This whole 'if I knew then what I know now' defense is complete rubbish. Due diligence? Give me a break.

Darrell Lucus at Loud, Liberal, Christian:

Much of the armchair quarterbacking over Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House centers around claims that Trump would have never been a position to run again had the Justice Department moved more quickly to prosecute him for absconding with classified documents and his role in the 2021 insurrection. Well, excuse me, but I disagree. Those criticizing Merrick Garland for waiting almost two years to start a criminal investigation against Trump need to ask themselves what would have happened had he moved quickly to investigate and indict Trump, only to have the case come unstuck in court. If you think Trump and his minions were screaming “WITCH HUNT!” now, imagine what would have happened had he been acquitted because a rushed investigation resulted in missteps at trial.

We would have risked a repeat of the Freddie Gray case, which came apart because Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby rushed the cases to court without ensuring there was enough evidence to show that the negligence of the officers who shackled Gray into a police van without a seat belt amounted to criminal conduct. We may have known their actions amounted to a callous disregard for life, but Mosby didn’t take the time to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. I’m also reminded of the Bill Cosby case, where prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania cared more about chasing headlines than doing the actual work of putting Cosby away for sexual assault. In so doing, they relied too much on testimony Cosby gave in a civil suit—a Fifth Amendment violation that couldn’t be ignored on appeal, even if there was no real-world doubt that Cosby was a pervert.

From where I’m sitting, the real hackles should be directed at the Democratic campaign apparatus. It got the equivalent of manna from heaven in the form of voluminous evidence that showed not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that when Trump was ranting about having a second term stolen from him, he did so when he damned well knew that he had lost to Joe Biden. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, neither the party nor the Kamala Harris campaign (née the Joe Biden campaign) made a dedicated effort to ensure that evidence stayed in voters’ minds.

The first time that a lot of people learned that Trump knew he had lost came in late January 2021, when The New York Times reported that Trump’s legal team concluded as early as Nov. 12—nine days after the election—that it could not win enough legal challenges to overturn Biden’s lead in Arizona. Earlier that day, Trump’s legal team filed legal challenges to 191 ballots—not even a fraction of Biden’s 10,000-vote lead there. Ethically, they were required to tell Trump, or at the very least make sure he received that information. At the same time, Rudy Giuliani started ranting about supposed malfeasance by Dominion Voting Systems. By then, the deplorable tubes were percolating with talk that Dominion-powered voting machines had switched thousands of votes from Trump to Biden. Even though deputy campaign manager Justin Clark told Trump this was bullshit, Trump sided with Giuliani. This started what the Old Grey Lady called “an extralegal campaign” to wangle a second term. In light of what we now know, “extralegal campaign” is a polite term for “insurrection” or “attempted self-coup.”

A few days later, William Saletan of Slate compiled a list of articles that suggested Trump knew or reasonably should have known even earlier than Nov. 12 that he had lost. The two things that jumped out at me were articles in Axios and The Washington Post that indicated Trump knew his odds of overturning Biden’s lead were extremely slim. According to Axios, Clark and his boss, Bill Stepien, told Trump on Nov. 7, soon after most networks declared Biden president-elect, that he had only one shot shot at reelection. He needed to run the table among outstanding ballots in Arizona and Georgia, and also win a legal challenge to Wisconsin’s count. Clark told Trump that at best—AT BEST—he only stood a 10% chance of pulling it off. According to The Post, Trump “signaled that he understood” what Clark was telling him—he needed a political Hail Mary to win another term.

The significance? As early as Nov. 12, Trump had to have known that on the latter date, he had no legitimate claim to Arizona’s 10 electoral votes. As anyone who was paying attention in 2020 knows, Trump had no politically realistic path to 270 that didn’t include Arizona’s 10 electoral votes. He damned well knew or damned well should have known that path had closed off as early as nine days after the election, and was still railing about fraud.

