This is the second excerpt from “I Alone Can Fix It”: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year, by Phillip Rucker and Carol D. Leonnig, published in the Washington Post this week. This excerpt is the account of events leading up to and including the insurrection on January 6, and it is chilling to the bone just how close we came to Trump and his goons taking down the government. This is a must read.
Trust me.
UPDATE: Politico is reporting that the DHS is taking the August reinstatement conspiracy theory seriously in terms of stepping up efforts to follow discussions of extremists on social media, concerned about potential violence caused by disinformation pouring our of right wing media and lunatics like the Pillow Guy and other nonsense peddlers. This story is coming from those who are familiar with a private briefing by DHS to members of Congress.
ORIGINAL POST: Seth Abramson, a defense attorney and author, has been after Trump for years. His latest work is digging into how Trumpland planned and directed the insurrection on January 6, but he also has posited the only theory I’ve heard that makes any sense about one of Trump’s most outlandish lies, and that is how he’s going to be reinstated to the presidency in August. Now, you know, and I know that there is simply no mechanism to restore someone to the presidency, even if an election was stolen, which this one most certainly was not. Once the Congress certifies the Electoral College vote from the states and the new president is inaugurated, it’s over, game, set, and match period, end of story. No one outside of the line of succession to the presidency can become president unless he/she is elected in the next national election.
So what the hell is Trump and his loudmouths doing? Why is he repeatedly asserting he will be reinstated? Abramson says that is all a dodge to avoid indictment in NY. Abramson says that Trump believes that with his rallies starting back up and his incessant repeating of The Big Lie, he can keep his insurrectionist based whipped up and the threat of violence would be so great that prosecutors wouldn’t dare indict him for fear of major social unrest. This is the only thing that makes any sense to me, that Trump believes he can keep the grift going long enough to run and win the presidency again in 2024, which will hold back the prosecutorial wolves from the door another 4 years.
https://twitter.com/sethabramson/status/1400470960587816961?lang=en
Sounds crazy, right? Of course it’s crazy and I don’t think the NY AG or NY DA give a good goddam about Trump’s fantasies. If they can nail him, they will, and they most certainly owe it to all of us Americans who suffered through over 4 years of the Trump Shitshow to protect our democracy by prosecuting that son of a bitch. I do think Abramson is onto Trump, and having written about him for years, most certainly knows him well enough to have an informed opinion. Besides that, NOTHING else makes the slightest bit of sense.
The Washington Post has published a harrowing account by insiders of Trump’s case of Covid19 last October that was downplayed and lied about since the day he got sick. As we all assumed, Trump was a LOT more ill than his staff or doctors lead us to believe, and he left for the hospital only when convinced how bad it would look if he waited so long that he would be taken on a gurney rather than walking to Marine One. The story also confirms what we all assumed, that he lived ONLY because he was president. WH doctors poured every known treatment to him as he got more ill, including the experimental therapy, the monoclonal antibody treatment. And then HHS secretary Alex Azar pulled strings so Trump could jump the line in front of others. At the time Trump received the treatment, only 10 people had received it. That treatment, and the others performed at the same time (which was unprecedented) undoubtedly saved his sorry life.
Trump’s contempt for science, human life, and common sense is well known. He forced aides to remove their masks in his presence, even while complaining to them that WH visitors would often get too close to him during events he insisted on holding. Covid19 outbreaks became so common that then CDC director Robert Redfield labeled 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as “not safe”. Because of Trump’s defiant ignorance, untold numbers of staffers, their families, and visitors were exposed and fell ill. Almost 900 Secret Service employees contracted the infection, HALF of them special agents who protected Trump, his family, and Pence. God knows how many fell ill from exposure during Trump’s idiotic Hitleresque rallies.
The worst part of this story, though, was that the gargantuan effort to save Trump actually backfired. Everyone had assumed that Trump having a near death experience would change him and he would reverse himself on the Coronavirus response, encouraging mitigation measures and preparing for the vaccine. Doctors were trying to decide when they would start speaking their mind about the disease. Staffers were preparing for a reversal of Trump idiocy. They were all wrong. Literally dead wrong. Trump insisted on returning to the WH early, and when he did return he was still very ill, but even more defiant. He insisted on climbing the stairs on the South Portico and barely made it. He then turned to the cameras and yanked off his mask revealing his heavy orange stage makeup, turned and stalked back into the WH. Nothing changed.
That was the day that hope died because Trump didn’t. And that’s the truth.
