The demented thug-in-chief set the stage for what he hopes will be an armed take-over of the November mid-term elections.
How do you listen to Donald Trump without becoming physically ill or throwing your half-empty wine bottle through your TV?
That thought occurred to me Thursday night as I watched Trump’s 25-minute package of lies billed as a speech. Almost every disproved claim about election fraud got trotted out, supposedly based on intelligence documents that the “Deep State” covered up.
Nicole Wallace, on yesterday’s Deadline White House show on MSNOW, said what Trump served up to the nation was basically a tray full of shit sandwiches. Sums it up.
There is one thing you need to know about the documents Trump cited, documents that supposedly have been hidden deep in the archives of the intelligence community. The archives are filled with documents. Nothing gets thrown away. What happens is it gets sifted through, a lot of it gets a close look and if it is proven false or irrelevant, it gets stuffed back in the file.
The millions of “de-classified” documents Trump cites includes those sorts of documents. In fact, odds are that statistically most incidents that come to the attention of our intelligence agencies end up being disproven. That is what Trump and his minions trotted out to the American public Thursday night.
Trump hit on a few themes. First, China. China had its fingers in all parts of our elections. Fact. No, it did not. Venezuela hacked our voting machines. Fact. No, it did not. It uses similar machines and hacked its own machines to keep despots in power. Previous administrations buried votes, rigged machines. Fact. Nope. Didn’t happen.
Trump went back to the recent California primaries where it took days to count votes because people can do mail-ins right up through election day. The California system maximizes the ability of voters to, well, actually cast a vote. Trump used the slow vote count as a reason to tell Americans they live in the sort of country he once called “shit-hole countries.”
“There’s no third world country that has elections like we have,” he said citing the California vote count as an example. Actually, he was not wrong. There are no third world countries that have elections like ours – fair and honest ones with almost zero fraud.
While Trump’s MAGA hard core base never will doubt a word he said, the verdict is in on our elections and has been for quite a while. Elections today, across the U.S., are the most honest, most thoroughly monitored and the most fraud free they ever have been in our history.
Over the past several years the Brennan Foundation, the Brookings Institute, Reuters, the Associated Press and numerous other organizations and media outlets have taken on and debunked the voter fraud claims.
For example, after the 2020 election, The AP did a deep dive into claims that in six battleground states fraud was rampant. The AP found fewer than 475 incidences of potential voter fraud across those six states. It concluded that “virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.”
The Brennan Foundation, in a seminal report on the integrity of our elections, found that in terms of vote-by-mail, one of Trump’s favorite targets, only “0.000043 percent of total mail ballots case, or about four cases out of every 10 million mail votes” might have involved fraud. That is statistically non-existent.
What is this all about? It’s stage setting. Trump has gutted the intelligence of agents likely to cry “bullshit!” to future claims of interference by foreign powers. He wants Jay Clayton as director the National Intelligence Community and his personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, as attorney-general, so he can use bogus claims to put troops, or ICE thugs, at polling places in the upcoming November mid-terms.
He wants to use these lackies and fake claims to seize voting machines and ballots.
In other words, he wants to use the November mid-terms to drive a stake through the heart of American democracy.
That’s what his 25-minute pack of lies Thursday night was all about. No doubt his base sucked it up. It’s doubtful a majority of Americans did, if they even bothered to listen to the speech or read it.
Two things need to happen.
First, Senate Republicans need to get past their fear of Trump and vote based on love of democracy to vote down the appointments of Blanche and Clayton.
Then, they need to jam these shit sandwiches down the garbage disposal by showing up in November in previously unseen numbers; numbers so overwhelming that the ICE thugs and Trump’s goons are shoved aside. JordanMuses
Jordan is a pseudonym for a writer who has spent a career writing about politics and being involved in business and politics at several levels. To protect those who have been associated with him he uses the pseudonym.