President Donald Trump and his supporters are actively working to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden in order to keep him in power. Their despicable plot revolves around disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Americans, in large part voters of color, on the grounds that their ballots were fraudulent. Their claims have been thoroughly demolished in legal proceedings finding no evidence that widespread fraud took place, because it did not. Top federal, state, and local officials have said that there were no election security problems, and the president’s legal team at times has acknowledged in court that no fraud took place.
But the Trumpist effort to steal the election in broad daylight doesn’t rely on whether its arguments can stand up to scrutiny in court. It is a fundamentally political effort. Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team are propagating a shambling mass of lies and deranged conspiracy theories about the election. They hope to create enough confusion to give cover to Republican officials at the local, state, and federal level working to subvert the will of the electorate and use their power to preserve the president’s. They want local and state Republican officials to refuse to certify election results in key states that Trump lost, in hopes that either Republican state legislators in those states will overturn the results and hand the president a victory or the election is thrown to Congress, where Republicans can grant him a second term.
This seditious conspiracy to shatter American democracy relies on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble: The facts are not on their side, and the law is not on their side, but the Trumpist media is on their side, so they are banging the table as loudly as they can. They will likely fail — in no small part because the key players in the would-be coup are incompetent loons — but the cost America pays will be high nevertheless. Continue reading.
