11/29/20: If Saturday was a tough day (minus the golf outing) for President Trump, Sunday was no better. A two-county recount demanded by his campaign in Wisconsin ended. At a cost of $3 million, with the bill going to his campaign, the recount in heavily Democratic Milwaukee and Dane counties proved that if there was massive voter fraud, and machines magically cheated the president out of millions of votes, it didn’t happen in Milwaukee and Dane.
Joe Biden gained 87 votes.
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Trump does his first interview since the election. |
*
STILL, REALITY can be an ugly place. Trump
decided not to visit Sunday. Instead, he placed a call to Maria Bartiromo of
Fox News for his first interview since his bitter defeat. It would be hard to
say whose performance was more pathetic, Lame Duck Don’s or the pseudo-journalist’s.
____________________
“I don’t think we even have to prove this.”
President Trump
____________________
Straightaway, Ms. Bartiromo asked the president to be “as precise as possible” and explain exactly what evidence he had that the election was rigged. This was the starting gun for a lengthy evidence-less diatribe.
Since Bartiromo failed to challenge the
president, or even ask fundamental follow-up questions, I have included a few
helpful observations of my own.
***
Trump: Well, first of all, I have to start by saying the whole world is watching, and nobody can believe what they’re seeing. And you have leaders of countries that call me say [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted], that’s the most messed-up election we have ever seen.
Blogger: Trump doesn’t mention any of
the leaders by name. This is not evidence. Bartiromo doesn’t notice.
(I am thinking, maybe Putin called?)
Next, the president complains about
the “Dominion machines,” which he says cheated him out of millions of votes.
Trump: We have affidavits on – from many people talking about what went on with machines….we had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account. And these are glitches. So, they’re not glitches. They’re theft. They’re fraud, absolute fraud. And there were many of them, but, obviously, most of them tremendous amounts, got by without us catching. We got lucky to catch them. I think we caught four or five glitches of about 5,000 votes each, and different states.
Blogger: You didn’t catch most of the
glitches? But still, you know they happened? Why not be precise and specify the
local jurisdictions where the four or five 5,000-vote “glitches” occurred?
Because then people could look up the facts for themselves.
Trump is on a roll and Bartiromo decides her job is to stay out of his way:
Trump: That was fraud. And they got caught. But, for the most part, they got away with it. And what happened, if you watched the election, I was called by the biggest people, saying, congratulations, political people. Congratulations, sir. You just won the election. It was 10:00 [p.m. on Election Night]. And you looked at the numbers.
Blogger: At 10:00 p.m. Eastern
Standard Time, polls in many Western states would just be closing. North
Carolina, one of two battleground states Trump would win in the end, would
not sort out its final count for a week.
By midnight, Eastern Standard Time, Biden
would have already built decent leads in Arizona and Nevada at a time most
people had headed for bed.
Trump rambled on about “dumps, big massive dumps” of votes, in “Michigan, Pennsylvania, and all over.” These dumps went against him in almost every battleground state. He complained about the Dominion machines again. He insisted one of the “great pollsters” said he would win Pennsylvania, but you had to allow “at least five percent for cheating, because they cheat.”
Blogger: A reasonable observer might remember
that President-Elect Trump did not complain about “cheating” in Pennsylvania in
2016, when he won the state by a little more than 44,000 votes.
We also know on Saturday (see: 11/28/20) that
the Trump campaign’s lawsuit in the state was pitched by the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court, in part because no voter fraud was alleged.
Trump’s just making s*** up.
Bartiromo: Right.
Blogger: That’s her journalistic contribution.
One word. She doesn’t ask questions. She lets the president rant.
Trump: The mail-in ballots were – are a disaster. They sent millions and millions and millions of mail-in ballots.
I’m sure you know people that got two, three, or four, because I do, where they said, you know, we got four ballots. They got one at a country home. Dead people were seeing ballots. Even worse, dead people were applying to get a ballot. They were making application to get ballots, many.
Blogger: Here in Ohio (a state Trump won
handily) my wife and I did receive multiple ballots each. My daughter Sarah,
who moved to Washington D.C. in 2008, and to Oregon this year, received one.
