Part II: Helping MAGA Folks Face Reality (Steps 83-164)

Part II: Helping MAGA Folks Face Reality.

(Steps #83-164.)

 

__________ 

“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.” 

Stephen Saltzburg

__________ 

 
Pedaling along in Petroleum County, 2024.

 

IN PART ONE, we provided 82 examples of proven lies told by Donald Trump or his cronies, or uncomfortable facts, showing why the Orange Dumpling from Mar-a-Lago can never be trusted. In Part II, we pick up with the 2020 election. 

Trump’s lying intensifies.

___ 

 

November 3-4, 2020 (Election Day/Night): As millions of votes pour in it looks as if Donald may win a second term. Election experts at Fox News, however, watch Joe Biden’s lead in Arizona grow to more than 88,000 votes. They call the state for the challenger. Only 3,500 votes separate Trump and Biden in Georgia. Pennsylvania has only started counting millions of mail-in votes. 

83. Just after 2 a.m., the “Fat Lady sings,” you might say. Donald declares victory, nationwide. Just as Steve Bannon predicted. (Steps 79-80, Part I.)

84. Millions of votes are still being recorded, mostly from Democratic-leaning areas. This always happens, not because voting is rigged, but because many Democratic areas are heavily populated, and getting accurate counts takes time. Fulton County in Georgia, for instance, will have half-a-million ballots.

 

Petroleum County, Montana (pop. 498) has only 348 votes to tally, and Trump cleans Biden’s clock. 

The blogger has pedaled a bicycle through the county – while traveling across the country in the summer of 2024. There’s one person for every three square miles. 

FUN FACT: Petroleum County is larger than Rhode Island.

 

85. November 5: Votes are still being counted. Trump insists counting in Pennsylvania (where he has a lead) must stop. 

In Nevada, and also in Arizona (where Biden leads), the president demands that counting must continue. 

(The MAGA folks fail to see the incongruity.) 

 

86. Behind the scenes, Roger Stone is fleshing out a plan to claim the election was stolen. It’s pretty much the same plan he worked on four years earlier (See: Step #31, Part I), but had cause to implement. 

He’s probably working on an updated version for 2024, if Trump loses – although that is just the blogger’s supposition.

Roger Stone's tattoo of his favorite president.
Trump is second?

  

87. 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.” 

88. On November 7, 2020, election experts at the major news outlets, including Fox News,  agree. Biden is declared winner. MAGA types erupt with fury, aiming their wildest screams at Fox News. Fox News decides to fire its head elections expert, Chris Stirewalt, sacrificing him on the Altar of Lies. 

89. We won’t learn for years (until Fox News gets destroyed in a massive defamation judgement – related to claims that the election was stolen), but Tucker Carlson texts his producer and admits allegations of massive vote stealing, which he and other Fox hosts have already begun touting, are “absurd.” 

(Fox News motto: “We keep the ill-informed ill-informed.”) 

 

90. On November 8, President Trump phones in to Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business. He insists a story he just read proves tens of thousands of dead people voted in Michigan. CNN decides to look into the matter. They check the first 25 names on Team Trump’s list of “Dead Men Walking to the Polls.” Then they check 25 at random. Thirty-seven of the alleged dead voters were in fact stone cold. For obvious reasons, none of them had voted. Five of the fifty had voted – those dead rats – except that CNN found those five very much alive and kicking. That left eight more, all still walking the earth. Sadly, none had bothered to cast ballots. 

91. Donald also warns that Democrats are about to steal two U.S. Senate seats, which will be decided in special Georgia elections. “You’re using the same garbage machinery, Dominion [Voting Systems],” he whines. “And she’s going around, [Stacey] Abrams [a leader of the Georgia Democrats], she’s going around screaming that she’s got 800,000 or 850,000 ballots.” 

92. The blogger is no dope – at least, he thinks. So he does a little checking. Abrams is actually “screaming” that voters have 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.” 

