There will be people — a lot of people — who will view Joe Biden’s presidency as illegitimate because of the messaging coming from just about the entire Republican Party right now.
There are no actual allegations right now, of course. What they have is a lot of debunked conspiracy theories and a lot of nothing. They have technicalities that they know can’t win in court but can sow doubt in some people’s minds, and they have an army of lawyers shameless enough to say with a straight face that, for example, 2.65 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania are possibly fraudulent.
Again, there is nothing to this. These strategies are not designed to win. They are designed to placate Donald Trump, who has a deep primal fear of being called a loser and also just lost the shit out of an election. Congressional Republicans, other than maybe the most delusional of them, are perfectly well aware that these challenges will go nowhere, but they don’t want Trump siccing his army of followers on them for daring to disagree with their Heroic Hero. So they all fall in line too, after a loser who just lost an election, because it’s better for them right now.
But this whole cascade of bullshit is perfectly believable for the people who already want to believe it. Let’s take Michigan, where Biden is leading Trump by almost 150,000 votes — which is a lot! — and Trump is leading Biden by 150,000 conspiracy theories.
Some of those theories are: The massive late votes for Biden prove election fraud; It was illegal to send mail-in applications to all Michigan voters; Dead people voted; Biden’s vote total suddenly jumped by more than 100,000; 2,000 Republican ballots went missing; Observers weren’t allowed to watch vote counting; A video showed ballots being secreted in to be counted at 3:30 AM; More that I don’t feel like going into but are just as false.
And the explanations for those theories are: Everyone always knew mail-in votes would massively go to Biden since Trump spent weeks shitting on mail-in votes; Sending those applications was perfectly legal and approved by the courts; The Republican list of thousands of dead voters consisted solely of errors, including living voters with the same names as dead Michiganders and dead voters who didn’t vote at all; There was a glitch that got fixed immediately and isn’t reflected in the current vote count; There were never missing ballots; Observers were actually allowed to watch; Those weren’t ballots, but actually photography equipment being packed by a photographer; More that I don’t feel like going into but are just as debunked.
But again, none of this is about the merits of the challenges. If you don’t want to take it from me, take it from the President’s legal team:
Living in a democratic society is the one American value that underlies everything else. It’s the thing we have that we can claim makes our country special. America was the first country to be founded on an idea, I remember one of my high school teachers saying, and while oh boy have we done a lot of bad things, we still have that idea and that aspiration. And that is what Trump is going after, just so he can save the tiniest percentage of face in the wake of his relatively average loss.
It’s possible that a person — not you, of course, because you are smart and thoughtful and good looking — could still have some doubt that this all comes from a sham of a playbook. Well, okay then. One last piece of evidence. This one is from September, detailing Trump’s plan to full-on steal the election via legal strategy.
Now, this isn’t likely to work for a few reasons — the election’s not quite as close as it would have needed to be, the fraud claims are going nowhere, and state legislators have already said they aren’t going to ignore the results of the election. But this was the plan. This was always the plan. Sow discontent, then lob a Hail Mary in there and hope the right guy catches it. It is a pathetic, shameful betrayal of the public trust and the values upon which the country was founded.
There will be no consequences for Donald Trump. There rarely are, and when they do exist, he throws lawyers at them until they go away. Somehow, despite his generally lazy efforts, it all works out for him. He doesn’t deserve that this time. Let’s hope it ends soon.