At this point, what the Trump regime is doing is fomenting terrorism and sedition, and I wish people would call it that.
With a key deadline passing Tuesday that all but ends his legal challenges to the election, President Trump’s frenzied campaign to overturn the results has reached an inflection point: Certified slates of electors to the Electoral College are now protected by law, and any chance that a state might appoint a different slate that is favorable to Mr. Trump is essentially gone.
Despite his clear loss, Mr. Trump has shown no intention of stopping his sustained assault on the American electoral process. But his baseless conspiracy theories about voting fraud have devolved into an exercise in delegitimizing the election results, and the rhetoric is accelerating among his most fervent allies. This has prompted outrage among Trump loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and even some Republicans say has become dangerous.
Supporters of the president, some of them armed, gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state Saturday night. Racist death threats filled the voice mail of Cynthia A. Johnson, a Michigan state representative. Georgia election officials, mostly Republicans, say they have received threats of violence. The Republican Party of Arizona, on Twitter, twice called for supporters to be willing to “die for something” or “give my life for this fight.”
“People on Twitter have posted photographs of my house,” said Ann Jacobs, the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, who alerted her neighbors and the police about the constant threats. She said another message mentioned her children and said, “I’ve heard you’ll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door.”
Mr. Trump himself has contacted numerous Republican state officials, pressing them to help him overturn the election he clearly lost. He has subjected others to repeated public shamings, lambasting governors to take action they are not legally allowed to take to keep Mr. Trump in power.
But absent a single significant victory in his dozens of lawsuits — and with a key defeat delivered by the Supreme Court on Tuesday — the president’s crusade is now as much a battle against the electoral process itself, as he seeks to cast doubt on free and fair elections and undermine Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he takes the oath of office.
“There is long-term damage when this kind of behavior is normalized,” Jeff Flake, a former Republican senator from Arizona, said on Twitter. “It is not normal, and elected Republicans need to speak out against it.”
Last week, a top Republican election official in Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, implored the president to stop attacking the voting process in the state, saying it had prompted threats against officials and poll workers.
Tuesday’s procedural deadline, known as safe harbor, serves as something of a guarantee that Congress must count the slate of electors certified by the deadline, and acts as an accelerant to resolve any outstanding election disputes. It also likely limits further legal challenges to halt or disrupt the official certification of electoral votes that Mr. Biden needs to claim the presidency.
After yesterday's Supreme Court rejection, and tomorrow's impending rejection of the absolutely silly Texas case, the battle will of course drag on thanks to Trump's army of seditious enablers.
Twenty-seven GOP representatives are urging President Trump to direct Attorney General William Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate election irregularities.
The lawmakers, led by Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), said in a letter to the president that Americans “deserve a definite resolution” into uncertainty around the election, according to the letter obtained by Politico. They added that “legitimate questions of voter fraud remain unanswered.”
Gooden originally sent the letter to Trump with his signature alone on Thursday, shortly after Barr told The Associated Press that the Department of Justice has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
The comment drew the ire of the president, who has repeatedly argued that the election was stolen from him due to widespread fraud without presenting evidence.
"Inaction from the Department [of Justice] along with public comments made by the Attorney General indicate a lack of willingness to investigate the irregularities your campaign and other elected officials across the nation have alleged,” the lawmakers wrote.
“The appointment of a Special Counsel would establish a team of investigators whose sole responsibility is to uncover the truth and provide the certainty America needs,” they said.
Understand that Republicans will do to Biden what the GOp believes the Democrats did to Trump, every day, for the next four years. They will fight him for every inch, every cabinet appointment, every executive order, every bill, every judicial opening, every time, every day.
Something the Democrats simply refused to do because of the damage it would have done to the country. The Republicans of course have the added advantage that they simply don't care, and will gladly welcome the coming violence and chaos as political assistance for them in the years ahead.
And I'm still not 100% sold that Biden will prevail, because Trump could just say "screw it" and declare himself President.
Who's going to stop him? Mitt Romney? The Media?
Us?
Better think long and hard about that one, folks.
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