After six years of whining and weedling about his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump is staring into the abyss of irrationality over the matter. On Monday, the President told former Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino on his podcast that Republicans need to take over elections. “The Republicans should say: ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said during his appearance. Of course, once Mr. Trump took a tenet of Republican orthodoxy—States’ rights—and flushed it down one of his golden toilets, the explainers started to appear. Led by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Republicans sauntered up to the microphones to tell us we had not heard what we heard.
Leavitt told a gaggle of reporters that the question of the Constitutionality of the President’s statement was not the point and answered an entirely different subject to deflect. “The President believes in the United States Constitution. However, he believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections,” Leavitt said. She then went on to reference the Save Act legislation, saying, “Voter ID is a highly popular and commonsense policy that the president wants to pursue, and he wants to pass legislation to make that happen for all states across the country.” Ms. Leavitt’s attempt to clean up the President’s mess is a tactic that has been used over and over again by Republican sycophants and apologists. Mr. Trump’s word salads and lies are often answered by Republicans when asked for comment by either saying they did not hear it or commencing to clean up on aisle 47.
Anthony Scaramucci told MSNOW (nee MSNBC) host Stephanie Ruhle when asked, “Hold on. If he’s a detail-oriented guy, then how does this statement that we’ve been hearing for months — don’t take him literally, take him seriously — make sense?” Ruhle asked. Scaramucci—whose short tenure in the first Trump term is now a punchline about time, given his brief stint as White House communication director—responded with yet another explanation of the unpredictable then-President-elect, saying Trump should be taken seriously and symbolically. Former Michigan Congressman Peter Meijer started his re-explanation of Trump’s words on CNN yesterday and was abruptly shut down by CNN contributor Luna Garcia-Navarro, who essentially called him out for gaslighting her, the assembled panel, and America.
During the show, Kasie Hunt, the host of CNN’s The Arena, uses live social media postings so that viewers can read the opinions of opinion makers during her interview. Normally, they are partisan ramblings and can be ignored, but former US Attorney Michael Moore weighed in writing,
“Trump and the GOP have been consistently good at creating a ‘devil’ in every recent election… it motivates the base from fear, and then he just denies every(sic) saying it.”
My only quarrel with his statement is that not only does Trump deny ever saying it, but his minions step in and say we never heard it. There were moments of courage that arrived and were replaced with cowardice just as quickly. Lindsey Graham, who said after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, “I think it’s a uniquely bad idea to delay this election. Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way,” he said. “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” Graham’s moment of clarity devolved into sycophancy and cowardice. He was right about one thing: Enough is enough, but the Republican Party wants us to wallow in the mud with their revisionist delusions.
Your Vote is Still Your Voice
