The story thus far — the 2020 general election was held on November 3. According to a timeline at the National Archives, the states had until December 8, more than a month, to resolve controversies surrounding the election. And then on December 14 the electors met in their states to cast their votes for president. After that time, all legal challenges to the election are supposed to be over. As a nation we were past the “speak now, or forever hold your peace” part of the ceremony.
The epic, unhinged meeting at the White Mouse with Trump and the crazies and White House staff shrieking at each other for hours happened on December 18. It must have been impressed upon Trump that there would be no more court challenges of the election. So the Looney Tunes showed up to present alternative ideas, including using the military to seize voting machines. But at the end of the day, all the crazy ideas (that we know of) were shot down.
The epic meeting from Crazy ended about midnight on December 19. And then, some time later in the night of December 19, probably pumped on adrenalin and Adderall, Trump tweeted for his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, the date Congress was to confirm who won the presidential election. This is, apparently, when the idea of a massive rally of Trump supporters who would menace Congress in some manner was hatched. Being able to encite his supporters into doing something menacing was the one superpower Trump had left.
I also want to point out that the fake electors scheme was put into place before the meeting from Crazy, obviously, because the fake electors cast their fake votes on the same day the real electors met, December 14. So there was already a scheme in the works to hand the election back to Trump by fraudulent means.
I guess the plan still needed something that could be used as an excuse to throw the real electoral votes into doubt — like, you know, evidence — which the Trumpers did not have. And they were out of “normal” options, like going through the courts. But maybe a violent mob would create enough chaos that the real votes could be thrown out, and no one would notice. It was crude, but there weren’t many options left, especially after the proposal to seize the voting machines had been shot down.
Yesterday’s House January 6 hearing brought out that timeline. It also highlighted how extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys threw themselves into the project of menacing Congress on January 6.
As yet no one has presented any direct, personal communication between Trump and these hard-right militant organizations, but they were willing co-conspirators nonetheless. And there is evidence that there was communication between Trump allies and the militants. There is no doubt that Trump both anticipated and incited violence. The militant organizations planned and executed an on-the-ground strategy that drew in “normies” who had just come for the rally and cranked that violence up for maximum effect.
Jason Van Tatenhove, a former associate of the Oath Keepers, testified yesterday that Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes has long desired to be recognized as a powerful paramilitary leader, and he saw Trump and Trumpism as a means to that end. Organizing for Trump was a path to more power and legitimacy, Van Tatenhove said.
I thought the testimony of Stephen Ayres, who had been one of the rioters who was not part of any militant organization, was especially effective. Ayres may not have been a Proud Boy or Oath Keeper, but he had been sucked into the social media vortex and believed that Trump had been robbed of his second term. He entered the Capitol and at one point was livestreaming from the Senate chamber. He was arrested on January 25, 2021, and earlier this year he pleaded guilty to disorderly and disruptive conduct. He testified yesterday that as a result of the notoriety he lost his job and had to sell his home. He said if he had known there was no evidence of election fraud he might not have gone to Washington. One suspects he is very sorry he did.
But of course, it wasn’t just Trump who made the Big Lie look like a legitimate concern. See Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman:
A full accounting must include the role of many mainstream Republicans in feeding the belief among countless Americans that the election actually could be procedurally reversed. This no doubt helped fuel rage when Trump’s procedural efforts failed, helping spark the violence.
This dereliction included the studied silence of countless elected Republicans. But it also included the noise made by GOP politicians such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), who led an effort to object to Biden’s electors on Jan. 6.
Hawley and Cruz have tended to claim they only did this to speak to their constituents’ concerns that the election’s outcome was dubious. In reality, they actively fed those concerns, and through the very process of objecting to Biden’s electors based on known lies that had been litigated for months, also fed the belief that a reversal was possible.
And, of course, a reversal is not possible. Even if someone proved tomorrow that the election had been stolen from Trump, that doesn’t mean he’d get the keys to the White House back.
This failure by mainstream Republicans was very neatly captured by one other moment at Tuesday’s hearing. The committee played a recording of Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) telling other GOP members on a Jan. 5 call that she was concerned about security the next day.
“We have, quite honestly, Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election,” Lesko said. “And when that doesn’t happen, most likely will not happen, they are going to go nuts.”
Yet the next day, Lesko herself voted along with around 140 other House Republicans to object to Biden’s electors, further reinforcing this false belief.
“Irresponsible” doesn’t begin to describe this behavior. And when does the Great Walkback begin? When are the Hawleys and Cruzes and Leskos going to step up and say “Well, of course, I never believed the election had been stolen …”
In poll after poll, about 70% of Republicans say they don’t think Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Literally, we can’t run a democracy like this. It’s going to implode.
Susan Glasser writes at The New Yorker,
According to a Times survey published on Tuesday, seventy-five per cent of G.O.P. primary voters said the former President bore no blame for the violent events of January 6th and was “just exercising his right to contest the election.” The paper touted that nineteen per cent of respondents said his actions “went so far that he threatened American democracy” as a sign of weakening support for Trump among his Republican base. But that seems an awful lot like wishful thinking. Only nineteen per cent thought an attack on the United States Capitol with the explicit goal of shutting down the electoral count was a threat to democracy? What better proof could there be of Trump successfully insuring that going along with his election lies remains a central tenet of the Party dogma?
We are so not out of danger now.