(She notified the local election board years ago that she was no longer an Ohio
resident.)
My wife and I each sent in one. We signed our
names, one safety feature, to protect the integrity of the vote. We included
one or the other: last four digits of our Social Security numbers, or our
driver’s license numbers.
The state would count our ballots and add us to
the computer. A second ballot in either of our names would set off alarms.
Mail-in balloting made safe.
Trump talked next about tens of thousands of dead people voting. Fourteen thousand corpses supposedly shuffled to the Michigan polls, according to one right-wing news story going the rounds. Some, Trump agreed, had been moldering in their graves “ten, fifteen years.”
Blogger: There was only one problem. CNN did
what any news organization could have done. They examined this claim, amplified
by several stalwart Trump supporters, including Newt Gingrich. And if you can’t
trust Newt, a man who cheated on his first
wife, then discussed divorce with her while she was hospitalized
and recovering from cancer, and then cheated on his second wife to be with his
third, if you can’t trust Newt, defending another man, who cheated on all three
of his wives, who can you trust?
So, CNN did what Bartiromo could
have done. They checked the list of “Dead Men Walking” to the polls. They
checked the first 25. Then they checked 25 at random.
Thirty-seven of the alleged dead voters were in
fact dead. Sadly, none had arisen, Christ-like from the grave, to vote.
Five of the fifty had voted – those dead rats –
except that CNN found those five were very much alive.
That left eight others, all of them still
walking the earth. None of those eight bothered to vote.
When CNN checked back again, they discovered
that the list of 14,000 had been “removed from the site hosting it.”
But the zombie story of voter fraud refused to
die. Trump, for one, still believed it, much like a five-year-old who still
believed Santa Claus brought all the toys for good girls and boys in a sled.
The president soon dropped another bombshell, although, like all the others, this one was a dud.
Trump: And how the FBI and Department of Justice – I don’t know. Maybe they are involved. But how people are allowed to get away from this stuff – with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud. And it continues to be, as they hide. And the problem we have, we go to judges, and people don’t want to get involved.
Blogger: So now the F.B.I. (led by a Trump
appointee) and the Department of Justice (led by a Trump toady) were involved
in a plot to steal the election?
Trump: I mean, you’re doing something. You’re actually very brave, because you’re doing something.” He talks about how only the New York Post went after the story of Hunter Biden. No one else in the media would.
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: Hunter Biden is totally irrelevant,
unless maybe he voted three or four times. And we might note, since Bartiromo
won’t, that the New York Post has already published an editorial, telling Trump to
stop with the “stolen-election rhetoric,” and all the “conspiracy-addled talk.”
Trump: (Fill in with blather here.)
Bartiromo: Yes.
Next, the president turns his hand to math. He says “we don’t have freedom of the press in this country. We have suppression by the press.”
Trump: This is the whole ball game. And they cheated. Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes. Now, we were – we were planning – we – I got 63 million votes four years ago and won quite handily in the Electoral College, won quite handily.”
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: The Fox News shill doesn’t ask Trump
about his claims, in 2016, that even though he won the Electoral College, he still
believed the election was “rigged,” and that he actually won the popular vote. Hillary
Clinton won by almost three million votes.
Second, Biden got 81 million votes. He
won by seven million.
If Bartiromo had been on her toes, she might have
asked about Trump’s claim in 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Iowa Republican primary,
that that vote was rigged. “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump tweeted at the
time. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes
than anticipated. Bad!”
Back to the president:
Trump: …the largest in the history of a sitting president, so much more, many millions more than anyone thought – you know, than we were even trying to get. And everybody said, this is over. I’m telling you, at 10:00, everybody thought it was over.
Bartiromo: Right.
Trump: And then the phony – the phony mail-ins started coming in, Maria. But, just so you understand, I got 74 million votes. It was over. And then mail-in started happening.
Bartiromo: Yes.
Blogger: Even the dimmest wits who followed the
news would have known the mail-in ballots would be counted last. In Pennsylvania,
the Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature had agreed in
the act that created expanded mail-in voting, that mail in votes would not be
counted until polls closed on
Election Day.
They were, by law, going to be counted last.
