THE FUTURE OF THE GOP
even the slightest doubt about his electoral inevitability. Spend five minutes reading his (now banned) Twitter feed, and you know that one sin that Trump cannot abide is others lacking supreme confidence in him. It was after the election, though, that the situation in and around the Oval Office took a strange turn. Trump wasn’t satisfied with those closest to him saying that there were “election irregularities.” Nor was it sufficient to lean heavily into allegations (still unproven to this day) that there was substantial fraud. To change the end result in a national election, you need to find the proverbial smoking gun. And that didn’t happen... not even close. To be sure, there’s always some fraud in a national election, and Democrats have a long and storied history of it. But to change the end result in a national election, you need to find the proverbial smoking gun. And that didn’t happen... not even close. But Trump didn’t care. He wanted his people to go out into the world and state, definitively, that he won the election. And not only that, but he also wanted them to state he won “by a landslide,” as Trump repeated publicly many times, much to the delight of millions of his voters who refused to accept defeat. Needless to say, Trump’s pronouncements of victory caused problems among some senior White House staff as well as at the Department of Justice. For the month of
November, Trump’s election objections had stayed within the system. Bringing legal challenges in court are well within precedent. And the Democrats had (cynically) chosen to leverage the panic around COVID-19 to enact a slew of last-minute changes in various states to election processes. Some suspicion (and even disbelief ) about Joe Biden’s win was understandable from Trump and his base. Once the election battle dragged into December, however, it started to become clear that the legal challenges weren’t going to change the outcome. The Trump campaign’s legal team – now famously derided by former Attorney General Bill Barr as “clownish” – was handed defeat after defeat in federal courts. They seemed more attuned to cable- TV news appearances than pulling off the miracle of a Trump reelection. There was a constant bait and switch underway, one in which Trump’s legal representatives made bold pronouncements on TV about the “bombshell” about to drop in court. Then at the moment of truth, they’d present much meeker, more limited challenges before the judge. Many in the pro-Trump conservative media were willing to take on faith the legal team’s request to be open-minded, as they prepared to deal the Biden would-be presidency a crushing legal blow in court. The “kraken” would be unleashed! They promised... it was going to happen any day. But of course, it never came. As the new year approached, there was a growing recognition among Trump boosters in the media that the legal team had no shot whatsoever at getting a
22
February 2021
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online