Did you miss it? On Tuesday, the electoral faculty made official what we’ve identified for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency.
Individuals could possibly be excused for being unaware that electors met in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia to solid votes. In practically each presidential election yr, the constitutionally required however largely ceremonial occasion passes with little discover. The tragic exception, in fact, was in 2020: Loser Trump adopted weeks of lies and scores of lawsuits alleging election fraud with an unlawful scheme creating faux pro-Trump electors in battleground states — a prelude to the violent revolt on Jan. 6, 2021. (Not like Trump, his accomplices within the scheme are, justly, nonetheless being prosecuted.)
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a essential eye to the nationwide political scene. She has a long time of expertise overlaying the White Home and Congress.
It’s nice that the switch of energy is continuing peacefully, because it at all times has besides on the onset of the Civil Struggle, and, sure, in 2021. But you possibly can thank President Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. Nobody can credibly doubt that, had he misplaced once more, he’d be elevating one other ruckus. Or worse, that there’d be violence. Trump steered as a lot, telling Time in April, “If we don’t win, , it relies upon.”
States and the federal authorities ready for mayhem that by no means got here. Gabriel Sterling, the highest Georgia election officer who 4 years in the past publicly and presciently warned Trump that “somebody’s going to get killed” due to his provocations, and who endured dying threats himself, stated of the electors’ assembly this week, “To be sincere, I forgot about it.”
As Trump declared in final month’s victory speech, “It’s time to unite.”
However as Biden stated afterward in congratulating him: “You’ll be able to’t love your nation solely once you win.”
Biden — who nonetheless hasn’t acquired Trump’s acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020 victory, not to mention congratulations, and who, because of Trump, is thought-about illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we are able to lay to relaxation the query in regards to the integrity of the American electoral system. … It may be trusted, win or lose.”
Certainly. And that’s why, on this week of the uneventful electoral faculty vote, Individuals ought to take the event to notice the harm that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s religion in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — as an alternative of becoming a member of him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.
Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he gained in November. And but, as much as the ultimate hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A whole lot of speak about large CHEATING in Philadelphia. Legislation Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on election day.
Metropolis and state officers, together with Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections, reposted Trump’s mislead insist there was “completely no reality” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic assaults and threats on-line. Numerous election employees have identified the sensation. Thanks, Trump.
Days earlier, Trump claimed, “Pennsylvania is dishonest, and getting caught, at massive scale ranges not often seen earlier than.” He unfold a false conspiracy idea of vote stealing in a single county, including, “We caught them chilly.” No, he hadn’t; there have been no vote thieves to catch.
After Trump gained Pennsylvania — shock! — he clammed up about Democrats’ alleged heists there and in all six different battleground states that he carried, together with 4 states ruled by Democrats. I suppose as vote riggers go, Democrats are simply inept?
Even earlier than the election, Trump stifled his speak that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, however solely after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates had been being shortchanged, appealed to his “yuge” ego: “Sir, your individuals are so excited to vote for you that they wish to as quickly as they’ll,” one stated throughout an April assembly at Mar-a-Lago. “You gotta inform them it’s OK.”
Trump has not, nonetheless, modified his tune in regards to the 2020 election. The president-elect continues to lie that he gained it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked. What’s worse, trying forward, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.
So it’s that he’s tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be U.S. lawyer common. She was a part of “the primary wave of the Large Lie,” as former Trump White Home aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the Home Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to unfold disinformation about lifeless voters and poll dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Group Trump’s ludicrous information convention at 4 Seasons Complete Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she or he was fulminating on Fox Information: “We’re not going anyplace till they declare Trump gained Pennsylvania.”
In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson informed the Jan. 6 committee that Bondi contacted her earlier than she testified to press Hutchinson to stay loyal to Trump, in response to the Washington Submit. (But it’s former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, that Home Republicans now need prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This yr, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a pacesetter of a pro-Trump coverage institute. And she or he promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Division of Justice, the prosecutors might be prosecuted.”
Little doubt Bondi as the subsequent lawyer common would perform Trump’s requires the Justice Division to examine the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get Home Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.
“Is she going to proceed … pushing out the Large Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and Jan. 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff lately requested on MSNBC.
That was a rhetorical query, in fact.