By mid-October, ABC News was already noting
that 2.8 million requests for mail-in ballots had been filed in Pennsylvania,
including 693,670 from registered Republicans. There were 216,971 requests from
unaffiliated voters, and 1,794,448 requests from Democrats. In other words, it
was crystal clear that once the count of mail-in ballots started the totals
were going to change drastically, and Biden would be slashing into Trump’s
10:00 p.m. “victory” lead.
Bartiromo (responding to the president’s tirade): Yes.
Trump: This election was rigged. This election is a total fraud.
Bartiromo: Mr. President, these are obviously very serious charges. And I want to walk through them and ask you how you will prove this in the courts, because, as you know, what I have been saying on the air is that elections are the reason that our young men and women go on battlefields across the world and, in some cases, lose their lives, because they believe that their vote, my vote matters just as much as your vote.
Blogger: The host has finally asked a “follow-up
question.” She’s really setting up Trump to respond as he chooses.
I should also point out that “our young men and
women” on the battlefields aren’t just protecting Trump votes. They’d be
protecting mail-in ballots like mine, tallied in the red state of Ohio, or mail-in
ballots in the blue state of Minnesota. They’d be serving on the battlefield
for those extra 87 votes, now tallied in Wisconsin. They’d be serving for the
81 million votes Vice President Biden piled up, just as much as the 74 million
garnered by Mr. Trump.
Bartiromo misses the point again.
Bartiromo: So, this is no longer about you, President Trump. This is about America. And many people agree with you. According to Reuters, 68 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of all Americans – that includes Democrats – believe there was fraud in this election.
Blogger: Of course, 68 percent of Republicans
believe there was fraud. The president has been howling “wolf” every day since November
3. People like Bartiromo have been regurgitating his cries.
At this point, Republicans will believe almost
anything. In one recent poll, 56% said they believed QAnon conspiracy claims were “mostly or
partly true.” If you went back to December 2017, you had a poll indicating that
51% of Republicans believed President
Obama was born in Kenya, even after their Orange God admitted in September 2016
that Obama was, in fact, born in America.
Besides, judges don’t agree. They keep tossing
Trump campaign lawsuits out of both state and federal courts.
Even Bartiromo would like the president to focus. She asks about the six key battleground states. What proof has he that the election was stolen?
Trump: Well, we’re trying to put the evidence in. And the judges won’t allow us to do it.
Blogger: Trump claims next that Democratic
“thugs” threw poll watchers out of vote-counting rooms in “many cases.”
Trump: Maria, there’s never been anything like this in history. And it all started with the mail-in. But it also goes to Dominion. It goes to a lot of things. But the mail-in, millions and millions of ballots being shipped all over, and ballots – as you know, there were a lot of ballots where it was just Biden on top. They [Democrats supposedly stuffing ballot boxes] didn’t do anything else because they were in a rush. And from what everybody is saying, and from what – I don’t think we even have to prove this. They say that I was doing so much better than they thought that they panicked, and they started just doing ballot after ballot very quickly and just checking the Biden name on top.
Blogger: Did Trump just say, some of these
stories “are unbelievable,” and “I don’t think we even have to prove this?” And
the courts keep refusing to allow his campaign to “put in our proof?”
He did.
Bartiromo: Right.
Blogger: What Abrams
is saying is that voters have already sent in 750,000 requests for mail-in ballots
for a special election in January. In fact, in every tweet, she links to
Georgia’s online “Absentee Ballot Request Form.”
A completed, mailed
in ballot is the political equivalent of money in the bank. You’d think either
Trump or Bartiromo would get that.
They may. They just don’t
want the viewers to think about it, because it undercuts the whole Trump
narrative.
Trump: What kind of an election is it? She’s going around collecting votes. What kind of an election is this? What kind of a country are we living in now, where you can vote for months ahead of schedule?
Blogger: A legal system? I check the website for the National
Council of State Legislatures. Even red states like Texas and Florida, which
Trump won, allow early voting by mail.
Only five states have resisted the move to make voting easier, and not limit it to Election Day.
