Is the debate over the 2020 election finally over?
It depends on who you ask. For many in the Washington DC establishment, for example, the question was settled the morning after Election Day in that year. This was when vote totals from key swing states that had gone for Donald Trump in 2016 mysteriously reversed themselves, turning seemingly safe Trump margins into toss-ups or convincing edges for Democrat challenger Joe Biden.
Similar to 2016, network pundits held off making “calls” on these states (Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, which Trump did not win four years earlier) because there allegedly wasn’t enough data to safely do so, despite figures flashing across the screen that strongly inferred that Trump had prevailed there. I recall texting friends and family members well after midnight to discern what other folks were thinking, and to a man (or woman) they indicated that Trump had surely pulled it off -- won reelection in a climate specifically designed to defeat him.
There it was -- Trump defying the odds -- again. All the COVID scaremongering, lockdowns of the economy, hysteria over post office boxes being removed for sinister reasons, annoying Kens and Karens lecturing on masks, bored and uneducated children forced to confine themselves to their homes and endless pontificating from Democrats on what was proper campaign behavior went for naught. Or so we thought. It didn’t seem possible that Biden’s mail-in ballots would tip the scale so dramatically and debatably. Couldn’t somebody do something? Why did several of these states suddenly stop their counting? What gives?
Not that I care to recall them, but the days following the election were excruciating and painful. There were many, many allegations of fraud, whistleblowers shoved to the side (Democrats only care about whistleblowers when they stand to benefit from the information), a multitude of confused state legislatures, strained and hurried court rulings and Trump’s people on TV pleading with the powers-that-be to step back and consider what had happened before proceeding any further.
If you’re like me, it’s repulsive to remember it. The collective mood among Trump backers was dour, frustrated -- and angry in those weeks. I heard about the AP declaring Joe Biden the president-elect while situated in a parking lot at a local tourist attraction. The news was pushed so hard that it practically made our phones explode (or so it seemed). Acquaintances vowed to fight to the end and never accept the result.
But seriously, what could be done? Many/most of us had contributed to the legal challenge fund. We’d written letters to the editor. We’d called our congress people. We’d watched Fox News religiously to see whether the latest litigation attempt had produced any sanity. We saw senile Joe and offensively stupid gal pal Kamala Harris speak from an “office of the president-elect” that they’d set up.
There were assemblies and protests. No one packed away their Trump/Pence campaign signs and paraphernalia. Maybe it wasn’t really over after all? We still had the senate, right? (This was prior to January 5 in Georgia) The president held rallies to keep hope alive. It was as though the campaign hadn’t actually concluded.
Like the cowards that they are, establishment Republicans went along with the presidential transition. Attorney General Bill Barr made his impossible “no evidence to overturn the election” statement. The president’s enemies attacked him incessantly like famished hyenas tearing apart a carcass on the African savannah. Donald Trump had very few friends left and a lot of dis-loyalists emerging from the woodwork to criticize him.
Then came January 6. The country and the world watched in shock as red, white and blue clad Trump supporters made an embarrassing spectacle of themselves at the Capitol. The media went nuts. This was the end.
In the time since, an impressive collection of evidence emerged to shore up many of Trump’s “the election was stolen” claims. Further eyewitness and documentary accounts (like in the movie “2000 Mules”) offered additional questions that likely will never receive definitive answers. Joe Biden and his antagonistic band of evil and incompetent Democrats have done a terrific job of screwing up the nation. It’s bad.
Yet the election scenario hasn’t completely gone away. The more time passes, the louder are the calls to move on from November, 2020, and refocus on the next elections. As last week’s results in the Georgia primary revealed, Trump’s intra-party opposition is getting bolder in its defiance of his endorsements and backing. Is no one “afraid” of Trump any longer?
In a piece titled, “Why heavyweight Republicans no longer fear Trump”, Adam Wrenn and Natalie Allison reported at Politico:
“Few in the party doubt that Trump still maintains an iron grip on his base. They acknowledge the former president’s endorsement in primary contests remains influential. But to many, Trump’s habit of rolling grenades into Republican primaries is getting old, and fears that he might damage the party’s promising prospects for gains this fall appear to be opening a new chapter in the GOP’s relationship with him.