[...] And yet, a mere five days later, Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held an absolutely bonkers press conference in which they aired out claims that they knew or should have known were false. So the president of the United States damned well knew or damned well should have known that the Big Lie was, well, a lie. He damned well knew or damned well should have known said lie that was causing innocent people—election officials, poll workers, voting tech company workers—to be harassed, trolled, and threatened. And yet, he didn’t do a damned thing about it. Worse, actually—he allowed his legal team to make those very same claims to the American people. The ads wrote themselves—or at least should have written themselves. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, they never came. Any concerns the Biden campaign might have had about tainting a potential jury should have been put to rest with how that campaign memo came to light. It wasn’t obtained through a leak. It was obtained via a legal filing by Eric Coomer, the former Dominion employee who had taken the Trump campaign, Giuliani, Powell and several other elements of the right-wing fever swamp to court for defaming him. Coomer had been forced to go into hiding due to a litany of death threats stirred up by the Big Lie, and his lawyers got his hands on that memo via discovery. News reports are one thing. Legal filings are another. The timeline is laughably easy to follow. Trump knew as early as Nov. 7 that he was shooting his last legal bolt to win another term, and knew as early as Nov. 12 that said bolt had missed. On Nov. 14, his own communications team unearthed hard evidence that would have made it clear to anyone with a brain that the Big Lie was, well, a lie. And yet, five days after that memo came out, Trump’s own lawyers held a press conference centered around claims that they knew or should have known were false. Seen in this light, that press conference was the first overt act in the insurrection—and everything Trump and his team did after that date was in furtherance of that insurrection. That includes all of those hair-on-fire fundraising emails from the Trump campaign warning about fraud. Seen in this light, it’s clear that the insurrection actually started sometime in November. It was almost certainly underway by Nov. 19 at the latest; that day’s bonkers press conference was the first overt act in the insurrection.

[...] The Democrats had a chance to make Trump pay the ultimate political price for his lies—and in so doing, make it far easier to make him pay in court for it. And they blew it eight ways to Sunday. If there is any doubt that Democrats have a messaging problem, the Democrats’ failure to make the American people remember Trump lied and knew he was lying should put it beyond all doubt.

This post from Darrell Lucus is spot-on: Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but kept on pushing the lie that he “won” even after being told that he didn’t win.

See Also:

Mike Luckovich

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“Socialism is a scare word they've hurled at every advance the people have made. Socialism is what they called public power, social security, deposit insurance, and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for anything that helps all people.”

—Harry Truman, 1952

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 7, 2024 (Wednesday)

The Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz continues to gain momentum, with people flocking to their rallies and pouring money into the Democrats’ campaign: in the first 24 hours after Walz joined the ticket, the party raised $36 million from more than 450,000 donors, more than a third of them giving for the first time. In contrast, the Republicans seem to be imploding. For years, people have noted that the party seemed to be painting itself into a corner, but it’s very odd to watch it now seem to be trapped.

Yesterday afternoon, after Harris’s selection of Walz had hit social media and enthusiasm was building, Trump posted on his social media company an elaborate and bizarre fantasy that President Joe Biden would suddenly try to take back the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

“What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!”

Aside from Trump’s obvious yearning to go back to running against Biden, on whom his personal attacks seemed to stick, and his attempt to find some nickname that will stick to Harris, this rant shows that the Republicans seem unable to counter popular Democratic policies.

The heart of their policies were in Project 2025, the extremist vision of a country ruled by a strongman who took the civil service, the Department of Justice, and the military under his own control in order to slash the popular, secular parts of the government and replace them with Christian nationalism. Right-wing evangelicals liked what was outlined in the project, but when the majority of Americans began to understand what was in it, they were quite clear they wanted no part of it. Trump then tried to distance himself from it, although he had publicly praised it, his political action committee had called it his plan, and more than 100 of its architects were people who had served in his administration.

And then it turned out that Trump’s vice presidential pick, J. D. Vance, had written the introduction for a book by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the chief author of Project 2025. The original publication date for the book, which calls for “a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution,’” was in September, shortly before the election, but today the publisher announced it would put off publication until November, after the election.

But advance reader copies of Roberts’s book are already in the hands of reviewers, and Madeline Peltz of Media Matters is posting some of the content online. In it, she notes, Roberts “rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an ‘optional individual choice,’ but a ‘social expectation,’” and that reproductive choice is a “snake strangling the American family.” It is no accident that Vance’s numbers with women continue to fall.

