Hours of screaming and insults
There was this one wild night in Trump’s lame duck tenure:
Late on a Friday night about six weeks after Donald Trump lost his reelection, a fistfight nearly broke out in the White House between the president’s fired national security adviser and a top White House aide.
A bunch of “unofficial Trump advisers” had managed to get into the Oval Office, where a bunch of official people tried to get them out, and everyone shouted at everyone else for hours.
There was shouting, insults and profanity, former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Herschmann said he nearly came to blows with Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser who was part of the Trump’s group of impromptu visitors.
“Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything. … At a certain point I had it with him,” Herschmann recalled in taped testimony that played at a Tuesday hearing. “So, I yelled back: Either come over, or sit your effing ass back down.”
…
The rolling, hours-long shouting match was absurd, said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a committee member. But nevertheless, the night was “critical,” he argued, since it provided a forum for Trump to watch as his own advisers shot down, one by one, the false theories to which he had been clinging in hopes of staying in office.
But that of course didn’t prevent him from enthusiastically embracing all of them.
It took place four days after the electoral college met and, confirming the popular vote in key states, formally elected Joe Biden the next president. The committee showed clips of testimony demonstrating that Trump was told by everyone from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to Attorney General William P. Barr to Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia — a lawyer and son of a deceased conservative Supreme Court justice — that there was no longer a legal path for him to remain in office, and it was time to concede.
Yet somehow, the delegation that included Flynn and Powell prevailed on a junior staffer to escort them into one of the country’s most secure facilities, where the group met for a time with Trump alone before any White House staffer even realized they were in the building.
When they did realize they sprinted to the scene.
Cipollone testified that he got a call that he needed to be in the Oval Office and rushed into the room. There, he spotted Flynn and Powell and another man he did not recognize.
“I walked in, I looked at him and I said, ‘Who are you?’” said Cipollone, in one of a number of clips played by the committee of testimony given by Cipollone last week, after months of negotiations.The man was Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of the discount furniture outlet Overstock.com, who was helping to organize and fund Powell and Flynn’s efforts.
Ahhhh well in that case, naturally it was entirely appropriate for him to sneak into Trump’s playroom to talk about stealing the election.
The crazies talked a bunch of crazy, and the marginally less crazy Official White House people kept asking them what evidence they had for the crazy. Answer came there none.
Powell and the others reacted with anger, suggesting that even asking the question was a sign that Trump’s White House team was insufficiently loyal to him. The committee emphasized the point by then showing a clip of Powell.
Loyalty means making up a bunch of crazy and then stealing an election on the basis of the crazy. Semper fidelis!
At 12:11 a.m., with apparent relief, Hutchinson texted Anthony Ornato, then deputy chief of staff, that Powell, Flynn and Giuliani had left the building. She expressed amazement that Byrne — the former Overstock CEO — had been with the group. “Dream team!!!!” she wrote.
She then sent someone a photograph she had just taken of her boss, Trump’s chief of staff, escorting Giuliani from the building “to make sure he didn’t wander back to the Mansion.”
The White House aides might have been relieved to bring the meeting to a close. But at 1:42 a.m., Trump made clear which side in the debate had won his heart.
“Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election,” he tweeted. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”
It was wild.
Trailing 8-9 percentage points in the polls yet it’s statistically impossible to lose. A normal sized polling error only knocks it back to about 5 percentage points which is the magic number for Dems winning the presidency.
So statistical, much impossible…
BKiSA, it’s statistically impossible to lose if the only votes that are acceptable are votes for him. Since he doesn’t recognize the rest of us as legitimate voters, it was in fact statistically impossible for him to lose…
It is almost as though USA needs a second civil war to drag the country kicking and screaming into the 20C.
The idiocy of the electoral college, the stupidity of allowing the defeated to continue in office for a further 3 months, voting on a Tuesday; all hangovers from the 18C.
Once the USA catches up to where the rest of us were last century, we’ll introduce them to modern technology that can make voting both easier and more secure and invite them into the 21C.
RDB @ 3
The Electoral College would not be a big deal if it functioned as intended (as a deliberative body), but it doesn’t currently. Far more important, in my view, is the over-reliance on the presidency. And as we have seen very recently, over-reliance on court cases to determine laws; we have a legislative branch, that’s what they are supposed to do. The number of electoral votes is close to the number of House members, which is roughly proportional to the population; it’s that “winner take all” bit in most states that’s sticky. (In contrast, representation in the Senate is far from population-based.) If the presidency were far less important (perhaps because Congress actually functioned properly), the issues regarding presidential elections, while still present, wouldn’t occupy the national psyche quite so much. You’d think we elected a dictator every four years; maybe we do.
The other items you mention, agreed, harmful holdovers from the 18th century.
RDB @3, and little things like fairness, a desire for as many people as possible to have their vote cast and counted, respect, etc etc.
Sackbut, I might be misinterpreting. When was the Electoral College ever a deliberative body? Surely that’s Congress? If you meant Congress I agree with the rest of what you’ve said.
It has to be said, the whole US voting system needs an overhaul and modernisation. Instead, anything that’s vaguely Constitution related seems to be (1) super hard to change, maybe e for good reason, and (2) even if actually under the power of Congress, is now treated as holy write and sacrilegious. Ridiculous of course. It’s not like God handed down a stone tablet decreeing that even if transport better than a horse and cart were invented, you still had to vote on Market day and structure the exchange of government operation on the basis of the fastest speed a man could get from the west to east coast in relaxed stages. Not to mention the underlying assumption that the whole thing would be conducted by gentlemen of means who knew better than everyone else and could be trusted to make decisions – which is exactly what the idea behind the electoral college is.