Blogger: If you’re keeping track, Trump had already
called Raffensperger “an enemy of the people.” At best, he sounds like a fascist
in sheep’s clothing. He has now insisted that the F.B.I. might be involved in
fixing the election, and the Department of Justice. Now you have this “character”
messing with the vote and “judges making deals” and “electoral officials making
deals” too.
Trump: Joe Biden did not get 16 million more votes than Barack Hussein Obama. He didn’t get it.
Blogger: Trump doesn’t believe it because he
doesn’t want to believe. If he admits to himself that Biden won, his
narcissistic personality may unravel. You could easily find a story that debunks this
kind of claim; but at this point it’s not worth it.
You could dissect the causes of his defeat if
you wished. Part of the reason Trump lost was that he got trounced by a growing
youth vote (voters aged 18-29), 61% for Biden, 37% for Trump. In fact, young people “voted majority blue”
in all but six states (with seven more not reporting data).
Trump also got thumped by women voters, losing
that half of the electorate by nine points.
Again, no rigging required. Democrats have won
the majority of women by an average of 8 points in the last ten elections.
Trump: But he beats Obama in swing states. Now, think of that. He beat Obama in swing states. You know that didn’t happen. They stuffed the ballot box. Everybody knows that.
Blogger: See youth
vote, above, etc.
Bartiromo: Biden won despite Democrat losses everywhere else in the House. Kevin McCarthy is still celebrating wins in the House of Representatives….So, there are certainly statistic impossibilities…Mr. President, will you be able to prove that the computers can circumvent the controls that are in place? A lot of people say, oh, no, we have controls in place. There are paper ballots. The computers cannot get through the controls that are in place.
Blogger: Yes, for example, paper ballots in
Georgia, which also showed the president was defeated there.
Even Trump seems to realize he’s running out of options to steal the election himself. He insists that despite his campaign’s bleak record in the courts, it’s not really that bad. “A lot of the cases that have been lost haven’t been our cases,” he says, even though they’ve been filed in his behalf. In other words, the losing record isn’t as bad as it looks, legally speaking.
Blogger: It’s actually terrible.
Bartiromo let’s his comment pass. Trump talks next about “the most dishonest political places” in the country, all Democratic-run, of course. He cites Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
She does not bring up the Milwaukee County recount vote (part of the recount in which Biden gained votes). Trump complains about the media again, and taps into his inner-fascist for real.
Bartiromo lets that attack on the First Amendment buzz right past her head. (If Obama had ever called Fox News, et. al., “enemies of the people,” she would have shrieked for a week on her show. Then she would have caught her breath and shrieked for another week. Ignoring that point, she asks Mr. Trump, if you take out the six “tainted” states, is that the plan? If Trump can win six separate cases, then Biden has only 227 electoral votes. Trump has 232.
Is that the plan?
Trump: Everyone knows that people were not allowed to vote when they walked in, so preciously, so beautifully, to vote. An elderly woman – we have her deposition – was told – who longed to vote, looked forward to the day of November 3, was told when she got in there, I’m sorry, you voted. And then they give her another ballot to sign, which they don’t use, because she already voted.
Blogger: Not a
single top state election official has claimed that there was significant fraud
in their state. In the case mentioned above, the poor elderly woman would
receive a provisional vote. Her provisional vote would count if records showed
in the end that she had not voted already.
Despite losing the machine vote in Georgia, and then losing the hand recount on top of that, Trump tells Bartiromo, “if I lost Georgia by, let’s say, 12,000 votes, we have tens of thousands more votes than that.”
The president starts babbling about dead people who voted again. Well, screw those zombies! We have “hundreds of thousands of votes more than we need in every swing state that we’re talking about,” he says.
He calls Chris Krebs, who he appointed to head the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity unit, whose job was to protect the election, “a fraud.” Krebs will be appearing on 60 Minutes later that evening. He has already called the 2020 election the most secure in U.S. history, and labeled Trump campaign lawsuits to overturn the results “farcical.”
Bartiromo: Where is the DOJ and the FBI in all of this, Mr.
President?
Trump: Missing in action…You would think, if you’re in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is – this is the biggest thing you could be looking at. Where are they? I have not seen anything. I mean, I just – they just keep moving along, and they go on to the next president.
