Find enough votes
Trump the hit man tries again.
President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.
That’s the restrained journalistic version. The reality is that Trump bullied and leaned on Raffensperger and his lawyer in an overtly “an offer you can’t refuse” kind of way. I listened to a four minute sample from the recording on Twitter just before it (apparently) got removed from everywhere, including the Post itself. I felt sick as I listened.
The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”
Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.
So Trump told him to find 11,780 votes. Literally find. I heard him say it.
At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
We won the state, with 11,779 fewer votes than that other guy, so all I want to do is add 11,780 to our number. That’s all. It’s so simple.
The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.
It’s true. He sounds frantic. He sounds hopped-up and emotional in a way I don’t think I’ve heard before. The pitch of his voice is higher.
So that’s scary.
On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”
Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”
“Respectfully, you out of control mob boss-wannabe loon, what you’re saying is a bunch of lies.”
During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.
“That’s a criminal offense,” he said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”
Why would we not want to re-elect this wonderful, responsible, public-spirited man?
Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.
Ya think?
(To be accurate, I suppose I think it’s possible that he has himself convinced by all the bullshit claims coming out of OAN and Breitbart and the rest, but since that ability to be convinced rests heavily on his authoritarian determination to keep his death grip on power, it doesn’t really equal “sincere” belief.)
“So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”
That is, reexamine it with people who are determined to find what I tell them to find, not people who are not determined to do that.
Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.
In the end, Trump asked Germany to sit down with one of his attorneys to go over the allegations. Germany agreed.
Yet Trump also recognized that he was failing to persuade Raffensperger or Germany of anything, saying toward the end, “I know this phone call is going nowhere.”
But he continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after more than an hour, Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Trump, for your time.”
17 days.
Yeah, I listened to it too. Raffensperger and Germany showed remarkable restraint in not saying “Frankly, sir, you’re full of shit.”
And even if Trump succeeded in this humiliating, not to mention illegal effort, he’d still have to “find” 42 more electoral votes to “win” the election!
I believe that he was expecting to lose in 2016, and was intending to tie up the Clinton presidency in this kind of garbage for the whole four years; because he sure as hell wasn’t prepared for the job. In fact, as far as I can see, he never did his job at all; so the whole world would have been better off had he lost then. He wanted his tantrum about the ‘Dems stealing the election’ back then and, by Jove, he’s going to have that tantrum now!
What a Maroon – Germany did however give a very cold terse “No” to Trump’s follow-up question about the moved machines. Not “No sir” just “No.”
Yeah, that was good.
Once again I’m struck by the brazen assertion of knowledge that the claimants couldn’t possibly possess. Trump “knows” that he won GA by a lot — how? The polls showed a close race, and he claims he doesn’t trust polls anyway. Are we back to this “I had a lot of people at my rallies” shit again? Possibly, but that’s probably crediting Trump with more of a thought process than he has. He WANTS it to be true, it’s GOOD FOR TRUMP if it’s true, therefore it’s true. Or at least you SAY that it’s true and expect people to believe you.
Meadows gets in on the action, too. He KNOWS there were more than two instances of dead people voting. How does he “know” that? What evidence does he have, and why hasn’t he provided it? Well, none, of course. He doesn’t “know” anything of the kind, he just knows he needs to pretend it’s true.
I’ve read a good description of the GOPers who are still supporting Trump – “the Vichy Republicans”. It’s astounding that senior politicians are still nodding him along.
Screechy, it also seems to be incomprehensible to him that he could lose a state that he won in 2016. He doesn’t know enough to understand that states do not always vote the same way (well, some do, don’t they? Nebraska was reliable…and one electoral vote going to Biden mirrors what happened in 2008 when Obama got one vote from Nebraska). He seems to have some concept that he somehow “owns” those states, that if he doesn’t win where he won before, it must be fraud.
I know the feeling; it’s like when you’ve been winning a multiplayer game 4.5 out of 5 minutes, but really it’s only the final score that matters, so upsets feel like you’ve been cheated.
The problem here is that Trump was trailing Biden before Biden even entered the race; it was often close but he was *never* up.
Sigh. “What you’re saying is not true.” Really? How about “What you’re saying is a lie.” To be polite. Or “You’re lying”. To be short. Everyone seems to be avoiding the L-word like the plague, but in this case it is warranted.
They aren’t avoiding the plague very well, though, so they are avoiding the L-word even more than that.
Apparently Raffensperger recorded this (with Germany”s knowledge) with the express intent of releasing it if Trump tried to lie about the conversation. That could explain their reluctance to call Trump a liar, or scream “Fuck you, asshole!” and bang down the receiver. They would have wanted to appear calm and in control, and let Trump dig his own grave.
By the way, if you listen to the full call, you’ll hear a couple of Trump’s lawyers (along with Mark Meadows). One of them is Cleta Mitchell. She wasn’t known to be working for Trump, but she has some history:
And, more recently:
There is an actual pragmatic reason people avoid saying “lie” and its cognates: it’s an open door to libel suits. Journalists, lawyers and many others are trained to avoid the word and its cognates.
But also of course when responding to a childish trashy bullying tweet from Trump, a coldly civil “What you’re saying is not true” makes him look all the more childish and trashy.