Based on what we know now, it's worth a very brief recap of the events following the 2020 presidential election:
- Between November 3 and January 6, every organ of the Republican Party was dedicated to the proposition that Democrats had stolen the presidential election.
- The president of the United States—Donald J. Trump—was the foremost champion of this conspiracy theory. His supporters filed dozens of court cases claiming fraud, losing every one of them.
- Trump then turned to Attorney General William Barr to support his claims of election fraud, but Barr refused.
- As he became ever more frantic, Trump consulted with an eminent lawyer who presented him with a plan to overturn the Electoral College results. Practically speaking, the plan boiled down to "The vice president has the ultimate authority to accept or throw out whatever results he wants."
- Trump pressed vice president Mike Pence to accept this. Pence called around desperately trying to convince himself that he had this authority.
- A war room at the Willard hotel, filled with Trump's closest advisors, was set up to put intense pressure on Pence to play ball. On January 5 Trump issued a statement that he and Pence were in "total agreement" about Pence's authority.
- This was a lie. In the end, Pence couldn't quite bring himself to follow Trump's orders.
- On January 6, a huge mob descended on Washington DC to protest the reading of the Electoral College results. Trump was thrilled with this.
- The mob broke into the Capitol in hopes of stopping Pence from declaring a winner.
- At the time, nearly every Republican politician denounced the insurrection.
- Today, nearly every Republican politician refuses to denounce the insurrection.
Robert Costa summarizes:
By the time Trump takes the stage on Jan. 6, he has pulled every possible lever of power to try to stay in power. Courts via Rudy. VP via Eastman. Lawmakers. DOJ. Now, all that is left to stoke, the last lever, is the sprawling crowd before him./end
— Robert Costa (@costareports) October 23, 2021
Costa left out one thing: the relentless PR campaign from virtually every Republican outlet claiming that Biden stole the election. That's what set the stage for everything else.
Congress is now interested in finding out what really happened in the war room during the early days of January. Republicans are almost unanimously determined to make sure that it stays a secret forever. That's where we stand today.
Time to turn all the cards over.
One of those cards is the "Donald Trump has been a confidential informant to the FBI for decades" card. The FBI/DOJ needs to be willing to pay the price of "burning" a longtime CI if they want to take him down.
Hahahaha! Also to the Kremlin.😎
The only reason I doubt El Jefe being a confidential informant is that I can't see him keeping things in confidence.
Donald Trump, and his gang of idiots, are horrid. The January 6th Capital stormers rightly deserve to be in jail.
My only caution, to my Democratic friends is I WISH it was only Republicans claiming that the Presidential election was stolen. Reminder, representatives for the last three losing Democrats (Gore, Kerry and Clinton) each claimed that they lost because of cheating. Note, I am NOT saying that the Democrats are equal to the Republicans on this front. Rather, my point is that there is a cumulative effect: Clinton’s crew claiming the Russians ‘stole’ the election makes it easier for the Trump halfwits to believe/claim a stolen election….
Trump was working with Russia to destabilize the US. So was China. This was a chance. You could also blame swing voters that made up large parts electorally of his coalition. October 1st they were leaning Biden. Over the course of October, they flipped back to Trump as seen in his rising approval rating.
Spadesogrey - my point is losing Democrats, claiming cheating, normalize this argument: the very act of claiming cheating provides succor to future groups to make a similar claim.
Not like that is new. Before 2000, elections were more clear cut. Look at the "suspicious" nature of 1876 or 1960.
America simply is having close elections because the electorate can't find a coalition that drives large enough gains.
Oh pluzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, you are worse than the anti-vax people who try to infect comment threats with innocent seeming questions or observations. All three Democratic candidates called their opponents and conceded, none have publicly complained about their respective elections except to argue for better election security and methods for the next guys down the road.
You mean new age Hippies and their anti-vax female overeducated supporters in the suburbs???