Facebook announced today that Trump was banned from Facebook for two years from the January 6th insurrection to overturn the results of the election in his favor. He will be considered for reinstatement at that time if the danger for violence has subsided. That’s bullshit. Everyday since January 6 Trump has publicly made statements perpetuating The Big Lie, amplifying the lies from his surrogates and the entire Republican Party. The appropriate decision would have been to ban him for life from the platform because he’ll never change. Alternatively, I would be OK with the two years AFTER he repudiates his lie and stops telling it as well as all of his sycophants stop repeating the lie. Two years from THAT action would be appropriate.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
We had a quiet holiday weekend at home this year, similar to last year’s, but most certainly not as fearful as that one. We binge watched television series, cooked, and went on walks with our dogs, even sans masks since we’ve both been vaccinated and continue social distancing from people we don’t know are vaccinated. Ignoring the nonsense going on in Austin, we had a relaxing and less stress-filled holiday and I realized yesterday the main reason – no Trump Show. One of the most infuriating intrusions Trump made into our lives for the last 4 years was his constant co-opting of holidays to draw attention to himself. Besides his incessant tweeting, childish insults, and rambling press gaggles, he LOVED the self aggrandizing rallies he organized at every opportunity, especially national holidays. For those 4 years, I couldn’t watch Memorial Day, 4 of July, and other national events because Trump turned them all into rallies for himself. Not during a holiday, but he even turned the White House into a 3 ring circus during the GOP national convention which was an assault on everything from the senses to federal laws to common decency. He was a one man shit show.
The pain of watching Trump turn the entire government apparatus into his own personal plaything has now been replaced by Biden’s quiet and steady leadership. He has returned us to our traditions of wreath laying and serious speeches about public service, the courage of our armed forces, and the keystone of our country, democracy. He never talks about himself, his personal grievances, or his political enemies. He restarted the WH daily brief with a competent press secretary who answers all questions truthfully without the personal attacks on the press that were commonplace under Trump. He’s played golf one time since becoming President as compared to Trump who had played at least 25 times at this point in his term.
What this weekend really drove home for me is that we must make goddam sure that Trump, or any of his Mini-Trumps, get anywhere near the Oval Office, ever again. The toxic waste of the Trump presidency came within inches of actually destroying our government and our way of life and continues to corrode our institutions, even from his lair at Mar a Lago. We must never let that happen again.
It’s all out war right now in Arizona, specifically Maricopa County, where Republicans have been presiding over an audit shitshow of the 2.1 million ballots from the 2020 election. We’ve talked about the sham that was cooked up by the Arizona State Senate, where they decided that it would be a really good idea to pander to Trump by pretending to count ballots and look for Chinese bamboo in the paper. The Arizona secretary of state has opposed the audit from the beginning, and now the Maricopa Board of Elections has weighed in with an open letter to the senate demanding that the audit be halted immediately. The letter was sent after Karen Fann, president of the senate, accused the board on Twitter of deleting the entire data base from the 2020 election, which, of course, is completely false.
Jack Sellers, the chairman of the elections board, both in public statements and in the letter ripped Fann, senate Republicans, and especially the “auditor”, Cyber Ninjas, for their incompetence. He also has refused to answer any more questions and demands. Here’s a quote from Sellers in that regard:
Jack Sellers, chair of Maricopa county board of supervisors, ends meeting by saying he is not responding to any more requests from state senate on Arizona audit. "Finish your report and be ready to defend it in a court of law," he says.
— Sam Levine (@srl) May 17, 2021
I had the opportunity to read the letter today and it’s a long, but fantastic read. Once choice paragraph I reproduce here:
“Next, let’s consider the County’s two separate forensic audits conducted in February of this year. You suggest that the Dominion proprietary password would have been necessary to conduct those audits. You are correct: it was. The forensic audit firms that the County hired, Pro V & V and SLI Compliance, are both accredited by the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission as voting system testing laboratories. Because of that accredited status, signifying that these firms are specialists who have expertise with voting systems and understand how to audit them, Dominion Voting Systems provides Pro V & V and SLI Compliance with the necessary passwords to audit their machines.
Your chosen “auditors,” the Cyber Ninjas, are certainly many things. But “accredited by the EAC” is not one of them. Regardless, we cannot give you a password that we do not possess any more than we can give you the formula for Coca Cola. We do not have it; we have no legal right to acquire it; and so, we cannot give it to you.”
So Republicans are eating their own. Sellers and the Maricopa County Elections Board see the handwriting on the wall. They KNOW there was no material fraud in the election and KNOW that Arizona Republicans are walking straight off The Big Lie cliff in subservience to Trump. They KNOW that this shitshow will most certainly make all Republicans look like idiots, and they’re trying stop it before that happens.
I believe the Dems should take a different strategy. They should demand that the “audit” be completed, then demand that the results be made public and laid down next to the original count and the two recounts. Only then could everyone see what a sham this whole thing was and will show the Republicans for the morons that they really are.