Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but to me it's genuinely weird to see the President of the United States admitting that he's getting ready to steal the election.
Oh, I don’t think so. I — we need nine justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam; it’s a hoax. Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else.
So you’re going to need nine justices up there.
"Hoax" and "scam" being words Trump uses for realities he does not wish his voters to acknowledge, it's clear he expects his shysters to push swing-state vote-rigging suits up to SCOTUS after the election, and he wants Amy Barrett Comey or some other reliable co-conspirator to rig it for him when they do. (Mike Pence has been doing the same thing, though in a less rough-and-tumble manner for the more delicate JustTheTip Trumpers.) (Update: Oh, yeah, there was also Trump's "get rid of the ballots" thing. Classy!)
Thanks to Barton Gellman at The Atlantic, we even have some idea of how they plan to do it:
According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.
If you think they wouldn't try such a thing after the Supreme Court's recent ruling against the rights of faithless electors, you underestimate the ingenuity of their evil; anti-democratic efforts work best when they contradict common ideas of fairness, because they break the people's faith in their institutions.
To prepare for this coup attempt, rightwing factota are already dressing the stage. Democrats have been bitching about the anti-majority nature of our Democracy -- two minority-vote Republican Presidencies since 2000, Dems getting played on the Supreme Court, etc. -- so Republicans are like, nah uh, it's you guys who are anti-democratic. James Antle from the Washington Examiner on 2004:
Literally in an election where some -- admittedly not all, not most, but not a trivial number -- of liberals were hoping Kerry could succeed in challenging Ohio's results, which would have resulted in him becoming president while losing the popular vote.
Who can forget Kerry's "Banana Republic Riot"! As it happened, Democratic objections in Congress to Ohio voting irregularities were dismissed by large bipartisan majorities, but Antle did his little to make it look like vote-stealing is the other guys' game and that's what counts -- to get enough of this stuff in the media bloodstream that Trumpkins can say "Oh yeah well Kerry said he should be president and that's the real fraud."
And GOP Rep. Jim Jordan is pimping a House Judiciary Committee Republicans report called "HOW DEMOCRATS ARE ATTEMPTING TO SOW UNCERTAINTY, INACCURACY, AND DELAY IN THE 2020 ELECTION" that is utterly full of shit. For one thing, it refers repeatedly to "all-mail balloting" as if those of us in jurisdictions with expanded mail voting options can't vote in person. And it has howlers like this:
All-mail balloting -- not to be confused with time-tested and limited absentee balloting --...
Oh for fuck's sake.
...raises serious questions about election integrity. To begin, states have notoriously inaccurate voter registration lists—one estimate suggests that voter registration rates exceed 100 percent of the eligible populations in 378 counties across the United States.
Yeah, people on voter rolls die and don't bother to call the BOE from their deathbeds and ask to be taken off. Not sure what that has to do with voting by mail.
As the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform found in 2005, voting by mail “remain[s] the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
"Potential"'s doing a lot of work there. That same 2005 report also says, "While there is little evidence of fraud in Oregon where the entire state votes by mail absentee balloting in other states has been one of the major sources of fraud." That would be the same "time-tested and limited absentee balloting" Jordan referred to earlier, and which Trump himself has praised -- a distinction without a difference on which the 2020 report leans heavily: We Republicans are not doing anarchistic mail voting, we're doing good Republican cloth coat absentee voting!
The report does this kind of thing throughout: For example, it refers to the 2007 King County ACORN registration fraud case ("Prosecutors claimed the defendants submitted more than 1,800 false voter registration forms") without mentioning that none of the registrations the temp workers filled out led to ballots being submitted -- in other words, the system worked like it was supposed to and caught the problem. There's also a lot of guff like this:
If states can allow violent left-wing extremists to riot and loot in person, then they should allow peaceful Americans to exercise their right to vote in person. If Speaker Pelosi can visit a hair salon without a mask in San Francisco, then Americans in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania can visit their local polling places.
So it's not a scholarly document, to say the least -- it's basically GOP propaganda but with footnotes, so operatives like Byron York at the Examiner can talk about it as if it's -- well, I was going to say the Warren Report, but no one's believed in blue-ribbon reports for years, so really it's more like Chariots of the Gods? or The Secret, and the rubes will eat it up. As I've said before: Were it not for motivated reasoning, they'd have no reasoning at all.
UPDATE. They're still dismissing this overt-and-not-subtle threat from the President as something you should just pretend didn't happen. David Harsanyi at National Review:
Not a single journalist or politician in hysterics on the social media right now — most of them having spent four straight years delegitimizing the presidency and the attacking constitutional order — actually believes Trump won’t leave office peacefully if he loses the election. It’s all an act. Trump, of course, gives his opposition endless ammunition to engage in these group fantasies with his reckless answers.
Just because he's "reckless" enough to say he'll do these things doesn't mean he's reckless enough to do them. If only one of these con men had the nerve to say, "look, he keeps saying he'll got a health care plan, too, and he obviously doesn't!"
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