93. The blogger is diligent in pursuit of Truth. So he consults the website for the National Council of State Legislatures. It turns out that red states like Texas, Ohio, and Florida allow early voting by mail. Trump won them all in 2020. For some odd reason, if he wins, voting by mail is kind of cool. 

94. Trump voted by mail in the 2020 Florida primaries, himself. 

 

95. November 12, 2020: Members of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee, including Director Chris Krebs of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as two other Trump appointees, 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.”  

96. North Carolina sorts out its last votes the next day. Donald is declared victor. He doesn’t mind if votes take time to count – so long as he prevails. 

97. Team Trump gets busy pushing claims of massive fraud in Georgia. This gets embarrassing quick. Trump lawyers cite the shocking case of James Blalock, Jr., a World War II veteran, who voted in Georgia, despite having died fourteen years earlier. Mr. Blalock has not in fact voted. His wife, Agnes, has, under her properly registered name: “Mrs. James E. Blalock, Jr.” 

98. Team Trump also spreads the tale of a U.S. Army raid on the office of a Spanish election software company with an office in Frankfurt, Germany. There, votes are supposedly being harvested for Democrats. When asked about the “raid” an Army spokesperson replies tersely, “Those allegations are false.” 

No raid ever happened. 

(And thank you for your service!) 

 

99. Another tale is told of Italian satellites beaming down billions of bogus votes for Joe Biden from space! 

100. QAnon fans, a silly subset of the MAGA faithful – people who will believe anything – believe the satellite story. 

101. The same kind of QAnon folks will later claim that President Joe Biden is actually being played by a robot. 

102. Gen. Flynn (who did meet with Russians in 2016) will later claim you could hack thermostats and steal votes. (See: Steps #45 and #56, Part I.)

Really, it’s pathetic for good people – which most MAGA folks are – to be so misinformed. Also: It’s dangerous to our democracy.  

 

103. November 16: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another Republican, unloads in an interview. 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. 

104. We should also mention that in dozens of counties with smaller populations, the machine counts, and hand counts, perfectly match. 

You can look it up. 

(Sadly, I fear, if you love Trump, you won’t dare.) 

 

105. Director Krebs (See: #95) 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. 

106. Trump fires Krebs. 

Election officials in Clark County, Nevada announce that they are unable to call one race with confidence. Ross Miller, the Democrat, appears to have defeated Republican Stavros Anthony by 10 votes – out of 153,000; but 139 ballots have “discrepancies.” 

107. Fox News jumps all over the 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. 

(Fox News loves stories about voting fraud – because Fox News loves ratings.)  

108. A recount follows. Miller’s lead grows to 30 votes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s one exclamation point for each vote gained. 

109. In other words: It’s no big victory for Donald. 

110. Not even a tiny one. 

 

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 their press conference, Powell describes the plot against President Trump. There’s “massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China.” She insists 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. 

111. Jumping ahead, for fun, Ellis will eventually be forced to admit, during a disciplinary hearing in Colorado, that she was lying about the 2020 election being stolen. Her license to practice law will be revoked for three years. 

112. Ms. Ellis will also cop to a felony for her part in a conspiracy to steal Georgia’s electoral votes for Trump.

Ellis is now a felon.

 

113. Then she will agree to cooperate with prosecutors in Arizona, looking into another leg of the plot to steal the 2020 election from Biden. 

114. None of the prosecutions we will mention (known as “witch hunts” to the MAGA faithful) will be possible unless ordinary citizens, forming grand juries, vote to return indictments. 

115. Powell will also cop to six misdemeanors, in the Georgia case, and be fined and placed on probation for six years. 

116. Kenneth Chesebro, yet another Trump lawyer, will also take a dive in Georgia, and cop to a felony.

Chesebro mugshot.

 

(An alert reader might notice there are a lot of felons in this story.) 

