Just Peachy

I’m not looking at the polls but Twitter is getting noisy.

We love you, Georgia, no matter what.

Trumpers, it was bad

WaPo is reporting this morning that conservative news outlets are downplaying the seriousness of Trump’s phone call to Georgia election officials. In the great scheme of things, it might be a moot point. Trump can not prevail and change the election results. Biden won, fair and square. There was very very little documented voter fraud and that was carried out by Republicans. So, from that angle, nothing Trump said on that call is going to make a lick of difference. Brad Raffensperger probably hates the fact that so many regular Georgians voted in November in spite of his best efforts but he’s not willing to go state prison over it.

Then there are the Senators who are going to try to cancel out the votes of 81 million Americans tomorrow. They couldn’t prove those votes for Biden were illegitimate because they didn’t have any evidence and more than one swing state election officials defended their voters successfully in court. So those Senators are going to take matters into their own hands. This is also likely to be unsuccessful. The only thing they’re likely to accomplish is dragging out the certification process that isn’t even a process at this point. All Congress is supposed to do is open the envelopes that the electoral college sent to them, count the votes in the envelope, confirm that there are 306 votes for Biden/Harris and 232 votes for Trump/Pence, and vote yes that the number of votes in the envelopes are correct. Then Pence says the Congress has confirmed the EC numbers. That’s it. End of story. That’s all she wrote. There is only a problem if the votes in the envelopes are something other that 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump. The time to challenge the electors is over. Josh Hawley and friends can’t change that. They can only bore us to death with speeches while their proud boy thugs wreck Washington in a fit of pique.

In both cases, right wing media has a point that this is a whole lot of nothing.

But make no mistake about the serious consequences of that phone call for Trump. It’s perfectly reasonable for either federal or Georgia state prosecutors to charge Trump with a serious crime. Sure, he sounds unhinged and like he bought into all the crazy nutball conspiracy theories. But that’s no excuse for what he asked Raffensperger to do. Not only that but he threatened them with consequences if they didn’t comply. It was not a perfect phone call.

In a way, we Democrats and Never Trumpers have come full circle on the whole Trump term from the beginning to now. Some of us had very reasonable concerns about the legitimacy of his election because the assistance from Russia was real and because so many swing state elections were conducted on machines without paper trails where it would have been much easier for dedicated Trump republicans to give him a few thousand votes here and there. There was no way for us to tell what happened. This year, there were paper trails and mail in ballots. Trump HATES mail in ballots. They put Republican secretaries of state in a bind. They have to certify actual verifiable votes. They can’t fudge them.

But more than that, we didn’t want a cannon ball for a president, especially a corrupt one. Some Trumpers may have been attracted to that “burn it all down”, Viking crossed with Mob Boss personality. The rest of us knew that Trump was going to wreck more trouble than even the most motivated Trumper was willing to tolerate. We’re about to see just how destructive he was and it’s going to be more than Trumpers bargained for. It *will* affect them in very harsh, very negative ways for decades to come.

We tried to avoid that. We tried to warn people. We did our best not to go along with the program. But he was worse than we thought in major ways. Last year at this time, he was impeached for a phone call very similar to this one where he badgered and threatened the head of another country to help him win an election by making up lies about his opponent’s son. He held military aid over that country’s head to get it to comply.

That’s not normal. That’s not the way we operate. No US it president has the right to use the powers of his office for personal gain. It isn’t done. No, no, you can’t point to too many examples of such a thing happening. The only other concrete example where that happened was with Nixon.

But back in January 2020, we didn’t have a recording of that phone call to see exactly how Trump persuades people to do things. All we had were witnesses whose lives and careers were ruined by Trump enablers.

I can’t even tell you they kind of damage to our moral authority as a nation Trump has had in the past four years. I do not want to hear any Trumper or Trump media mouthpiece telling me that it wasn’t that bad. That phone call to Georgia was as corrupt as it could possibly be. Trump was asking Raffensperger to help him overturn an election. That election included 81 million participants who voted in good faith, according to the laws of their state. What Trump was asking was for Georgia to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a presidential election in a way that no president has ever done in the history of our country.

It’s a bridge too far and it’s caught on tape. I’m not surprised that Trump is livid. He can try to pardon himself for federal election tampering before he leaves but he can’t pardon himself from state charges.

After the election, there were many Biden advisors who thought that pursuing Trump in court for all the illegal stuff he did would be a bad idea. They want to unite the country by allowing Trumpers to save face. This advice is by no means universal but that was the direction we were headed. Just let him ride off into the sunset and deal with his state indictments in court using his same strong armed tactics.

But with this last phone call, there have got to be second thoughts. This is so bad that it can’t be excused. No one should be able to get away with tampering with election results. He’s got to face consequences now and I’m not talking about just a Congressional censure. When there is this much evidence of such a serious crime, there has to be a severe penalty so that no president, Republican or Democrat, tries it again.

Any president who thinks they don’t have to face accountability to the citizens of this country is a threat to this country. This is as bad as it gets.