Will the Big Lie Ever Die?
Reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is a start.
I don’t know if Donald J Trump will ever face criminal prosecution for his actions as president. And if he is indicted or charged, chances are he’ll never see the inside of a jail cell. As venal as the man appears to be, the reality of justice systems for the wealthy and the not-wealthy says to me that this is all performative.
On the off-chance that a guilty verdict gets handed out, appeals will last far beyond his probable life span. History will have to be the ultimate arbiter, and that judgment will change as it ages.
Although the January 6 House Select Committee recommended Justice Department action on four charges, although the special prosecutor’s office seems to be ramping up its investigations, although authorities in Georgia and New York appear to be pursuing charges, history indicates this is more noise than probability.
One can always hope, I suppose. But the oft-repeated narrative saying he’ll face a reckoning in his lifetime doesn’t hold up.
There is good news to be had in all this, namely the destruction of his personal political brand. Despite declaring his intentions to run for president in 2024, there is at present no organization beyond a few Mar-a-Lago minions. There have been no rallies, no campaign events, and no field organizing.
What we have seen is a high profile dinner with marginal characters, a sale of digital collectors cards (with pirated & post shopped images), a daily dose of crazy uncle level rants directed at perceived enemies, along with a constant stream of direct mail appeals filled with angertainment and phony contests.
His party hasn’t completely disowned him, but there are growing degrees of separation with assorted powerbrokers. Few will outright denounce him, but the very muted response to the January 6 Committee’s executive summary is telling. Trump is not winning elections for the party, and that’s what counts.
The Committee's instance on building a narrative centering on Trump-led illegal conduct was designed to be a keep-it-simple-stupid way of discrediting him for historians and encouraging the Justice Department to get off its duff.
The key findings of the committee are those that undercut the Big Lie. i.e., Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that victory in the presidential election was stolen from him.
As legal scholar Benjamin Wittes observed, the real devil is in the details. The 762 endnotes in the executive summary are just the start. Any one of these details would have ended a political career a decade ago, but in today’s DC swampland they’ll mostly be of interest to historians.
Take note number 50, for example, elaborating on the fact that Trump had to know he’d actually lost the election:
It’s hardly a gripping read—until, that is, you look at the text on page 10 that it supports. That, in turn, reads as follows: “As the Committee’s hearings demonstrated, President Trump made a series of statements to White House staff and others during this time period indicating his understanding that he had lost” the 2020 election.
Now look at the note again: Apparently, Gen. Milley, Allyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Kellyanne Conway all told the committee that Trump had made statements “indicating his understanding that he had lost.” In some cases, as with Farah and Hutchinson, we already knew this. But in some cases, we did not know it. The Conway interview, for example, took place less than a month ago, and the cited portion of the transcript stretches over some five pages—meaning that she may have had a fair bit to say on the subject of Trump’s knowing that he was lying when he told the public the election had been stolen from him.
Furthermore, claims about fraud were known to be false, even among the former President's inner circle.
From the New York Times:
The executive summary of the committee's final report states that it asked multiple election conspiracists -- including John Eastman, Michael Flynn, Jenna Ellis, and Phil Waldron -- for evidence of election fraud and that "all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination" in response.
In addition to this, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani acknowledged to the committee that he did not buy claims that Dominion Voting Systems' machines had stolen the election from Trump, and his ally Bernard Kerik acknowledged that "it was impossible... to determine conclusively whether there was widespread fraud or whether that widespread fraud would have altered the outcome of the election."
In sum, writes the committee in the executive summary, "Not a single witness--nor any combination of witnesses--provided the Select Committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any State."
The Big Lie’s power as a political instrument has already been challenged, via the results of the mid-term elections and the utter failure of Trump’s endorsements in contested contests. Only one (Arizona nutbag Kari Lake–who’s taking a drubbing in the courts) of the high profile Trumpist candidates has cried foul about losing, even though they all campaigned on voter fraud by Democrats as an issue. They knew all along it was bs, and now that they’d have to put some actual cash into making their case they’ve folded.
It’s funny-not-funny how just about everything Republicans advocate against these days ends up being a projection of what they themselves are actually doing–draining the “swamp” is a classic example. (So-called sexual “grooming” is another – there is no contest between the number of “good Christians” and infrequent occurrence of gays being arrested for pedophilia.)
One bit of good news here. Congress will support changes to election law that will effectively block every pathway tried by the former President in his quest to keep Joe Biden from assuming the office of the presidency.
From the Washington Post:
The omnibus spending bill has been released, and buried inside it are provisions that would reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs how Congress counts presidential electors. Trump’s effort to subvert his presidential reelection loss exploited many weaknesses in the ECA that would be fixed if the omnibus passes, as expected.
Strikingly, all this is happening with little noise from right-wing media or MAGA-loyal lawmakers. A bipartisan group of senators negotiated these reforms for months with the support of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and they will likely be backed by many or even most GOP senators. Trump himself has been surprisingly mute.
Yet the fact remains: GOP senators who support these ECA reforms are implicitly acknowledging the ugliest realities of what Trump attempted in 2020. They are acknowledging the true nature of the threat that Trump or an imitator might pose in 2024.
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