(Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for adding me to Crooks&Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Stay safe out there, readers, wear the damn masks and watch out for coup attempts)
We're about two weeks into the reality that Pennsylvania called for Biden, clinching the Electoral count he needs. We're two days out from Georgia finishing their recount efforts – they have rules to recount if a result is too close, and it was looking that way for both the Presidential ticket and one of the Senate races – and confirming that Biden won that state (arguably the first real crack in the GOP Southern Strategy we've ever seen, more on that another time) pretty much putting Biden at 306 Electoral Votes to trump's 232 (in a great irony, this is the mirror result of 2016 where trump had 306 to Hillary's 232, except this time Biden also has the Popular Vote locked in).
And here's trump still, denying the results, screaming about fraud, and sending mixed messages and different lawyer teams into (and out of) various states trying something, ANYTHING, to get the courts to flip the majority will of Americans so HE can outright steal a second term and stay in power.
It's both horrifying – trump is no longer hiding his obsession to rule as a dictator – and hilarious – his efforts are so pathetic even wimp fights are more brutal.
So just to pass the time – until the moment when trump decides to go full coup d'etat and call out his Proud Boys supremacist militias to overthrow the state governments, or he succeeds in convincing three state legislatures (Michigan's, Pennsylvania's, and Georgia's) to ignore the votes and illegally seat their own pro-trump Electors – here's my five cents on why trump is behaving this way.
Reason One: trump's narcissism.
We've known going into this nightmare that trump is pure Id, even more than his Ego. Operating on impulse and on the bare minimum of self-awareness let alone awareness of others.
Trump has made it clear he views the world in the simplest of terms: That people are divided into Winners and Suckers, and that HE (champion and most excellent of the former group) shall never be lumped in with the latter.
So just on this mindset alone, trump cannot admit – not to others, not to himself – that he lost. Granted, he's lost before: His many bankruptcies should be viewed as admissions of failure, except that thanks to his lawyers and through the mercies of bankruptcy laws trump was able to wiggle his way out of responsibility and still claim himself a successful businessman who “gamed the system.” His failure with the USFL vs. NFL antitrust lawsuit should be a glaring example – if you ever read the jury findings, you'll see how the jurors recoiled from trump's bullshit and saw him as the instigator and not the victim – except that trump still blames everyone else for that folly. The Trump University scam that was haunting him during the 2016 campaign itself should be viewed as a loss, except again he worked out a plea deal that guaranteed the settlement would cast no blame nor lingered on the open fraud he and his cronies committed.
In one respect, trump lost in 2016: The Popular vote clearly went for Hillary. But due to the broken and anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College, trump squeaked into winning three battleground states with literally mere hundreds of votes that gave him their Electoral Votes instead. It should be noted that trump promptly crowed – against all evidence – that he had won a LANDSLIDE, not just the College but also the Popular vote, and claimed it was the greatest victory in history (ignoring the Electoral and Popular vote blowouts of 1984 and 1932 (we don't count Nixon's 1972 blowout because the cheating exposed by the Watergate scandal negates that)).
Trump can't crow like that this time. The illusion of the Electoral College can't grant him that excuse. So he has to settle on denial. Constant, whining denial that he's the victim of voter fraud and to get us to pity him back into office.
Reason Two: Republican Denial of Democratic Party legitimacy
In this, trump is not acting alone. One of the reasons why trump's attempts to subvert the election results is ongoing is because the rest of the Republican Party has no choice but to agree with him.
Just as trump has to deny Biden his victory, the Republicans have to deny the Democratic Party theirs. The whole point of GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts is to reduce the majority advantages the Dems hold across most of the large-population (and most battleground) states. Remember, Republicans are currently in power as a minority (political, not ethnic) party. If the Democrats hold at least two parts of the federal government – the Executive, and part of the Legislature with the U.S. House – that reduces the strength they have on the national stage, and makes them vulnerable – through investigation and oversight by a Dem-controlled Justice Department – at the state level as well.
