Conservative support for Donald Trump seems to break three ways. There are the ‘Never Trumpers’, those who find the man and his policies far too upsetting to their manners, morals and (less often) policy preferences to ever support. There are the ‘Forever Trumpers’, who view him as the second coming, and even an improvement on the first, in not going in for sandal wearing or long hippy hair and speaking the Queen’s English (Queens, New York that is).
And then there is the sensible tribe to which I belong, the ‘Sometimes Trumpers’. To us he is at once a vain, ignorant, bullshitter and the best defence against the predations of the Left over the last four years. A man whose personal morals would shame a sewer rat (he ‘allegedly’ bonked a Playboy model and a porn star soon after his wife gave birth to her first child) who at the same time is unquestionably right on the big issues – immigration, China, the economic downside of globalization and the evils of wokedom. We criticize his missteps (his numerous firings, premature troop withdrawals, incoherent Covid briefings, inane Twitter fights) while praising his roaring (pre-Covid) economy and unconventional but successful approach to foreign policy (Israel secure, Iran cowed, China challenged).
In short, sure, he’s a dick, but he’s our dick.
When the man was elected in 2016, some lefty types went in for literally baying at the moon in distress. Then the craftier among them came up with the Russian collusion myth to explain away his electoral victory – it wasn’t the will of the people you see, it was Russian hackers on Facebook wot done it. Utter bollocks of course and massively insulting to those folk who voted for Trump.
Unfortunately now a depressing number of conservatives are going down the same road. They are claiming a conspiracy of democrat voter fraud involving thousands of people and the cooperation of two voting machine companies has resulted in a ‘stolen election’.
Serious, serious claims. Needing serious, serious evidence. So let’s take a look.
Trump is legally challenging the results of six ‘battleground’ states he lost by relatively slim margins: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. None of them look like going his way, and even if they did the result would not be decisive. For example Trump lost in Michigan by about 150,000 votes and yet the discrepancies that have been found affect only 387 votes. Similarly in Pennsylvania, Trump lost by 80,000, but his legal team are only focusing on signature and vote ‘correction’ issues which involve fewer votes than this.
The Trump lawyers headed by Rudy Giuliani (last seen being outwitted by Borat) held a press conference where they made a series of wild allegations that importantly, they are not repeating in court. The most extreme of which is lawyer Sidney Powell’s claim that both most widely used voting machine companies (Smartmatic and Dominon) fixed the result. She maintains there was a nationwide plan to subvert the election involving an ‘algorithm’ and that these companies are financed by ‘communist money’. When in doubt, blame the commies.
Turns out the truth of this is relatively easy to ascertain; each machine produces a paper copy of every vote that can be compared with the machine total. This was done in Georgia and the machines were found to only be out by single digits per county.
Trump friendly, Tucker Carlson offered to devote his entire week’s programming to Ms Powell and her ‘evidence’. She declined.
We need to do a bit of Occam’s razoring here. Is the following likely?
- There was a massive inter-state effort to subvert the election involving the collusion of thousands (including many Republican officials)
- Two competing voting companies agreed to it
- This was carried out in such a way that it resulted in a slim Biden win rather than the ‘blue wave’ predicted by media. If you are going to rig an election, why not do it convincingly?
28 states use Dominion voting systems including Ohio and Florida which Trump won comfortably.
- The Presidential race was rigged, but the Senate and House of Representative races were left untouched. If Biden is to do anything substantial as president, he needs the legislatures to be blue.
Or alternatively, Biden simply got more votes than Trump.
This is not to say there was no fraud. There almost certainly was. But was it beyond the usual chicanery that a country with 153 million voters across fifty states with very different voting rules inevitably allows for? Probably a bit, given the depth of Trump hatred and the form democrats have for dodgy election business (for instance the 1960 Kennedy vote in Chicago). But not enough to overturn the result.
And Trump knows this.
Unfortunately his more rabid fans don’t
Giuliani and team’s legal challenges and drip-fed ‘evidence’ are like a slow striptease in front of an audience of premature ejaculators. Each revelation is met with hysterics that this is the proof needed that the whole thing was a scam. If they really had hard evidence of the worst case of election fraud in U.S history wouldn’t they be moving with more sense of urgency?
What Trump and Giuliani are really doing here is creating a counter-myth. Just like the Russkies-did-it Democrats, they are trying to keep their followers sweet and laying blame for their loss on something other than the American voter.
It’s a fundamentally insincere attempt to protect brand Trump. Yes, the media ‘rigged’ the election in treating Trump as an ‘illegitimate’ president for four years and were biased beyond belief (the burying of the Hunter Biden story was unconscionable ) but what Trump’s doing now although not illegal is just as ruinous to the spirit of democracy.
In the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup tells Tom Cruise’s smartarse liberal lawyer that he ‘can’t handle the truth’. Jessup, like all conservatives, prides himself on being able to face unpalatable truths – in this case, the necessity for a strong military. So the question for conservative ‘forever Trumpers’ is: can you handle the truth?