HokieAnnie - I believe you have a selective memory
Clinton
https://www.yahoo.com/now/hillary-clinton-maintains-2016-election-160716779.html
Kerry
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/hitchens200503
Gore
https://theintercept.com/2018/11/10/democrats-should-remember-al-gore-won-florida-in-2000-but-lost-the-presidency-with-a-preemptive-surrender/
You are distorting history to support a false narrative. Each candidate gave concession speeches and graciously called their opponents to congratulate them on their victories.
At no point whatsoever did any of them encourage their supporters to not accept the election results. That's a huge difference between them and Trump.
To repeat, I am NOT saying the failed Democratic candidates (or related supporters) are equal or to the Trump bag of fools.
For context, I was raised in the Rust Belt, as a Democrat, in a Republican suburb. I am telling you, non Trump Republicans, literally my parent's neighbors, use Clinton's post loss claims of 'Russian interference' as sustenance when I asked about the storming the capital. You get 'sure Trump lost. So did Clinton, Kerry and Gore. Unless its a landslide, losing candidates dispute the results.'
So yes, I firmly believe that Democrats provide succor to Republican claims of cheating and the Jan 6th circus of fools.
"You get 'sure Trump lost. So did Clinton, Kerry and Gore. Unless its a landslide, losing candidates dispute the results.'"
Except none of them disputed the results. Not one of them said they were the legitimate President after losing the election. None of them called the results false. None of them tried by every legal and illegal mean at their disposal to reverse the final outcome. None of them then goaded their party members and supporters to take matters into their own hands.
That's the issue with this kind of weak whataboutism (which is what you are doing even if you say you are not). Saying that X,Y,Z influenced the results one way or another is a valid criticism of an election since that is literally what happens in every election ever. That's what elections are, a whole bunch of things that influence and tilt results in one way or the other.
But that is very different from what Trump and his cultists did, which was not to say the results were influenced by X,Y,Z, but to flat out say the results were false and should be ignored and the outcome reversed.
Final post from me on this point. I am NOT saying Gore, Kerry or Clinton are equal to the Trump attempt to over throw an election.
I AM saying that a pattern, mind you this is the last three losing Democrat candidate (or senior Democrats), questioning the validity of an election creates an infrastructure that aides (I am not saying justifies) Trump's horrible actions.
Hillary
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41244474
Kerry
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/19/2004-kerry-election-fraud-2020-448604
Gorehttps://account.newsobserver.com/paywall/subscriber-only?resume=246920577&intcid=ab_archive
"I AM saying that a pattern, mind you this is the last three losing Democrat candidate (or senior Democrats), questioning the validity of an election"
The issue is that none of the three questioned the validity of the election. There is no pattern.
In Clinton's case she gave reasons why she thinks she lost the election, explicitly saying "this are some reasons why I lost the election", which is what every candidate on Earth who loses an election normally does.
In Kerry's case he actually said nothing, he conceded and that was it. In the article you linked to, one person thought that "maybe" the Ohio election was fraudulent but Kerry himself never claimed or even insinuated as much.
For Gore I can't see your article since it is behind a paywall but same as with Kerry, once he SC weighed on the Florida recount he conceded immediately and since then has never tried to claim the election was stolen from him.
There is no patter where the losing Democrats question the validity of the election. Trumpists refuse to accept it because that is what Trump told them to do and what he himself does. Even before the 2016 election when he thought he was going to lose, he had already been screaming the election was a fraud before it even took place. That has always been his schtick. In his sick mind he is the absolute best at everything and if the results don't show that, it is definitely because he was cheated and the results are fake (just see his long term whining when The Apprentice didn't win an award he thought it should have won).
There is no point of comparison nor rationale that gives Trump and his lackey's any sort justification even weakly for their response to losing the election.
Bingo!
Gore personally certified Bush's Election as VP! Kerry conceded, though it stuck in his craw. So did Clinton. Democrats conceded Trump was the legitimate President but 85% of GOP Senators & Reps would not admit to the Washpo that Biden was the legal President. No equivalence there.
There is Democrats sore losing, and then there is Trump, the Gop & a coup d'etat.
Toby Joyce - agreed, the actions are FAR from equal. Rather, my point, is simple, imagine two worlds.
