Despite 2020 election loss, Trump now uses government to engineer new result
Out of power in 2020, Democrats stole the presidential election in Republican-controlled states like Arizona and Georgia.
It was a remarkable feat, made more remarkable because of the Electoral College.
Only the Russians had been able to do this before the Democrats, when the Russians stole the 2016 election.
To steal a presidential election is not an easy thing. Because of the Electoral College, one cannot just rig elections in areas of high population.
One must discern the swingiest of the swing states. Then, once done, one must determine the electoral procedure of those states down to the county level. Some states, like Pennsylvania, have a different election process in every single county. Others, like Georgia, have a standard procedure.
Once the appropriate states and counties are targeted, the election thieves must figure out how to bypass audits, voter identification checks, voter rolls and other processes.
Then, in an age where no one can keep a secret, they must find enough individuals who are willing to go to their graves to keep that secret. It is akin to finding 12 men to dig up the body of the man they claim is the messiah and suffer torture and death to keep that secret.
Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and Democrats blamed Russia
Controlling the White House in 2016, Democrats nonetheless insisted the Russians stole that election.
Pay no attention to Hillary Clinton failing to go to Wisconsin or Erie, Pennsylvania, in the final days of that election, even as her husband grew more and more vocal that she needed to.
The Brooklyn progressives running Hillary Clinton’s campaign ignored blue collar voters and, when she lost the election, they could not admit they had screwed up.
They, instead, insisted the Russians stole the election. To this day, many Democrats continue to insist it is so.
In fact, what both a bipartisan Senate review and the Mueller Special Counsel reports showed was that the Russians did engage in “sweeping and systemic” interference in the 2016 election, according to the Mueller report, with indictments advanced against 11 Russians, but with no coordination by the Trump campaign. The broader internet effort mostly focused on dividing Americans over cultural issues and also included attempts to create both pro-Clinton and competing pro-Trump rallies as documented on Page 42 of the Senate report.
In 2020, despite controlling the White House and multiple Republican states, President Donald Trump and his most ardent supporters insisted the election was stolen.
Just as Democrats were able to build a pressure campaign to get then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to hire Robert Mueller to investigate the 2016 election, Trump has gotten his political apparatchiks to head to Fulton County to seize ballots for an examination.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, frequently excluded from national security meetings, is doing her best to be relevant by overseeing the ballot acquisition.
The stolen election grievances rest on two basic issues.
- First, in every election, mistakes are made because elections are run by people, who are often volunteers at the precinct level.
- Second, election law is very nuanced and many casual observers are convinced they saw something that was theft when it was not.
In 2020, during all the postelection litigation, Trump’s legal team very often made public pronouncements to the cameras but then did not make the same pronouncements in courts where the lawyers are bound by their oaths to be truthful.
They also insisted they only needed to dispute around 12,000 ballots, but ignored, in Georgia at least, the 30,000 people who voted but not for president.
That is a common occurrence and, as I advised Trump lawyers in 2020, Georgia law requires that, for an election to be disputed, most often the candidate must cast doubt on not just the margin of loss between two candidates, but also the deficit of the vote in the race.
Put another way, the Trump team needed to discredit the 12,000-vote difference between Biden and Trump and the 30,000 ballots of those who would not vote for President for a total of 42,000 disputed ballots. They never did that.
Dig deep enough and you can always find a crime
Now, Trump supporters claim 300,000 Fulton County ballots were cast illegally.
Again, they do not know nor care to know the law.
That number equals the early, in-person vote. A clerk did not sign off on a final tally, which is not required by state law but by Secretary of State regulation.
No one, including the Trump supporters, argues those 300,000 votes were cast fraudulently.
They claim a failure to sign final paperwork by a clerk means those 300,000 votes should be discarded.
What a precedent that would set — a single person refusing to sign a form not required by the law could throw out lawful votes.
Having failed to cast down on those lawful votes, the FBI has now raided Fulton County to seize ballots for inspection. Fulton County has historically run its elections pretty incompetently, and the Trump team is capitalizing on that incompetence.
Notwithstanding that, during the prosecutions of Trump by New York City, Fulton County and the Biden administration, Trump’s supporters insisted if you dig deep enough and long enough, you can always find a crime. Or, they said, a good district attorney can always indict a ham sandwich.
Now it is their turn.
After failing repeatedly in court after the 2020 election, beclowning themselves with ever sillier arguments to throw out lawfully cast ballots, Trump is now using the very government that could not keep the 2020 election from being stolen to find out how it was stolen.
His supporters insist they are correct. They will not stop until they can prove it, even if it must be engineered and spun into being.
Before it is over, do not be surprised if they, too, insist it was the Russians all along.
Erick Erickson is host of the nationally syndicated “Erick Erickson Show,” heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on WSB Radio. He is also a contributor to the AJC.