 

117. Rudy will tell so many lies about two Georgia poll workers “stealing votes” that he will get his ass sued for defamation. He will refuse to supply documents the court demands; and a jury will award plaintiffs – the two workers, who end up facing a storm of death threats – $148.2 million. 

118. Meanwhile, on November 19, 2020, a suit is filed in Georgia by prominent private attorney L. Lin Wood. The Trump ally calls on a federal court to block certification of the state’s electoral votes. U.S. District Court Judge Steven Grimberg, a Trump appointee, rules that any “evidence of improprieties,” as presented, “falls far short” of what would be needed to justify stepping in to alter election results. 

119. Next, Trump summons Republican lawmakers from Michigan to the White House. He pressures them to declare him winner of that state’s electoral votes, despite Biden’s 154,000-popular vote lead. 

120. 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 and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors just as we have said throughout this election.” 

121. Referencing the president’s ploy to convince state legislators to do his bidding, Sen. Mitt Romney is brutally honest:

 

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. 

 

122. 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.” 

(That statement proves to be prophetic.) 

(Also note: Per our practice, we are almost exclusively quoting Republicans.) 

 

123. A suit filed by The Election Integrity Project, a group led by a pro-Trump activist, is tossed by Clark County District Judge Gloria Sturman. The suit alleges that 1,400 people who had registered to vote in Nevada, moved to California, and still voted in Nevada. Sturm essentially calls the people who filed the lawsuit a bunch of nitwits. For example, military personnel, at bases like Camp Pendleton in California, but whose permanent homes are in Nevada, might legally send in a vote from a California address. Same for their spouses and adult children. 

The blogger, at Camp Pendleton in 1970.

 

124. Team Trump lawyers ask for election returns for the state of Pennsylvania to be voided. U.S. Middle District Judge Matthew Brann rules that they have presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” 

125. Sidney Powell “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 Kraken: A mythical destroyer of ships.

 

126. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says the president’s refusal to admit defeat is harming the country. It’s time for Trump to “stop golfing and concede,” he says.

 

127. Next we have a statement signed 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.” 

128. Another challenge to Pennsylvania voting results is tossed. Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, with the concurrence of two other Republican-appointed judges, responds. “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Judge Bibas writes. “Charges of unfairness are serious, but calling an election unfair [emphasis added] does not make it so.” 

129. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court also throws out a lawsuit asking for 2.5 million mail-in ballots to be disqualified.

 The ruling is unanimous. 

 

130. 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 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. 

131. Mr. Blogger does a deep dive while editing his 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. 

132. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey makes it clear. Trump lost his state. This fact ricochets off MAGA skulls. 

133. Governor Kemp says Trump lost the Georgia vote, as well. That fact ricochets off the skulls of people in red baseball caps. 

134. A federal judge agrees to freeze Dominion voting machines used in three of the most populous blue counties in Georgia. Alas, the skies darken quickly for Trump lovers, when U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten notes that there is “precious little proof” to back any claims of haunted voting machines. 

Still, it’s a kind of win for Team Trump. (See: #150.)

A rare courtroom win!

 

 

135. On 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 election. 

136. The next day, Trump offers up a multitude of false claims in a speech, insisting that he won the election. In Antrim County, Michigan, he claims, voting machines “wrongly switched” 6,000 votes from his column to Biden’s, and “this is just the tip of the iceberg.” He goes on to insist that sleuths have uncovered hundreds of similar examples. “Are there 1000s?” he wonders. 

137. The mistake Trump refers to occurred in a county where the Board of Elections is in GOP hands. The mistake has nothing to do with Dominion systems being rigged. (See: December 17, below.) 

138. In Detroit, Donald says, “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. 

“According to unofficial election results on the City of Detroit’s website,” the Associated Press points out, “on Nov. 3, there were 250,138 votes cast and 504,714 registered voters [emphasis added]. Detroit has an estimated population of 670,000.” 