Blogger: No. What an asshole this guy is.
Bartiromo doesn’t challenge. Fox doesn’t pay her to challenge the Trumpian
narrative.
Trump: There are many mailmen that are in big trouble for selling ballots, getting rid of ballots. This is the craziest thing you have ever seen.
Blogger: I decided to check out these “mailmen”
claims. I found a story about a mailman in West Virginia who changed
absentee ballot requests from “Democrat” to “Republican. A total of nine votes
were involved.
In New Jersey, another carrier was arrested
after 1,875 pieces of mail were found in two dumpsters. But only 99 mail-in
ballots were involved. In a deep blue state those votes would make no real difference
and possibly hurt Democrats.
A Kentucky mail person was arrested for
throwing “a large quantity of mail” in a construction dumpster, including 111 mail-in ballot
requests. No actual ballots were involved.
In addition, you had the case of a Massachusetts
man setting a fire inside a ballot drop box outside the main library in Boston.
Authorities retrieved 122 charred ballots, 87 of which were legible and would still
be processed.
Last, but not least, two USPS employees in
Pennsylvania were arrested in early October and charged with tossing mail in
the trash. In one incident federal agents recovered “314 items of
First Class Mail, seven items of Certified Mail, one item of Priority Mail and
1,311 political advertisements or similar items of campaign mail.” One request
for delivery of a mail-in ballot was found, but no completed ballots. The
second arrest led to recovery of “75 items of First Class Mail and 25 items of
political advertisements or similar items of campaign mail. The seized mail did
not contain any mail-in ballots, but it did contain one request for a mail-in
ballot.”
None of these cases involved any “widespread election
fraud,” and certainly there was no proof of a plot to screw Mr. Trump.
Two days after the election, a New York postal
worker was arrested and found to have delayed delivery of 813 pieces of mail, because
he was too lazy to finish his route. Three ballots were
involved.
I kept going down the rabbit hole, hoping to
find the elusive proof of massive mail-in fraud. There was the Ohio postal
employee charged with dumping and destroying letters and newspapers he didn’t
feel like delivering, and 32 Dolly Parton book
club books. Only one absentee ballot request was lost.
As for the Trump votes “dumped in the river,” a claim the
president made during his first unhinged debate with Joe Biden, ABC News had
already followed that claim to the river’s source. When White House Press
Secretary “Birther” McEnany was asked which “river” the votes were found
floating in, she accused reporters of “missing the forest for the trees.”
In reality, three trays of mail had been found
by a Wisconsin roadside, including “several” absentee ballots, but none from
Wisconsin voters.
No flowing water was involved.
No matter. Bartiromo finally asked what cases, specifically, Trump thought would make it to the Supreme Court? He’d need six. One to overturn the vote in Wisconsin. One for Nevada. One for Arizona. One for Michigan. One for Georgia. And one to block the Pennsylvania vote.
Trump: Well, the problem is, it’s hard to get into the Supreme Court. I have got the best Supreme Court advocates, lawyers, that want to argue the case, if it gets there. But they said it’s very hard to get a case up there. Can you imagine? Donald Trump, president of the United States, files a case, and I probably can’t get a case, even with – and we have tremendous proof.
Blogger: You can get a case
to the highest court in the land; but you have to have a case that has merit.
So far, the Trump campaign has only ridiculous
claims to spread. But the president isn’t quitting. He has Rudy Giuliani on his
side.
Trump: Well, I’m going to use 125 percent of my energy to do it. You need a judge that’s willing to hear a case. You need a Supreme Court that’s willing to make a real big decision, based on everything that – it’s not like you’re going to change my mind. In other words, my mind will not change in six months. There was tremendous cheating here.”
Blogger: No one expects the president to change
his mind. If his head were filled with cement instead of brains, it wouldn’t make
a bit of difference.
His mind is set.
Bartiromo thanks him for his call, and that’s
it.
*
Sunday evening, at least one former Republican member of Congress has had all he can stand. Paul Mitchell describes himself in his Twitter bio as an “Opinionated defender of our Constitution and nation.”
He tweets:
MITCHELL TWEET HERE…
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