- In one world, there is a pattern of the losing Presidential candidate (or folks close to the candidate) claiming that the election was not fair: that is what we basically have with Gore, Kerry, Clinton and Trump.
- In another world ONLY Trump's idiots claim that the election was illegitimate.
Can you not see how world one makes it easier for Trump supporters to justify January 6th?
Interesting, but Christopher Hitchens does not count as a representative for John Kerry.
Neither was Jon Schwartz a representative for Al Gore, and in that case the complaint didn't rest on a murky unsubstantiated claim, but on the historical fact of the Supreme Court's intervention.
So, "representatives for the last three losing Democrats (Gore, Kerry and Clinton) each claimed that they lost because of cheating" seems like an overstatement. Hillary's remarks from 2020, though, were deplorable.
Yup.
Clinton graciously conceded the night of the election. Absolutely no comparison whatsoever.
You can only fight the projection of wrongdoing with a firm commitment to the truth -- which means exposing and prosecuting true wrongdoing when it occurs. Anything less rewards the gaslighting.
Thank you. Nothing like that person falsely equating different situations.
Some big differences. The Democrats did concede in spite of winning the national vote by large margins. Gore actually won the vote in FL--but the Supreme Court stepped in to stop the recount. The Russian meddling was real, and lest not forget the pronouncement by the FBI director.
I agree. The 2000 election simply is going to cause whining no different than 1876 or 1960. Said poster above should realize that.
The critical difference is that when Democrats alleged cheating they were specific about the acts constituting the alleged cheating and had good evidence to support their allegations. The Trumpist allegations have been either vague or completely implausible, and in either case completely unsupported by evidence.
Remember that cries of "wolf" gain plausibility when a wolf has actually recently been seen in the vicinity.
Melissa Cerrone did nothing wrong!
FOAD, troll. You ain't no friend o' mine.
Gore never said Bush cheated; it was other, often non-political actors, who groused that Kitty Harris gamed the results by going forward with JEB's voter purge.
Kerry never said Bush cheated; Greg Pallast, a radical leftist journo (so likely a Green or Nader voter) was the loudest voice about Wally O'Dell's shenanigans in Ohio.
Hillary never said Trump cheated; she pursued a recount, quickly relented, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, & Wisconsin due to possible hacks from your contractors on Savushkina Street, but she averted no assurance that the count manipulation on the part of Russia was in direct coordination with the Trump-Pence campaign.
Right we all remember the environmental extremists who attacked the Supreme Court in December 2000, viciously beating the Supreme Court Police with giant thermometers. It's truly both sides.
& now one of them is about to radicalize joebiden's Bureau of Land Management.
I appreciate your viewpoint -- really, I do -- but it doesn't really hold water. Gore eventually conceded after about five or six weeks. Kerry conceded almost immediately after election night, as did Clinton. Yes, representatives (and a lot of voters) for these three claimed cheating, but let's draw a clear comparison between them and theformerguy: the twice-impeached and disgraced former President claimed cheating, nearly everyone in the Republican Party (from high-ranking officials to rank-and-file party members to trailer-dwelling MAGAts) claimed cheating, and there was a entire media apparatus (not just one network, but also Newsmax and OANN, as well as thousands of websites from Breitbart on down) set up to broadcast that Big Lie. In other words, there's no comparison.
Gore supporters did not claim there was cheating; they claimed there were errors in the vote count, which there were. Errors DO happen, and when an election is as close as 2000 was, those errors acquire greatly magnified significance. There were some people in 2004 who questioned the Ohio count, but I don't recall them being representatives of the candidate. In 2016, the allegation was of "upstream" cheating; the claim was that Russian interference had improperly affected the way people voted; there was no claim that the count of the votes actually cast was inaccurate or that there were fraudulent votes.
More significant, Gore, Kerry and Clinton all personally accepted the outcome of the elections they lost; they did not claim fraud or "the election was stolen". Trump's "stolen election" claims are being made by Trump personally, with his followers following.
