An hour-long weekend phone call between President Donald Trump and Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, underscores how badly detached Trump is from the facts and how desperate he is to overturn a legitimate election that didn’t go his way. There’s a good possibility he broke the law by appearing to threaten Raffensperger with legal retaliation for not coming up with the 11,780 votes Trump pleaded for him to manipulate in the president’s favor.
Defenders of democracy don’t behave this way. But desperate despots do. Trump’s delusional insistence that he actually won the Georgia election by 400,000 votes, as opposed to the 11,779 he lost by, suggests he no longer has a grip on reality.
“I mean, you know, and I didn’t lose the state, Brad. People have been saying that it was the highest vote ever. There was no way,” Trump told Raffensperger, alleging without proof that 5,000 dead people voted and that thousands of out-of-state residents cast votes in Georgia. No amount of facts offered by Raffensperger would persuade Trump to back away from demanding the announcement of a new, manipulated vote count.
IN THE WAKE of this frantic attempt to subvert democracy, how can 50 to 140 Republican members of the House and 12 senators, including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, seriously justify their ongoing attempt to hand Trump an election victory he did not earn? To support Trump’s megalomania is to participate in an effective pre-inaugural coup.
Trump has put American democracy in grave peril. Last month, he entertained a proposal to deploy U.S. troops to conduct a revote of the Nov. 3 election. Martial law, in other words.
“There is no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of an American election,” Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said in a joint statement.
The idea was so alarming that all 10 former secretaries of defense — a Republican-dominated group that includes former Vice President Dick Cheney — jointly signed a brief op-ed in The Washington Post Sunday warning civilian and military officials of “grave consequences,” including possible criminal penalties, for carrying out any such presidential order.
“Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the Electoral College has voted,” the op-ed stated. “The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the Electoral College votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.”
The mere fact that they felt compelled to issue such a statement is an indication of the precarious state of American democracy. For Hawley and his fellow Republicans to support Trump’s bid to subvert democracy is alarming at best, and treasonous at worst.
