Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 01:54 pm
Despite the fact that there is a good possibility that the House Select Committee will lay out the essential elements of a conspiracy to commit sedition tomorrow night in describing Trump’s actions on January 6th, Trump’s obsession with somehow overturning the election remains unbreakable. Of late, Trump is laser-focused on Wisconsin, where a recent bizarre 4-3 supreme court ruling found that drop boxes outside the clerk’s office didn’t constitute “the clerk’s office,” and the opinion, written by the furthest right, most conspiratorial justice, declared the 2020 election unconstitutional. Trump took the ruling, declared victory in Wisconsin, and we are now learning, called GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to ask that Wisconsin decertify the election.
Yes, in the summer of 2022, Trump assumes that the fact that Wisconsin had drop boxes outside the clerk’s office instead of inside means that Trump won the election in Wisconsin, and almost two full years later, Trump is still trying to decertify the 2020 election, something that CNN’s Jeffery Toobin finds insane.
If someone had come up to you on the street and someone said, in July of 2022, that they were trying to overturn the election held almost two years ago, you would say this is like a tinfoil hat crazy person. The idea that the… former president thinks this could be overturned is so bizarre.
Toobin also thinks that Trump’s call to the Wisconsin speaker could be used as further proof of intent to steal the election. That doesn’t seem correct from an evidentiary point of view, but one can and should wonder if Trump committed an independent crime in and of itself by once again being a candidate meddling within a state’s election machinery, similar to Georgia. Toobin thinks it may have wider relevance:
“I don’t know if it counts for criminal intent. It’s almost hard to wrap your mind around… but it just shows that the former president is obsessed with this issue and is not letting it go, and if they are still looking for criminal intent, that is potentially more evidence.
Actually, some of us would have a hard time wrapping our minds around Trump being any other way and accepting that he lost. Countless psychologists and psychiatrists have commented on the fact that Trump suffers from a personality disorder (as opposed to mental illness) in which his mind cannot withstand the narcissistic injury of the loss and thus must forever reject the loss and forever work to erase that loss.
The phone call to Wisconsin is more problematic than it might seem at first blush. The Wisconsin supreme court’s decision – written by the most MAGA-Trump justice on the court, went well beyond the question at issue and declared the 2020 election unconstitutional in retrospect. The Wisconsin assembly could use the finding to “decertify” the election and send notice to Washington that it rejects/withdraws its electors. If two other state legislatures, perhaps emboldened by a SCOTUS decision this fall on the 12th Amendment, sent similar decertifications to a possible new GOP Majority House and Senate, it wouldn’t result in Trump replacing Biden. It would absolutely cause the type of controversy and chaos that Trump loves, the type that sucks the legitimacy out of democracy, the type that one suspects that Right-wing fascists here in the U.S. and those in Eastern Europe have hoped to accomplish.
Toobin is correct in that it’s tinfoil hat stuff to expect to be reinstated as president by a GOP-led Congress (if it happens) in early 2023. But it’s 100% sane, dangerous, and dark to consider that the ultimate goal of the movement itself isn’t reinstating Trump. It is to drain whatever little faith remains in our elections.
When the public doesn’t trust elections, leaders “take” the office by whatever means is effective. We all saw what Trump believed it would take in January of 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i97nckLIuc
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