ electoral votes for Biden should not count. Texas electoral
votes for Trump should.
“At one point,” the WashingtonPost notes,
“the [Paxton] complaint repeats discredited theories that Biden was rescued by
a late dump of ballots, saying that as of 3 a.m. on the morning after the
election, Biden’s chances at winning all four states were “less than one in a
quadrillion.”
(Since
the world population is only eight billion, it’s unclear how that works.)
Trump supporters may never figure this
out, but Texas allows mail-in votes, just like the four states Paxton is suing.
In Paxton’s state, however, only people over age 65 can be trusted
to sign mail-in ballots, provide proof of who they are, fold them, put them in
a special envelope, lick the flap, put the first envelope in a second, lick the
flap, and affix correct postage. You can even vote from jail in Texas, under certain
circumstances, which is fun.
In the lawsuit filed by Paxton and crafted by a lawyer, Dr. John Eastman,
it is cited as evidence that no person has ever been elected president if they
met defeat in both Ohio and Florida. This is irrelevant.
And wrong.
John F. Kennedy lost both states, and still won in 1960.
(Eastman is now under indictment in the Georgia election fraud case.)
John F. Kennedy won in 1960.
Next, we had
several other irrelevant claims. This blogger’s favorite: Trump won 18 of 19
“bellwether counties.” According to Mr. Paxton and Dr. Eastman that meant there
was no way Donald could have lost.
We should point out, of course, that we don’t vote by
“counties” in America, or count only “bellwether county” votes. We total up all
the votes of all the people in all the counties in this great land. For comparison purposes, Hamilton County, Ohio has more
people than the entire state of Wyoming. Franklin County, Ohio has more people
than either North Dakota or South Dakota.
One blue county has as many people as all those red.
Trump did win a majority of votes in
18 counties that had not missed picking the winner in a presidential election, dating
back to 1980.
So???
It was fun to find out that just four
years earlier, Hillary
Clinton beat Trump in 14 other “bellwether counties.”
(Attorney General Paxton will later be
found
liable for retaliating against
whistleblowers in his office, after they accused him of bribery and fraud. He
agrees to pay $3.3 million in damages. But not before he tried to stick
taxpayers for the tab.)
At any rate, none of this mattered. Just forty minutes
after the case was filed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled:
“DENIED.”
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest
in the manner in which another State conducts its elections,” the Court
explained. “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”
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