 

139. A federal judge now orders Trump lawyers to pay the State of Michigan and the City of Detroit $175,000 for filing a “frivolous” lawsuit in an attempt to challenge voting results. 

140. Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers is taking regular phone calls from Rudy Giuliani and the president. They want him to help overturn election results. He says he won’t – because he took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. 

“It would violate that oath,” Bowers later tells congressional investigators, “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 refused to break the law or violate his oath.

141. This one is funny. Testifying before a panel of Michigan lawmakers, a “star witness” in the fight to overturn Biden’s victory turns out to be quite the 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. 

FUN FACT: Her testimony proves so bizarre, Saturday Night Live presents a parody. And, yes, Rudy did punctuate her claims with a barrage of gaseous omissions, caught on microphones inside the hearing room. 

 

142. On December 4, Team Trump suffers five brutal court defeats. At 4:30 p.m. the Minnesota Supreme Court tosses a suit, after lawyers ask that the state’s electoral vote not be certified. 

143. The Michigan Court of Appeals tosses a challenge to certification of the vote in Wayne County, home to Detroit. 

144. 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.” 

145. Those alternate electors (i.e. “fakes”) are eventually hauled before a grand jury, and two of their leaders are indicted. 

(Questions related to that case are currently before the Nevada Supreme Court.) 

 

146. A Wisconsin judge blows up another lawsuit. Asked to overturn the state’s 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 would do indelible damage to every future election. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.” 

147. 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 outcome of the election.”

148. We should probably mention here that Ms. Ward is later called to testify as part of a congressional investigation looking int the events related to the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6. She decides to plead the Fifth to just about every question investigators can think of. 

149. Georgia Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan explains, during an appearance on CNN, that Trump’s “mountains of misinformation” about stolen votes are hurting the Republican Party. “If I had a chance to spend five minutes with every single person in Georgia that doubted the election results,” he says, “I think I’d be able to win their hearts over, show them the facts and figures, separate fact from fiction” 

(Good luck with that, sir. We’ve been trying for the last four years.) 

 

150. December 7: A federal judge 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 lawyers’ only “win” in court, an earlier decision by Batten (See: #134), becomes a loss. 

Their record is reduced to 0 for 2020. 

 

151. U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker tosses another lawsuit seeking to overturn the Michigan vote. Parker is scathing in rebuke. “This lawsuit seems to be less about achieving the relief Plaintiffs seek … and more about the impact of their allegations on People’s faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government.” 

152. 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.”

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: 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 Trump is a shameless liar. 

 

153. The president’s lawyers briefly advance 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 – against sister states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Paxton claims those states’ electoral votes for Biden should not count. 

Texas electoral votes for Trump should.

 

154. “At one point,” the Washington Post 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 eight billion, it’s unclear how that math works.) 

 

155. 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. 

156. You can even vote from jail in Texas, under certain circumstances, which is oddly amusing. 

157. In the lawsuit filed by Paxton and crafted by a lawyer, Dr. John Eastman – soon to be famous – 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. Even the simple blogger knows that, without needing to look it up. 

Dr. Eastman muffs an easy one.
President Kennedy lost both Ohio and Florida, but won.

158. Next, we had several other irrelevant claims. This blogger’s favorite: Trump won 18 of 19 “bellwether counties,” which had not failed to pick the presidential winner since 1980. According to Paxton and 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. 

One blue county has more people than all the red counties.

  

159. It was fun to find out that just four years earlier, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in 14 other “bellwether counties.” 

160. Biden won those same 14 “bellwether counties” in 2020. So, take that, Dr. Eastman, you dolt. 

161. We should also point out that Paxton will later be found liable for retaliating against whistleblowers in his office, after they accused him of bribery and fraud. He agreed to pay $3.3 million in damages. 

162. But not before he tried to stick Texas taxpayers with the tab. 

163. Like his hero, the Orange Dumpling, Paxton later gets impeached – but survives his trial. 

164. No matter. None of this bellwether BS 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.”