The more trump screams that Biden cheated and stole the election from him, the easier it becomes part of the Far Right Narrative that the Republican party can shill on Fox Not-News and other wingnut outlets. The Narrative will repeat the story they sold to the world when Obama was in office: The Democratic leadership is illegitimate and must be obstructed for the greater good. Where the GOP sold that by accusing Obama of being a Fake American (dirty Mooslim Kenyan Usurper Socialist), they will repackage by accusing Biden of being a Fake President (demented anti-Catholic Usurper Socialist).
We're seeing the ramifications of that right now. A little-known agency in the Executive branch (GSA) that oversees the Transition period is refusing to recognize Biden, cutting off Biden's team from coordinating with the government to ensure a smooth entry in January. Considering this can hamper Biden's ability to manage an out-of-control pandemic as well as handle any foreign disruptions, this singular act of spite can get people killed...
Reason Three: Making Money.
One of the greatest sins of the Citizens United court ruling has been to let the political campaign system turn into a financial free-for-all with little oversight and too much cash getting wasted on Gods-know-what.
We've already seen glimpses of this with the growing scandal revolving around trump's banished campaign manager Brad Parscale. We're seeing more of it right now in the past two weeks where trump's campaign – and other Republican PACs – have been spamming email requests (more like demands) to their voting faithful to help pay for the legal fees of trump's ongoing lawsuits to nullify thousands of mail-in ballots he doesn't like.
Thing is, you need to read the fine print in these fundraising emails: A number of them state that depending on the amount donated the first amount – say, the first $5,000 of a donation – won't go to the legal effort. That money would go instead to pay off debts in trump's campaign instead (and maybe even to trump himself).
It's another grift. Trump is trying to squeeze out every last penny from his sucker fanbase. Always the dollars, always the fucking dollars.
Reason Four: There is nowhere else for trump to go after all this, except to jail.
I keep harping on this fact: trump's whole life has been a series of escalating con games, moving up from property ownership and renting, to land speculation, to casinos, to golf courses, to team sports ownership, to marketing books, to marketing junk, to marketing himself as a celebrity, to marketing himself as God-Emperor. Every step a con, scheming his way into a fantasy life of permanent wealth he can never attain because he's borrowing too much and spending too much. Every business move collapsing onto itself due to his own mismanagement and abuse, setting himself up just enough so he can jettison the failure and move on to the next big deal.
This is pretty much how he gambled his way through life, and how he scammed his way – through bullying the Republicans into accepting him as a candidate, through bullshitting his way through every primary, through overwhelming the national media to give him free airtime 24/7 to shill his campaign – into a White House he really didn't earn or deserve.
Once in the White House, trump behaved the only way he knew how: Grabbing everything he could in fits of greed, cutting corners by ignoring rules and practices set in stone to ensure legal norms were upheld, and letting his underlings waste time and resources to pander to his whims. Trump violated the Emoluments Clause from Day One, for God's sake. Aided and abetted by a Republican-controlled Congress until 2019, trump ran rampant allowing his agencies to fleece the taxpayers at will, promoting cronyist behavior at every turn.
The Hatch Act – separating the needs of election campaigning from the powers of the Presidency – was broken so many times by his handlers and then by trump himself that the law itself currently isn't fit on paper for use as toilet paper.
And all of this – thanks to trump firing agency-level Inspector Generals and abusing the Justice Department as his own law firm defending every corrupt act in trump's administration – happened with little oversight and legal accountability, right up to his getting impeached for using foreign policy to compel another country to interfere with our own elections. With a Republican-controlled Senate covering his ass, trump never had to worry about the consequences of every sin he's ever committed.
Until now.
With all the things he's done – before and during his tenure – trump was protected by a questionably legal standing order that sitting Presidents are immune from criminal investigations and charges (civil matters is a different matter per Jones v Clinton). Once trump is officially done as President – the second Biden swears his Oath of Office on January 20 2021 – trump is criminally liable for every potential criminal act, especially the Emoluments violations as well as any national security violations he may have done. Granted, there are statutes of limitations, from what I've heard they last five years so any law he broke in 2017 has to be reviewed and charged by 2022.
