Donald Trump isn’t just still spreading the Big Lie about the 2020 election, he’s still actively engaged in attempting to overturn the election results and justify every step of the Jan. 6 coup plot. In the last week, that has included calling—and threatening—the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly because that speaker refused to help Trump in a new effort to reverse the vote in an election now 20 months in the past.
In January, a Wisconsin judge sided with conservatives trying to restrict the right to vote and banned drop boxes for use in the 2022 primary elections. His ruling was swiftly blocked by an appeals court, but the case moved up the line, and in the first week of July the conservative majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court handed down a 4-3 decision that outlawed most ballot drop boxes and made it illegal for anyone other than the voter to turn in an absentee ballot.
Wisconsin’s narrowly divided court has generated a record number of 4-3 decisions, but this one particularly excited Trump. Because while the court’s ruling explicitly affects only elections going forward, Trump immediately seized on this decision as meaning that “hundreds of thousands” of votes in the 2020 election were “illegal.” So he took the natural next step: calling up Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and trying to force him to decertify the 2020 election results.
Campaign Action
As WISN reports, Vos then made a critical mistake: He tried to explain to Trump why it’s not possible to go back and revoke electors that have already been sent and counted. Because laws. The state constitution. The space time continuum.
Also, it wasn’t hundreds of thousands. It was 2 million Wisconsin voters who voted by absentee ballot in 2020. Throwing all those votes out wouldn’t be wiping out a few liberals in Madison, it would be disenfranchising half the state.
Trump’s reaction was perfectly predictable. He immediately jumped onto his personal social media platform, so that the reporters who watch that space for smoke signals could dutifully relay that Vos is “a long time professional RINO” and “Democrats would like to thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs, for letting them get away with ‘murder.’”
To be clear, Vos is the same guy who headed a 2018 lame duck session that gutted the power of the state’s governor so that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers would not be able to undo the disasters created by his Republican predecessor, who cooperated with Vos on sabotaging the office. Vos has been at the forefront of shoving his party to the extreme right since taking office.
In fact, Vos has responded to past prodding from Trump by hiring a former Republican state Supreme Court justice to investigate charges of election issues in a move similar to the “investigation” carried out in Arizona. However, just like in Arizona, that investigation wasn’t able to turn up anything that helped Trump, who lost the state by over 20,000 votes. Instead of satisfying Trump supporters, the investigation surprised Vos by suddenly dropping him into the ever-expanding “deep state” as far as the MAGA crowd is concerned.
When Vos appeared before the state Republican Party convention in the spring, he drowned out with boos and heckling after attempting to explain, “We have no ability to decertify the election and go back and nullify it. We do not. We need to focus on going forward.”
Vos tried to reply to Trump’s latest attack by simply making it clear: “The court case as you read it does not go back and say what happened in 2020 was illegal. It just says going forward it can’t happen."
Which earned Vos another reply from Trump in which he said, “I don’t know his opponent in the upcoming Primary, but feel certain he will do well if Speaker Vos doesn’t move with gusto.”
That opponent is no doubt heartbroken that Trump did not know him. As Urban Milwaukee notes, Vos’ opponent is first-time candidate Adam Steen. What is Steen’s platform? It doesn’t do too much nitpicking when it comes to things about governing, or the economy, or education, or … stuff.
But the very top of Steen’s campaign website says he is running because, “Trump is the best thing to happen to the United States since the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”
Following the release of the results of the investigation into the election, Steen declared that Vos is a “treasonous traitor” and that Vos is directly responsible for electing President Joe Biden.
Vos’ response to this is exactly that of every Republican being smacked around by Trump. He insists that he “talks to Trump regularly” and that he, too, thinks that Trump has been just terrific for the Republican Party. But for the first time in his 17 years representing a heavily conservative district, Vos is out there knocking on doors 20 hours a week, desperately trying to hold on to his spot against a man whose only platform is that Trump is better than George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, and that the state should shred the laws to roll back the 2020 election.
It’s 2022 after all. Going forward is the last thing that interests the Republican Party.