Members-Only Article
I was scanning through my email this morning when I found this article from Roll Call rounding up what was new in ex-President Trump’s rally Saturday in Arizona. The claims about white people being replaced or deprived of COVID medications in favor of Blacks or Hispanics have gotten more focused and intense, which isn’t terribly surprising based on what I told you back on the 5th; efforts to stop “amplifying” Trump have largely allowed him to further radicalize without any scrutiny. But I really got interested after I read way down into the piece and saw that Trump is now explicitly exhorting his supporters to cheat in elections to counter Democrats’ (of course non-existent) cheating.
“We have more people than they do, but they know politics and they know cheating,” he said to cheers. “I sometimes say, ‘Well, would the Republicans ever do what they did?’”
Then comes a classic Trump “Sir” story from his aides.
From Roll Call …
The response from his aides, Trump said, is “‘Sir … we’re proud Americans, you know they won’t do it. They won’t do it.’” The former president then encouraged Republicans to tinker with elections to ensure their candidates win: “I say if it’s good for [Democrats], why aren’t the Republicans doing the same kind of thing with the ballots? You know, the [mail-in] ballots they used COVID as another method of cheating.”
On one level this isn’t surprising. False charges of cheating and fraud have always served as a permissioning device to allow either cheating on behalf of the accusers or simply disenfranchising those falsely accused of cheating. That goes for Trump and so many of his predecessors. Trump has edged up to this line before. But now there’s no line. He’s demanding Republicans falsify, refuse to count or otherwise manufacture election returns in 2022 and 2024. And because there’s an elite journalist agreement not to foreground things Trump says no one has even heard about this – except of course Trump’s supporters who hear everything he says on conservative media, Facebook and all the other channels where his message comes through loud and clear.
I say “no one has even heard” when clearly some have and the author of Roll Call piece, John T. Bennett, had. I haven’t been tightly on the Trump beat recently. But … well, I follow political news fairly closely, let’s say. If I didn’t hear it I’d say that in broad terms it was like a pebble falling in a pond with no ripple outside of the far-right press ecosystem.
That’s very unfortunate. Trump remains the untested leader of the Republican party. He’s insisting his supporters commit election fraud, stuff and toss ballots. That’s news.