“Hello, Georgia. By the way — there’s no way we lost Georgia. There’s no way. That was a rigged election.”
Just yesterday evening, Donald Trump visited Georgia, ostensibly to support Republican candidates for the two U.S. Senate seats still up for grabs.
I say ostensibly because these days, when Trump goes anywhere, it’s always about Donald Trump.
At least he mentioned the two candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, although at least once he referred to Loeffler as Karen. He didn’t talk much about them, mostly about how he needs their votes in the Senate to help him reverse the result of the recent presidential election.
These are desperate times for Trump, and perilous ones for our system of self-government. I don’t think it’s too much an exaggeration to say that if Trump somehow succeeds in stealing an election he lost by more than 7 million votes, there might not be an election in 2024.
Think about it. Every accusation of voting fraud Trump has alleged has been dismissed by the courts, many of them by judges appointed by Republican presidents and even Trump himself.
Even the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump himself, rejected cases that could have helped him steal the election.
Republicans love to cite Democrats’ complaints in 2004 and 2016, but there is one difference that makes all the difference. John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 had both conceded defeat within 24 hours of Election Day.
In a third election, 2000, when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by 537 votes in Florida, members of the Congressional Black Caucus wanted to challenge the election. They needed one senator to make the challenge legit, and Gore asked Democratic senators not to participate.
Gore showed he had a sense of honor.
Trump shows every day that he has none. His Saturday phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was out-and-out solicitation of election fraud. And ironically, one of the two candidates — David Perdue — was outraged only that the transcript of the call had been made available to the Washington Post.
Nothing wrong with fraud, Trump supporters say.
The only sin is exposing it.
Nice little country you have here.
Be a shame if something happened to it.
Uh, Don? Shaddup!