There will be people alleging irregularities in every election; it is important to keep track of exactly who those people are. Allegations by the defeated candidate in person carry a lot more weight than allegations by supporters that are not approved by the candidate.
algore honored the result, then went home & won an Academy Award & Nobel Prize.
If El Jefe had the same gumption, he would have admitted his loss to joebiden, then gone back to Maralago or Bedminster & finally secured his long-deserved Emmy Award.
Right, but your forgetting the lack of counter protesters. The "battle" outside of the capitol is what was supposed to delay the "results". The move to go inside the capitol was a poorly, quickly made backup plan. Pence knows that when you try a coup, capital markets would begin to liquidate and the dollar would contract significantly, leading to credit collapse. Destroying the U.S. economy and Trump. But that is what Trump's handlers wanted. But reneged at the last second. It's why Republicans overplayed the Trump hand. Are struggling themselves to reorganize, which the media is totally missing.The
The counter protesters were the key to all this, as George Lucas would say.
Has anyone asked Eastman if Kamala Harris has the same powers he said Pence did to choose the next president, no matter the results of the vote?
Didn't you hear, children of legal immigrants born in the US are no longer allowed to be VP or P. It's the Kamala rule.
/s
Oooooh so that's why Spiro Agnew had to resign.
Every president before Martin van Buren was an impostor.
President Martin van Buren, our only ESL president.
But our first president born after Independence, & therefore not a crown subject.
Also: is Martin van Buren's ESL background a bigger deal than Jefferson Davis being the North American continent's first trans president?
Ah right. There's always an exception...
Two things concern me about how we're responding.
First, the age-old beltway principle still endures that if something was done that was really, really bad, it must have been done in SECRET. So we just need to "get to the bottom of what happened." But what we saw and heard done openly was really, really bad! Why can't that count? I'm worried that they're going to spend months digging for some "smoking gun" that will never quite be found, because all the guns were out and being used right in the open.
Second, too much of the rhetoric is directed towards preventing physical violence. We had a "close call," but it failed, and if we can do a better job of protecting the Capitol next time, all will be well! But that's missing the point of the civic violence that has already been done, and done successfully. I don't want to hear any more of "making sure this never happens again." I want to hear how those who already attempted to assassinate our democracy are delegitimized, disgraced, and sent to prison.
Kevin left out a few things:
1) Trump pressured county election officials to recount to give Trump more votes, 'find' ballots for him, or investigate/discover fraudulent schemes.
2) Trump pressured state election officials to recount to give Trump more votes, 'find' ballots for him, investigate/discover fraudulent schemes, and refuse to certify Biden the winner.
3) Trump pressured State legislatures to overturn state election results and declare Trump the winner though various means including fraud investigations, delaying/refusing certification, and appointing a Republication slate of electors despite Trump losing the vote.
4) The Jan 6 rally was set for that day by Trump & co. Initially, the organizers picked a day a few days earlier.
The Washington coup schemes were the third act after lawsuits failed, and the pressure campaign at the state level failed.
Excellent points.
Trump pressed vice president Mike Pence to accept this. Pence called around desperately trying to convince himself that he had this authority.
So, this thing has been around for 250 years and no one ever thought to do it before? OK!
Maybe Pence should have called Scalia to make up how the law works, rather than this guy.
Is there some way we can mark these seditionists for life?! Maybe WaPo and the NYT could print all of their names, in fairly large print, on the front page as a wall os shame and we could actually shun them forever.
We should brand them Delta Tau, like at a fraternity initiation.
Make Haw-Haw Hawley & Cyclops Crenshaw & CrossBitch Taylor-Greene & Wheels Cawthorne bear a scar on their biceps marking them as minions of Donald Trump.
It will be 1000 times worse in 2024 if he runs for President. I guarantee you that right from the get-go, he'll be out loud proclaiming that 2020 was stolen from him, and Democrats are going to try and steal it again unless Republicans stop them. You might see some Republican-dominated state governments start sabotaging against Democratic victories even before the election. You might see actual violence at polling places disproportionately used by Democrats in Republican-dominated states, to say nothing of disruption from Republican party monitors on site.
