Trump and His Pathetic Allies Are Yelling About St

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Trump and His Pathetic Allies Are Yelling About Stealing the Pennsylvania Election or Getting a 'Do-Over'

These people are enemies of democracy. If it's necessary to retain power, they'll get rid of it.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politic...nl21928036

_By Jack Holmes
Nov 6, 2020



lindsey graham
Twitter

The Republican Party is an authoritarian outfit. They do not believe in democracy and, in their actions, they are enemies of democracy. This is a polite way to say "fascist," which freaks people out and shuts down their brains. But it's the same.

They believe they should be in power, and if they don't win the support of a majority of citizens—which these days, they usually do by stopping certain citizens from voting and drawing maps where those citizens' votes count for less—then they'll simply try to steal the election.

That Donald Trump is lazy, and his plot to do so has been clumsy and telegraphed, does not change the fact that international observers have already issued a report on his behavior this election cycle that reads like an indictment of some tinpot dictator.

To be clear, what is now happening has been coming—and it's been incredibly obvious—for months. Well, years. In 2016, Trump said he would only consider the election legitimate if he won. Even when he won, he greeted the news he'd gotten shellacked in the popular vote by saying 3 million of those votes were fraudulent. 3 million(!), and yet, when he created an entire presidential commission to investigate, they found nothing and disbanded.

Then he ransacked the institutions of democracy for four years, undermining the separation of powers and the independent system of justice and the free press, until this election was approaching and he once again said he'd only lose if it was rigged.

Again: the president said he would scream fraud if he lost, and now that he's losing, he's screaming fraud while providing zero court-admissible evidence. This isn't complicated!

Then he started yelling about fraud, but this time it was vote-by-mail during a pandemic, which he openly admitted he feared because it could boost turnout and overrun the Republican voter-suppression machine.

He installed a hack at the United States Postal Service to undermine faith in the mail vote. His campaign arranged for Republican legislatures in key swing states to block efforts to make it easier to count the mail ballots, particularly in Pennsylvania, where they could not begin counting until Election Day.

This made it pretty much inevitable that Trump would be leading on Election Night, the point at which he told confidantes in advance that he would declare victory. Then he declared victory at 2:30 a.m., before the votes were counted, yelling about fraud.



The president ramped this all up with a particularly mendacious and pitiful performance at the White House Thursday evening.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Except he and his supporters simultaneously demanded that the vote continue in states like Arizona and Nevada, where he was behind. The message was clear: votes for Donald Trump are good and legitimate. Votes against him are fraudulent and bad. This is not the viewpoint of a democratic movement.

The scheme continued with shit-brained yelling about how the counting centers in Detroit and Philadelphia and Maricopa County were not allowing Republican observers in to monitor the process, even though there were Republican monitors inside monitoring the process.

Nonetheless, this gigantic Death Star of stupid bullshit had been trained on the 40-or-so percent of the country that is hooked on Fox News and talk radio , and people started showing up to these counting stations in what looked to be the beginnings of rolling Brooks Brothers Riots.

And all the while, the president's pathetic allies stood by and watched or, in some cases, joined right in. If you're looking for proof of how deep the rot goes in the Republican Party and the "conservative" movement that provides its fuel, take a look at all the apparatchiks who've aided and abetted this assault on democracy by one of the most obviously despicable characters in American political history, a giant baby who never faces consequences for anything he does and continually gets things he did not earn and complains the whole time that the system—nay, the world—are rigged against him.

Take a look at what these pillars of the movement got up to last night, after Donald Trump kicked things off with a spasm of mendacity at the White House that came off not so much as a bang, but a whimper.

Lindsey Graham got out to a significant lead in the race to be the loser president's most pitiful lackey, rolling out a performance for the ages on Sean Hannity's Big Stupid News Hour.

"Everything should be on the table." Apparently Lindsey Graham got the message from Don Jr. Now says Republican state legislators in PA should consider throwing out the results of the election and appoint Republican electors from Pennsylvania. pic.twitter.com/fMiu8RBnU7
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 6, 2020

This is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, granting that a coup is "on the table" on national television. They're going to just throw out Pennsylvania's election results because they are hallucinating widespread fraud, which is so widespread they've failed to produce a single piece of evidence? Get real. Actually, get fucked.

