December 2, 2020: Revisiting President Trump's Press Conference

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: In March 2022, I was reading a story about Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni. I noticed a comment President Trump had made on this day, and went looking for the source. Lo and behold, I turned up a transcript of his entire press conference, which lasted for almost three quarters of an hour. Looking back, here are a few of the whoppers he told on that day. 

It’s fun to remember that Ginni Thomas helped organize buses to transport Trump supporters to Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. We all know now, how festivities ended. 

In any case, on December 2, Trump said all of this and more:

 

As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States.

 

That statement, at least, was true. He didn’t do it, though. 

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.

 

Surely, the dullest Trump fan would notice that now the president wanted to delay finalizing the vote. 

Previously, he had said he wanted the vote-counting to end in the early morning hours of November 4, when he had the lead in several states he eventually lost. See also, statements below. 

Trump claims next that tens of thousands of individuals showed up to vote on November 4, but were told they had already cast ballots. 

They didn’t know what to do. They had no one to complain to, most just left and said, “That’s strange.” But many people complained and complained vehemently, and in a lot of cases, they filled out a provisional ballot, which was almost never used, but in virtually every case was a vote for Trump. In other words, they went in to vote and they were told that they voted and they didn’t vote. They left and they felt horror and they lost respect for our system. This happened tens of thousands of times all over the country. That’s how desperate the Democrats were. They would fill out ballots of people not even knowing if these people were going to show up. When they did show up, they said, “Sorry, you’ve already voted.”

 

It would be a violation of the law for poll workers not to offer, accept, and submit provisional ballots to the proper boards. No evidence of this kind of subterfuge has ever been presented successfully in court. In 2016, research showed that 2.5 million Americans submitted provisional ballots. Only about 60% were “fully counted,” and another 10% were “partially counted,” as allowed by states. The most common reason for rejection of provisional ballots was that voters were not registered. 

Trump continued his ramble: 

In one Michigan County, 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 turned out not to be the tip of the iceberg. There was no iceberg. The mistake Trump refers to here, occurred in Antrim County, where the Board of Elections was in Republican hands. The mistake had nothing to do with Dominion systems being rigged. A hand recount of paper ballots later showed Trump gained 11 votes in Antrim, and Biden lost 1. 

A “risk-limiting” recount of a little more than 17,900 ballots, chosen at random from across the state, showed 17 ballots “out of balance.” 

A June 2021 report by the Michigan Senate, that body controlled by the Republican Party, can be summed up in one sentence: “Our clear finding is that citizens should be confident the results represent the true results of the ballots cast by the people of Michigan.” 

Yep. Trump lost. 

Then-President Trump claimed on December 2, that there had been massive fraud in Georgia – a state where the governor and secretary of state were both Republicans. 

In Georgia, it doesn’t work, but we have a secretary of state, and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures. … Why? You’ll have to ask them, but without a signature match, or a check, it doesn’t matter. They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack, all against me. This was during a recount that I didn’t even think mattered. They found many thousands of votes, and that recount didn’t matter. The one that matters is the one that’s going on now, that because of the fact it’s so close, they had to by law give another recount, but the recount has to be a recount where they check the signatures. Otherwise, they’re just checking the same dishonest thing. It won’t matter.

 

In none of the three recounts performed in Georgia were “thousands and thousands of votes” found “out of whack, all against me.” Trump lost every time, in the final tally by 11,799. Biden’s margin of victory did drop by 1,779 votes out of five million cast. So the vote counts were 99.9+ accurate. The biggest mistake of all was made in Floyd County, where clerks initially failed to upload results from some precincts. The board of elections in that county, where Trump gained roughly 800 votes, was controlled by Republicans. 

So a big cream pie in their faces.

 

Many people received two, three and four ballots. They were sent to dead people by the thousands. In fact, dead people, and we have many examples filled out ballots, made applications, and then, voted, which is even worse. In other words, dead people went through a process. Some have been dead for 25 years. Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone, and if that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately. 

 

Note: The president wants millions of votes “overturned immediately.” As of February 2022, the situation in Ohio is typical – where a Republican attorney general has 27 possible cases of illegal votes being cast in the 2020 election. 

