I may be off a bit, but it seemed to me that in about 30 minutes of the hour-long phone call between Trump and the Florida Secretary of State, Trump offered as proof of a rigged election information that was either ‘told’ to him or ‘seen’ by someone else at least a dozen times. He also said that people from South Carolina told him that he couldn’t lose in Georgia because he had won big in their state.
Not only did Trump win Georgia because people told him he did, but another ‘proof’ of his electoral success was that he held rallies in Georgia which, according to him, attracted 50,000 people or more. He did?
In fact, from February 11, 2019 through November 2, 2020, Trump held exactly two rallies in Georgia, the first at the regional airport at Macon, the second at another airport outside the town of Rome.
Both of these events allegedly drew 30,000 spectators, a number which seems to be generic to every description of a Trump rally issued by the Trump campaign. The rally coming up tonight will be in Dalton, an airport located some 14 miles from the border with Tennessee. Maybe this time around the Trump campaign will learn from the other side about how to steal some votes.
Talking about stealing the vote, what really demonstrates that the 2020 election was no different from every previous election is a comparison between 2016 and 2020 exit polls. Because if Trump’s ballots were thrown in the trashcan and his vote numbers were consequently less than they should have been, we would see some differences in not only the number of votes, but which voters chose him.
In 2016, Trump got 53% of the male vote, of whom 58% of these voters were also White. In 2020, he got 53% of the male vote. And again, 58% of these voters were White. If hundreds of thousands of Trump ballots were tossed away, how could he have received exactly the same proportion of male, White votes two times in a row? I may not know much about politics, btu I know how to add and subtract.
Here’s another crucial demographic. In 2016, Trump received 50% or more from voters above age 45, he drew around 40% of the votes from persons age 18 to 44. The exact, same breakdown in the age of Trump voters occurred the last time around.
The reason that Trump is carrying on about election fraud is because he really has nothing else to say. What’s he going to talk about over the next couple of weeks? How his Covid-19 team has done such a great job in manufacturing and distributing 2 million vaccine doses when he promised in September that 100 million doses would be ready by the end of last year?
For that matter, the stand-up members of Congress who are going to yap their heads off on Wednesday before the electoral votes are certified also need something to talk about over the next couple of weeks. Here’s what Ted Cruz had to say about CDC travel guidelines in response to Covid-19: “It’s not about vaccines or protecting people’s lives, it is instead profoundly anti-science, and is only focused on absolute govt control of every aspect of our lives.”
This is political pandering at its worst. My only hope is that my friends in the liberal media will also stop pandering after January 20th, if not before. In today’s New Yorker Magazine, John Cassidy refers to Trump as a “dire threat” to democracy because over the past four years, Trump “has lied on a daily basis; purged officials who challenged him; used his vast social-media following to intimidate other elected Republicans; charged the federal government millions of dollars for the use of his private businesses; awarded prominent positions to his family members; pardoned some of his closest political allies; and, finally, tried to overturn a perfectly legitimate election.”
What’s so threatening about all that? Does Trump lying about the size of his rally crowds match the way that LBJ lied about the Gulf of Tonkin? Does hiring members of his family to do nothing on the Federal payroll match how Nixon immolated the entire populations of Cambodia and Viet Nam?
If it’s time to move beyond Trump, this needs to work both ways.
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