And the Roberts book is only one of Vance’s recent unpopular steps: it turns out that he also wrote a glowing blurb for a book written by ghostwriter Joshua Lisec under the name of far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. The book, titled “Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them),” calls for purging their enemies from society. “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” Vance wrote. “Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people… In ‘Unhumans,’ Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Without popular policies, MAGA Republicans are simply falling back on the old narrative techniques they used in the past. This morning, Trump called into Fox & Friends, where he fell back on the old argument that Democrats are essentially communists who are undermining American culture. Of Harris-Walz, he said, “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately if not sooner.” Trump also tried to hit on the culture wars Republicans have fallen back on since the 1970s, warning that Walz is “very heavy into transgender. Anything transgender he thinks is great.”

Trump also tried to push the idea that Harris’s choosing of Walz over Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro proves that the Democrats are antisemitic. “I think it's very insulting to Jewish people,” Trump said. This is a hard sell considering that of the 26 members of Congress who are Jewish, 24 are Democrats, and of the 9 Jewish senators, 8 are Democrats and 1 is an Independent. And then, of course, there is the fact that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is himself Jewish.

When the stock market tumbled Monday, Trump tried to pin the slide on Harris—calling it the Kamala Crash—and Vance seemed to bet against the United States, predicting that “[t]his moment could set off a real economic calamity around the globe.” When the market rebounded Tuesday, the two remained silent.

Indeed, Trump is largely off the campaign trail, raising suggestions that his handlers don’t want him in public out of concern about what he will do—not a frivolous concern after his angry performance last week before the National Association of Black Journalists.

Meanwhile, Vance is traveling around to the sites where Harris and Walz are speaking. His crowds are embarrassingly small compared to theirs, and he seems perhaps to be trying to intimidate his opponents as Trump tried to do when he loomed behind his 2016 Democratic opponent, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Today Vance and a phalanx of his team approached reporters near Harris’s plane to attack her, only to discover she wasn’t around, at which point he boasted the plane would soon be his.

But rather than seeming intimidating, he came across as so desperate for attention that he had to stalk a more popular figure across the tarmac. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) apparently thought so: she reposted Vance’s photo of his group of about nine people walking away from Harris’s plane and commented: “Looks like [Vance] brought all his rally attendees to the airport with him today.”

MAGA Republicans also appear to be reaching to their past by attacking Walz with the sort of “swift boat” smear campaign attacking his military service they launched against decorated veteran John Kerry when he ran for president in 2004. Indeed, the Republican operative widely thought to be behind the attacks on Kerry, Chris LaCivita, is now in charge of the Trump-Vance campaign. Vance today suggested that Walz is engaging in “stolen valor.” Vance served for four years as a Marine, including as a military journalist in Iraq, where he did not experience combat. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, during which he deployed in response to natural disasters in the United States and served in Europe in support of U.S. operations in Afghanistan.

A number of observers are saying that part of the genius of the Walz pick is that he seems to many people to be the dad and grandfather stolen away by the right-wing rage machine of talk radio and the Fox News Channel and replaced with frightened, angry people who suspect their neighbors and insist the country is going to hell. It seems unlikely that doubling down on that narrative will attract the voters the MAGA ticket needs to win a majority of votes in 2024.

Yesterday the Republican-dominated Georgia State Election Board passed a rule that could delay the certification of an election until “after reasonable inquiry that the tabulation and canvassing of the election are complete and accurate and that the results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.” In a rally on Saturday, Trump thanked the three Republican members of the board—Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King—by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory.”

In 2020, Trump tried to get Georgia to throw out its certification of Biden’s victory there, claiming the vote had been marred by fraud, especially among the state’s Black population. He told Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes—one more than the 11,779 that had given Biden the state.

Yesterday, news broke that former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, who was indicted in Arizona for her participation in the scheme to replace the state’s real electors for Biden with fake ones for Trump, has agreed to a plea deal. In exchange for the state dropping its charges against her, she has agreed to provide information and materials about the scheme and to testify “at any time and place.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

(Mark Meadows)

From the April 24, 2024 article:

“Defendants and unindicted coconspirators schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1 in office against the will of Arizona’s voters,” the 58-page indictment reads.

The names of seven of the defendants, including Meadows, Giuliani and Epshteyn, are redacted, but the document makes clear who they are by describing their roles. Others include attorneys John Eastman, Jenna Ellis and Christina Bobb, as well as Trump 2020 campaign operative Mike Roman.

Ken Chesebro, an attorney who helped devise Trump’s post-election strategy, is described as “unindicted coconspirator 4.”