A special check of 5,000 ballots supposedly cast by dead people in Georgia turned up four examples. At least one of those four ballots was cast for Donald J. Trump. 

Trump was so full of shit in his comments on December 2, he was lucky he didn’t get mistaken for a porta-potty in a suit. 

He continued: 

Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win. In all states, I very easily win, the swing states, just like I won them at 10 o’clock in the evening, the evening of the election. 

 

Trump can’t even get his message straight in the same press conference. He wants to revert to Election Day itself, when he had the vote lead, and just declare himself the winner. 

Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people, and in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me. 

 

Trump deserved to be disparaged. As of March 2022, none of his claims has been upheld in any court, state, federal, or The People’s Court. He wasn’t representing any of the people who voted for Biden. He wanted to overturn the results rendered by those 81 million. 

Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years…

 

Trump could never decide how much money the Mueller investigation “wasted.” He repeatedly changed the number – almost as if he was making it up. Which he was. The Justice Department said the final cost was $31.7 million. That investigation, and others, also turned up proof that multiple Trump advisors and campaign officials, and even Trump kids and/or their spouses, met with Russians during the 2016 election. The short list would include Don Jr. and Jared Kushner, which Don Sr. later admitted, Roger Stone, who lied to Congress about his meeting, Paul Manafort, who had multiple contacts, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, who was working on a Trump Tower Moscow deal at the same time Trump was running for president. 

Trump kept going: 

Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement.

 

Rubio was never the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Trump can’t even get that right.

 

Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID. The voting took place entirely on the honor system, no identification of any kind was required.

 

Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that no state in the country verifies United States citizenship as a condition for voting in federal elections. This is a national disgrace. No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting, specifically, because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.

 

As always, with Trump you had the kind of vague claims that are hard to refute. What is a “very, very powerful ID?” 

Here in Ohio, Mr. Blogger had to supply the last four digits of his social security number or his driver’s license number when he filled out an absentee ballot. He also had to sign his ballot before mailing. In Arizona, you needed to prove citizenship in order to get a driver’s license after 1996. So you could have proved eligibility to vote by…having a driver’s license and placing the number in “box 9” on your voter registration form. 

Loser Donald kept babbling: 

In addition, thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters.

 

We covered the story of Floyd County, above, where GOP election officials screwed their own pooch. 

In Fayette County, Republicans again screwed their dog, failing to upload more than 2,700 votes. But of those votes, 1,128 were for Biden. Again these were red counties, muffing their own counts. In Fayette, Trump had a net gain, of 449 votes. Walton County is also a solidly red county, returning Trump more than 74% of its votes. Once again, the problem was failure to upload a voting card for one part of the county, which, when uploaded gave Trump a gain of 176 votes. Libertarian Jo Jorgensen also picked up 10 additional votes. 

Dozens of counties in the key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan. All of this is evidence.

 

This claim was egregiously false. Only 71% of Michigan voters bothered to mail in ballots or show up at the polls. 

Donald keeps juggling numbers and dropping them ever time. He’s either ill-informed, or he’s lying. 

Probably both: 

In Detroit, everybody saw the tremendous conflict and the horrible way that the two Republican canvassers were treated so horribly because they wouldn’t vote when they saw that 71% of the precincts didn’t balance. Also, there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters.

 

Detroit is in Wayne County. The population of the county is nearly two million. A total of 867,409 votes were cast for president in 2020. As for Detroit, itself, a Democratic stronghold, turnout was grim, as the Associated Press noted. “According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the AP explained, “on Nov. 5, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.” 

This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. … We already have the proof. We already have the evidence, and it’s very clear. Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say, “You’re right.” Our country needs somebody to say, “You’re right.”

 

This serves as a fitting ending to a Trump “stolen election” diatribe. “Everybody knows it,” he claims. He was robbed of a second term. Everybody knows it. Well, maybe not all the judges who “have refused to accept it,” or the countless media outlets that accurately reported on results from both red and blue states. 

Sixteen months later, not a single court or recount or investigation of any kind as upheld any of Trump’s complaints.