And he will almost certainly run if he's healthy in 2024, which he probably will be - his dad lived to be 93, and his mother 88.
Good points. It's nowhere near over yet. I recall being at a polling place in Albuquerque's South Valley -- heavily Democratic, working class Hispanics -- and there were pickup trucks and SUV with Trump banners driving around and around and around the block where the Vote Center was located, to prevent people from being able to park there, or even approach. I've never seen anything like it.
But it's a sure thing that we'll see more and more in future years. Unless law enforcement and public opinion change radically, that is. More disruption, definitely more violence.
Can't count on the cops. Trumpers think violence is cool. They are armed. I don't see another way to hold it back without left wing militias.
I hope he does run in 2024. It will be an epic defeat and hopefully he'll drag the rest of the ticket down with him.
He has early stage Alzheimer's and lung damage. Your lost.
the Trumpers already tried that here in Fairfax, VA - the government center was an early voting location and there were folks lined up to vote on the first day voting opened - they drove around the parking lot with their Trump flags hollering obscenities at the folks in line scaring many.
This past legislative session they passed laws further restricting what you can do near a polling place so under current law they would not be allowed into the parking lot.
Trump held back the federal response because he wanted to see if they could pull of the coup for him.
The C-in-C using his command authority to support a coup in his favor by inaction is something that doesn't get explicit mention a lot and it should.
Who besides me thinks the civil war begins Nov. 2024? And who agrees that left-wing militias are not the answer?
Relatedly, what will life in the new Repug state be like? Will it really be so bad?
I'm almost beyond consolation
You need a nostril rip. You do understand what capital liquidation is don't you??? The "red states" will bankrupt and no longer exist. You just don't think.
I not only don't know what capital liquidation is, I don't know what a nostril rip is, or whether I need one, or why. The red states will bankrupt and cease to exist well after they begin a shooting war. Besides, I live in a red state.
What makes you the way you are?
Then your a moron
You mean "you're" a moron.
Given the lack of IQ displayed in your posts I'm sure the irony of posting "your a moron" will be completely lost on you.
Don't waste your time. You are talking to a troll whose only purpose around here is to post nonsense, to say some variation of "irrelevant", or to post anti-semitic or racist comments every now and then.
Nah. We win Texas and the Republican Party is broken. They can't win the presidency without Texas because of the electoral college. Much as I hate to admit it, it all may turn on (the evil) Elon Musk moving hundreds of highly educated Democrats from CA to TX.
Poor Elon. About to get the Jack Dorsey treatment.
Whats the option besides militias? Fascists will just round you up and shoot you unless you resist with force.
In Portland, Joey Gibson's Patriots Pride cowered in fear after just one of their homies got shot.
These radical falangists are cowards.
Lets also note the current divide in America started in the post- Great Depression era globalism were manufacturers consolidated around but city suburbs and by Reagan's time, began heavily exporting commodities and expanding consumer debt into big cities/Suburbs. Yes, to the idiot poster above, Red states are the biggest globalist ones. When it goes, we will see starvation and governments collapse one after another.
For a true leftist, this is the desired result. Period. It's why Putin backed off on January 6th.
Not one of those idiots who attacked the capitol has been charged with terrorism.
What part of the definition of terrorism doesn't apply here?
While not all were expressly Christian, as with the animist QANON Shaman, none of the arrested golpistas have been revealed as Muslin.
The thing about the capitol rioters,
these are all people easily given to strong natural convictions.
The courts should simply recognize this.
You mean "you're" a moron.
Woops. That was for Spades. I'm such a moron, I can't post in the right place.
The only modification I would make is too number 2. It may be picking nits, but to my understanding (IANAL and I didn't read the lawsuits) almost none of the lawsuits filed actually claimed fraud. Instead, something like 99% claimed process violations, eg "the legislature changed rules so you could vote by mail by dropping it off instead of using the USPS and they didn't have the right to do that", etc
Now, the lawyers had press conferences where they SAID they would argue fraud. And probably most Trump supporters don't draw a distinction. But when it came time to go to court, the Trumpers didn't have any fraud allegations for the court.
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