The other thing the Presidential status protected trump from were the criminal and civil matters he broke before he ran for office, such as the sexual assaults that have been documented and especially the one (maybe more) awaiting his DNA sample in civil court. Trump had mastered – thanks to his army of lawyers, the only ones he ever really pays well – the tactics of delay delay delay to force his legal opponents into giving up and dealing out. However: he's used that trick too many times, he can't use being in office as an excuse after January, and he's now at the end of the number of other tricks he can keep pulling off before the judge(s) simply decide to hold him in contempt.
Piling on top of that are the reports that trump – for all his stealing and thievery in office – is broke, millions of dollars in debt, and some of the largest debts are due within the next four months. If he were still President past January 2021, he could delay those debts even further (or pay them off abusing his access to funds, further criminalizing his actions while in office). Alas, he won't be able to do that with Biden winning...
And the most obvious thing of all, the Sword of Damocles dangling over trump's head, are the criminal charges awaiting him with the State of New York. Following on the investigations into trump's bribing of mistresses and illegal use of funds from his now-defunct charity, these are legal matters that even as President trump cannot stop or delay.
Oh, trump could force his owned Department of Justice to intervene, maybe even arrest state-level officials, maybe even steal off evidence and destroy it all in the Attorney General's office, but it would be such a violation of federalism (separation of Federal and State powers) that it would trigger straight-up Civil War. Trump could try pardoning himself, but Presidential pardons only cover federal crimes, not state. Hilariously enough, New York's District Attorneys could hit trump with criminal charges even if trump had won this election cycle, creating the unique sight of the Commander-in-Chief Loser of the Popular Vote wearing an orange jumpsuit while in handcuffs.
New York's legal system - spearheaded by DA Letitia James - has trump by the short hairs, and he knows it. The only real escape from that was staying in the White House under siege for four years until he got the gardeners to dig him an escape tunnel to Bermuda.
Anyone genuinely dreaming of trump running for the Presidency again in 2024 has to wake up to the reality that by 2024 trump can well be sitting in a safe-watch wing of an upstate New York prison waiting out a 5-year sentence after a jury finds him guilty of at least one count of fraud. Anyone – trump included – thinking he can start up his own media empire to rival Fox Not-News is ignoring this reality as well.
Let me repeat: This is it for him. Trump has nowhere else to go, other than prison on fraud charges, or exile to a country that doesn't extradite to the United States.
Reason Five: Straight-up Delusion
trump has yet to play out every trick he can pull to steal away Biden's Electoral win. Of great concern is the reported effort by the state legislatures in key battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and now Georgia – to ignore the majority votes in their own states, nullify those votes in fact, and directly select their state's own Electors.
This is where the vague wiggle room of laws hurt us. The Constitution itself doesn't spell out how the states select their Electors: it was assumed that every able-bodied citizen under the law (propertied white men first, then all white men, then all men regardless of race, then all women also regardless of race, then all Americans 18 and older) would vote and the states write in laws to accept that, and for the most part it's gone that way. Only rarely – I know of one instance, South Carolina in 1860 had their legislature pick the winner because they feared even a Pro-Union Pro-Slavery Southerner could win – had a state overridden the voting process. Only once since then – the 1876 election where two states could not agree on certifying which Electors to send – had this been an issue (and the solution for that was undemocratic as hell and the results allowed Jim Crow to flourish).
The expectation is that the state legislators will respect the rights and the views of their state's majorities and choose Biden's roster of Electors to complete the process. The situation won't put trump's ass on the line, it'll be the legislators who would have to deal with angry voters – not just Democrats but even Republican voters who still (yes there are many) respect the right of voting – within minutes of breaking tradition (and even their own state's election laws).
And... it's looking like the states in question - even Arizona - are refusing trump's call to subvert the election results. So this is pretty much a moot point.
After this, trump's only remaining move to stay in power is an outright coup d'etat.
This isn't over yet.
