With the Impeachment trial in the Senate about to begin tomorrow, I thought this point might be worth making and, if the House Managers have this argument in their arsenal (as I’m sure they must), a forceful presentation of it might convince several GOP Impeachment-fence-humpers to spare their political groins and stand, for once, on the right side of history.
So last Tuesday, shortly after the House Managers posted their scorched-earth brief for the Second Impeachment Trial of the Worst POTUS in US history, Donald Trump’s second-string Lawyers filed their own brief in support of said shambolic lunatic — and it was itself a shambolic doozy. Laughable, of course it was, but much like the testimony of the woman pictured above, it was actually worse than merely monumentally embarrassing for Trump’s lost cause: It was, not to put too fine a point on it, thoroughly damning.
Now there are dozens of lawyerly blunders in that short, 14 page unintentional parody, and if you want to get the rundown of how stupendous was their stupid, there are plenty of great analyses out there, including the Philip Bump WaPo piece I linked to above. But the most glaring and damning bit in my opinion, which I have yet to see explicated in the national media, occurs on page 4 (Answer 4):
It is admitted that after the November election, the 45th President exercised his First Amendment right under the Constitution to express his belief that the election results were suspect, since with very few exceptions, under the convenient guise of Covid-19 pandemic “safeguards” states [sic] election laws and procedures were changed by local politicians or judges without the necessary approvals from state legislatures. Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.
That paragraph is itself a compilation intentional lies: Trump didn’t proclaim that the results were “suspect,” he claimed that the election was de facto stolen, that it was a fantastical fraud, that he actually won in a landslide, and that he was the prime victim of that monumental crime (along with his supporters, of course, which is the basis of the incitement charge)— and that that crime was perpetrated not just by “local politicians and judges” who were manipulating the rules using Covid as a pretext, but also by Dominion voting machinery that was programmed to defeat him surreptitiously, and by myriad other nefarious means. Here’s a Forbes piece that highlights his most prominent lies about the election he lost; note that false pandemic “safeguards” isn’t even on the list.
In other words, he’s explicitly proclaiming, in this bizarre historic document, that he cannot defend his rabid promotion of a demonstrable and colossal series of lies and provocations, instead asking history to believe that the sum-total of his blatant and prolific falsehoods — that he and his followers were the victims of the worst, national and international, insanely broad-scale and complex conspiracy against American democracy in history — was merely a suggestion that he thought the results were “suspect” and therefore not subject to any test as to their accuracy, nor as to his obvious malignant motivation.
He does the same thing in Answer 5 of that document, but in that instance he uses “the election results were suspect” diversion as a direct defense for one of those demonstrable gigantic lies that the Managers’ Brief points out (“we won this election, and we won it by a landslide!”), saying that statement was just him “express(ing) his opinion that the election results were suspect.” LO-fucking-L. He was expressing existential outrage at a crowd he was exhorting to fight on his behalf against a cabal of evil political thieves who had ripped off both him and the rabble he had assembled to fight for him.