As the clock ticks away and Donald Trump's regime comes closer to its endgame, we're now seeing Trump openly pushing his GOP enablers to produce a "win" for him, or they will be crucified by his brownshirts.
President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected his assertions, explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 12,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
Trump dismissed their arguments.
“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
Raffensperger responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
The rambling, at times incoherent conversation, offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.
“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
Several of his allies were on the line as he spoke, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a prominent GOP lawyer whose involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.
In a statement, Mitchell said that Raffensperger’s office “has made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same thing: show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our numbers are wrong.”
The White House, the Trump campaign and Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Raffensperger’s office declined to comment.
This isn't the first time Trump has gone after state officials demanding they "find" more votes for him. Hell, this isn't even the first time Trump has personally leaned on Brad Raffensperger of Georgia demanding that he steal the election for him.
And yes, Trump made it crystal clear what the consequences will be if Raffensperger doesn't deliver, saying in the call that Raffensperger would "certainly never be elected again".
Again, the Washington Post has audio of the entire conference call. At one point Trump suggested that nobody would question Raffensperger if he simply told the world that he just had to "recalculate" the vote totals.
We've got Trump on tape, cold, actually trying to blackmail the Secretary of State in Georgia to steal the election for him. This should be the end of him, 25th Amendment, Mike Pence and the cabinet remove Trump. But it won't be, because every single Republican still remaining in Trump's corner is just as fascist and corrupt as he is, and the ones that haven't left the party yet are just waiting for a more competent white supremacist fascist to follow into a new era of Jim Crow.
And very soon, we'll get that person.
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