I don’t have them to hand, But T Greg Doucette has proposed a number of reforms on the nature and ratio of representation for Congress, Senate, and the Supreme Court that would improve representation with the existing framework, and make it far harder for a minority to capture the Court for decades at a time.
Rob, the point of having electors rather than just counting votes was so that the electors could make the final decision on the presidential election. They were supposed to guard against the possibility of a totally unqualified person winning the election. Much has changed, and many if not all states forbid electors from voting against the instructions they have from the popular vote, at least on first ballot. The original plan may or may not be technically “deliberative”, but I think the word fits anyway. The way things are now, they might as well send a piece of paper rather than a group of human beings to the Electoral College meeting.
That’s the point though isn’t it Sackbut. The EC was never really a deliberative body, it was a gentleman’s club having a last shot at making sure elections turned out ‘right’ – because ordinarily are men (it was men then) couldn’t really be trusted. I think the EC has long outlived its usefulness. In fact, given modern vote counting and communication systems, the whole idea of state by state weighted votes for a National office like president should be scrapped for a straight popular vote. It removes the risk to either political side of literally a few thousand people in critical counties in critical states determining who gets the job, when the popular vote margin is literally in the millions.
The only way you’e going to fix any of this is by electing better politicians and them actually doing something.
I’d prefer the gentlemen’s club, really… They’d’ve made sure Trump never took office. That the EC *caused* someone like him to get elected was an unforeseen event.
Looking at the history of early American politics I’d say that the EC allowed some pretty awful people to be elected – they were just more acceptable to ‘gentlemen’.
I’m sure a small cabal of us could run the world much better than it is at the moment, but that’s just not, well, democratic. Ultimately we just have to have systems and institutions that have both fairness and protection of rights baked in at some level of compromise, the ability to evolve without reckless swings, and then trust (enough) of our fellow citizens to do something within the bounds of sense. Of course, that’s why education is such a battleground politically, because neither the left nor the right especially want well informed, robust, logical thinkers. They might vote accordingly.
There are laws being passed in State Legislatures to allow the legislature to choose electors independent of the popular vote, which will likely not be a deliberative process as most politicians are more loyal to their party than their constituents. Add in that since 2010 gerrymandering has become the norm (2005 in Texas,) democracy will be a fading memory.
Rev David Brindley #3
“we’ll introduce them to modern technology that can make voting both easier and more secure”
Like paper ballots that are marked with pen or pencil & folded to conceal the choice & dropped into a box?
That is how I voted in every election at every government level I have participated in, in Canada. I don’t see how machinery would improve the process.
Read: to make sure white male landowners won the election.
I can’t say that is how I have voted in every election here in the US, because in Oklahoma City, we had somewhat old fashioned machines with levers (which were fun, but sometimes they were hard to pull). I imagine they’ve updated, though, that was in the 1980s.
Since coming to Nebraska, I have voted as you describe. It isn’t so much how we vote as it is that we vote on days when many people can’t get off work (no matter what federal law says, because if you aren’t paid for it, you probably can’t get off work); we have elections that run non-stop; I am already getting fundraisers for people that won’t be up for reelection until 2024, and I started getting those immediately after the 2020 election; because our elections reward those who spend the most money….etc. etc. etc.
And no matter what people say about the fact that Trump spent less money than Hillary, that still holds. He got so very much front page headline free coverage he didn’t need to spend as much. Everyone was eager to talk about him, to put him on tape, to give him free air time…for those inclined to vote Trump, even the negative press enhanced their likelihood. So much of Hillary’s press was only front page when it was negative, she didn’t have that same. So while he didn’t spend as much money, way, way more money was invested in his campaign, even by people who were watching and reporting the train wreck with horror.
At one point, we had the Fairness doctrine; they would have had to run as much air time on Hillary as on Trump. Reagan managed to do away with that, and the Republicans have since then filled the airwaves with their shouting, screaming, hateful nonsense with no need to balance. The Democrats do some of that, but not as much, and they are not at all entertaining most of the time. (I don’t find the Republicans entertaining either, but for a lot of people, they are. It’s not my sort of entertainment.)
Amending the constitution is probably impossible at this point with the divisiveness in the country, and the fact that one party is benefiting from it. What is possible, at least in some states, is to divide the electoral vote based on percentage. For instance, Nebraska is one of two states that does that, and in 2012, we gave one of our (five puny) electoral votes to Obama…Omaha is not as reliably Republican as the rest of the state. That would better reflect the actual vote. Not that I trust the voters, either, but at least we wouldn’t get a president that the majority of the people didn’t want.
That was a foregone conclusion. They were choosing from among a set of white male landowners.
I’m not trying to claim the EC is this brilliant idea, just that it has some amount protection against tyranny of the majority, something I consider important. It could foster tyranny of the minority at times. And it doesn’t work in any way currently.
Putting folded paper ballots in a box is only part of the process. The bulk of the process is taking those ballots out of the box, reading them, and recording the votes. Usually this is done by people. It’s not obvious to me that this method is more secure than various technological solutions. I know that electronic recording of ballots can be compromised, but so can human reading of paper ballots.
It is my understanding that paper ballots provide better auditing. Paper ballots placed into ballot-reading machines is the way things are done in my district, and it seems to provide a good mix, getting humans out of the ballot-counting-and-recording business while still providing audit capability.