“’We have to be the party of tomorrow, not the party of yesterday,’ [Chris] Christie, who campaigned for Kemp in Georgia, told POLITICO. ‘But more important than that, what we have to decide is: do we want to be the party of me or the party of us? What Donald Trump has advocated is for us to be the ‘party of me,’ that everything has to be about him and about his grievances.’’ …
“Prominent interest groups in the Republican universe also appear to be increasingly comfortable stiff-arming Trump. The Club for Growth, the anti-tax organization headed by David McIntosh, whose super PAC has been one of the top outside spending groups on Senate races this cycle, doubled down on its support for Mandel after Trump endorsed Vance. The Club went so far as to increase its ad buy featuring old clips of Vance disparaging Trump, a decision that reportedly angered the former president and put Trump and McIntosh squarely at odds.”
This mostly balanced Politico article still contained the usual anti-Trump bias, but the gist of it was true. As is his right, Trump has made endorsements in most of the high-profile primary races, and respectable folks who’ve backed other candidates haven’t been frightened off just because the former president decided to come in late. The Politico authors cited the recent Alabama U.S. senate primary -- with Congressman Mo Brooks -- as a characteristic case of where Trump’s un-endorsement failed to tip the scales.
Of course, there was the Peach State GOP primary next door where Trump came up short in nearly every race that drew national scrutiny. Georgia proved -- at least a little bit -- that Trump isn’t a political King Midas whose say so instantly turns everything he touches to gold.
It should be noted that Trump still claims a 100-6 endorsement record this season. Who would reject that degree of success?
Trump also made headlines last week by publicly refuting one significant aspect of former campaign manager and presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway’s new book -- namely, that Conway told him he’d lost the 2020 election (he claims she never said such a thing to him). Picking a public fight with Conway, and some others, is not a good strategy for the outsider first-time politician. Trump has to realize that he still possesses enormous power in the Republican Party but he can’t hit back or jab at everyone and expect people to automatically jump behind him just because he’s Donald Trump.
The common theme here: conservatives and Republicans have moved on from 2020. We still think it’s a valuable topic to keep in the public’s mind, but the overall emphasis has to be placed elsewhere. Keep 2020 alive in terms of continuing to push for elections integrity. Beyond that, drop it.
Again, after all this time and a plethora of evidence came to light, I’m convinced Donald Trump lost the 2020 election -- in terms of the popular vote. Common sense leads to this conclusion, primarily because no amount of scheme concoction, “Mules” and leftist coordination could’ve swung the results in every place simultaneously. There are strong inferences that sinister deeds took place, but on a scale large enough to win everywhere at once?
And why just those six states? Why not in Florida and North Carolina, too? Were the results of the states where Trump won all legitimate -- outside the margin of fraud -- but not the ones that tipped to bumbling Joe and cackling Kamala?
There have been motions to audit the results of every state, and I’m onboard with doing so in an effort to purge voter rolls and give crooks the impression that they’re being watched -- and hopefully punished when caught -- but it’s strange that Trump backers have confined their animus to those states that went the other way this time, including Georgia.
Regardless of the reasons, the optics from Trump’s lack of success in The Peach State are bad. It gives Politico writers license to peck at Trump. That’s not good, either.
I still maintain that Trump lost the election in the latter part of September and in early October, first with his less than inspiring first debate performance (while all states were allowing early mail-in voting) and then with his testing positive for COVID without an acceptable explanation. That’s it. That’s the ballgame! Take your ball-ots and go home!
And now we’re stuck with senile Joe. Talk about disastrous unintended consequences.
Nobody can say for sure whether the doubts over the 2020 election have subsided -- or if they ever will. But it’s clear that Donald Trump isn’t gaining much by continuing to devote a major part of his speeches to the topic. Conservatives would much rather hear about Trump’s plan to re-up energy production or protect God-given liberties that Democrats have assaulted.
Time to move on? Time will tell.
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