Again, there are Republican observers in Philadelphia and everywhere else. But that's not the point: the point is to suggest "bad things happen in Pennsylvania"—the president's line from one of the debates—with the obvious connotation that certain people live there. It's the same people Republicans try to stop from voting. "Dead people voting?" Put up some evidence, Lindsey, or shut your gob! People who are "not legal residents" voting in Nevada? Put up or shut up.

But really, what is this guy's deal? Lindsey Graham just won re-election. He's got six years until he has to run again. Surely no one believes this guy, who used to say Trump is a "kook" who's "unfit for office," has really drunk the Kool-Aid.

Why is he going so far out on a limb for this guy? Will he really need Donald Trump's support this badly in 2026? Is it really just that one of Trump's failsons threatened Republicans on Twitter? Does Graham really think he's going to be president in 2024 after how things turned out when he ran in 2016? Or is there something else at work in his calculus?

Because he wasn't the only one. Here's Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican—such as it is—in the House of Representatives on the president's favorite teevee channel declaring that he won before the votes were counted. Here's Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House who deserves a lot of credit for guiding the Republican Party along this road to ruin, calling for Trump to get Attorney General Bill Barr to send federal agents to arrest election workers in Philadelphia.

Straight-up fascism. Here are, of course, the right-wing media stars like Hannity and Mark Levin, screaming and crying and pooping their pants. (Hannity called for a "do-over" election in Pennsylvania. Try to imagine the reaction if, say, Rachel Maddow had done this in 2016.) But here, also, is Ted Cruz, whose father the president hinted had helped assassinated JFK, and whose wife the president insulted as ugly.

I am angry.

The American people are right to be angry.

We need observers.

Now. pic.twitter.com/LLk7Yoi8SE
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 6, 2020

Again: there are fucking Republican observers in all these places. The Trump campaign went to court to moan about this, and here's what happened, via Alan Feuer of the New York Times:

Judge asks campaign lawyer if GOP observers are in the room or not.

Lawyer says there "is a non-zero number" of them in the room.

Judge, losing patience, asks, "Are people repping DJT Trump for President in that room?

"Yes."

Then what's the problem?" judge asks.

The problem is that they are babies. Big authoritarian babies who don't believe in democracy. This is one of the most pathetic displays on the American national stage in history. Completely disgraceful, and a disturbing harbinger of things to come.

And not just when Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who also chimed in with dumbass propaganda about the "watchers," inevitably run for president in 2024. (These irredeemables almost certainly heeded Junior's threats.) And not just when Mitch McConnell, the now and probably future Senate Majority Leader, weighs in with some weak-ass talk of "every legal vote."

There is a darker and more immediate future afoot, and we may have gotten a glimpse of it Thursday night when Alex Jones showed up in Arizona to whip the crowd outside a ballot-counting center into a frenzy. Or when Philadelphia police intercepted a QAnon-stickered Hummer allegedly headed towards that city's counting center, arresting two men and recovering weapons from the car.

To be clear: the president telegraphed that he would invent widespread issues of voter fraud if he lost, and he is now doing exactly that. The Fox News Channel, with which he has enjoyed a Symbiosis of Stupid for his entire presidency, has snapped into action to spread the delusional conspiracies about cities where Black Americans live stealing the election.

They've been joined by some of the president's most pathetic allies, who in fairness only narrowly beat out the many, many Republicans who are watching this in silence. They would apparently prefer the president orchestrate his election theft with a little more gravitas—you know, like they did it in 2000.

But again, the president was too dumb and lazy to even get his legal team in proper place before he tried all this, so now he's reduced to just spewing enough crap into the body politic that it goes into some sort of septic shock.

Because he is a completely broken person, the president would have no regrets at all about kicking off enough street violence to disrupt the process of his ass getting evicted from the White House. His allies are on board, and no one should forget.

These are some of the absolute worst people the United States of America has produced. They should get the Sarah Huckabee Sanders treatment every time they visit a restaurant for the rest of their lives. They have declared war on American democracy itself, and that is not forgivable in this lifetime.

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