Donald Trump and Steve Bannon (AP)
Three days before the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump knew he was going to claim victory whether the vote tabulations showed that result or not, according to a New York Times report on Special Counsel Jack Smith's sweeping new court filing that is the most detailed account yet of Trump's efforts to overturn the election results -- and those efforts are at the heart of Smith's attempt to hold Trump accountable in the election-interference case in Washington, D.C., before U.S. Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Under the headline "Trump saw 2020 election results as an obstacle, not an outcome;A court filing offers insight into his thinking and makes it hard to see him accepting another loss," The Times' Jess Bidgood writes at the paper's On Politics newsletter:
Three days before the 2020 election, one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers told a private gathering of his supporters that, no matter what happened on Election Day, the president was going to say he had won.
“He’s going to declare victory,” said the adviser, according to a new court filing by the special counsel investigating Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after that election.
“That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner,” said the adviser, whose name is redacted but who appears from other details to be Stephen Bannon.
The filing is a step in the effort by the special counsel, Jack Smith, to prove that Trump is not immune from prosecution for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
But, one month before Trump is on the ballot again, it also offered new details that paint a chilling picture of the way the former president and current candidate seems to think about elections: as an exercise in which the vote total is entirely beside the point. In his world, adverse election results were an obstacle, not an outcome.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump told family members at one point, according to the filing. “You still have to fight like hell.”
Coming at a time when his allies, including his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, have tried to downplay Trump’s efforts to hold onto power four years ago, the filing offers a glimpse of Trump’s thinking that makes it difficult to imagine him accepting a loss in November.
“Trump is in to the end,” Bannon said shortly after the 2020 election.
In a section that might make some readers reach their "puke point," Bidgood shows that Trump and his Republican allies had little regard for the actual vote totals; they were mainly interested in creating an environment of chaos and confusion that would allow them to steal the election for Trump. Bidgood writes:
The filing sheds new light on the way Trump and his advisers viewed the number of votes he had won as little more than a trifling detail. Trump and his allies have argued that he contested the results in any way he could because he genuinely believed they were fraudulent.
The filing lays out the ways Trump dismissed the real numbers. He sidelined advisers who knew that results, as they were, meant he had not won, and relied instead on the counsel of allies like Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor. He ignored or even threatened swing state Republicans who presented him with inconvenient truths, as when a person who appears to be Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, said the state had found evidence that only two voters who had died had cast ballots — not thousands, as Trump had claimed.
“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said, according to the filing. “That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense.”
The notion of Trump accusing someone else of committing a criminal offense is breathtakingly rich. From The Times report:
As they looked for ways to gum up the electoral-certification process at any level, Trump and his allies knew confusion and conjecture were their most important tools.
“We don’t have the evidence,” a person who appears to be Giuliani told state legislators in Arizona in early December, “but we have lots of theories.”
They also seemed to understand that just the existence of lawsuits would help legitimize Trump’s claims in the minds of the public. That might be why Trump showed so little concern when he was told by an adviser that Giuliani’s false claims of fraud could not be proved in court.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump said.
Jack Smith's new document, and Bidgood's reporting on it, combine to present a classic portrayal of a criminal mind at work. That this criminal happened to still be president of the United States, makes a reasonable mind ask, "How did anybody ever vote for this guy, in 2016 or 2020? Of more import at the moment is "What about the 2024 campaign, which is about to head into its final month? Polling shows Trump has enough support to make the race with Kamala Harris a virtual tie right now. And that raises this question: We know Trump is a one-time convicted felon, the Smith case could make him a two-time convicted felon, he has been adjudicated a rapist in a New York court, he has been sued twice by the same woman (E. Jean Carroll) and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, he has been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the genitals, which effectively was a confession to sexual assault. After having extramarital sex with a porn star (Stormy Daniels), Trump paid hush money to keep her quiet and preserve his political viability.
It's bad enough that anyone voted for this guy the two previous times he ran for president, but how could anyone seriously consider a vote for Trump in 2024, when we know he is a walking, talking crime spree? Are some Americans so dim-witted that they actually believe we need a two-time felon, an adjudicated rapist, a sexual assaulter, a man who had sex with a porn star while his wife was home with an infant. At the heart of all these criminal and civil cases, is a mountain of deceit -- but some people think this guy belongs in the White House. of all places? If you are old enough to vote, how you vote is your business, but I suggest you do us all a favor and stay home on election day, or better yet, show up at the polls and vote for someone who actually is fit to serve - Kamala Harris.
And please, don't try to con the rest of us with any claims that voting for Trump in 2024 was your patriotic duty. You might be an American, but you are not a patriot, in any sense of the word. In fact, your vote for Trump is an act of disrespect -- like spitting on the graves of true patriots (including my father) who risked their lives to protect our democracy.
What about this year's election on November 5, 2024? My prayer is that enough Americans have sufficient common sense to reject Trump (and his wannabe-dictator dreams), ensuring our democracy will survive and thrive well into the future.
Let's return to Jess Bidgood's reporting for her thoughts on that subject:
It was only three days ago that J.D. Vance sought to dismiss Trump’s efforts to overturn the election as a thing of the past. When Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota asked him on the debate stage this week if the election had been stolen, Vance said breezily that he was “focused on the future.”
Trump repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” earlier this week.
And, reading Smith’s court filing now, there are striking parallels between Trump and his allies’ actions in 2020 and certain steps they are taking today — and it’s something Democrats and allies of Vice President Kamala Harris are warning about as they make the case that Trump is a danger to democracy.
“We’re setting ourselves up for another bad election-certification process,” said former Representative Dave Trott of Michigan, a Republican who has endorsed Harris.
The Republican National Committee has started a flurry of lawsuits, some of which are premised on false claims, that voting-rights experts say appear to be part of preparations to contest the results of the 2024 election.
“Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy,” Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections, told my colleagues last week.
At his rallies and in social media posts, Trump has also been promoting false claims that immigrants who are not citizens will vote during the election, echoing the way his false claims about mail-ballot fraud before the 2020 election sowed the seeds of distrust in those results.
“A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English,” he said falsely during his debate with Harris last month.
And, with election results expected to take days in key states, the country could face the same kind of lag in vote-counting that Trump moved to exploit last time by declaring victory right away.
In 2020, Bannon had told the group of supporters that they knew more Republicans would vote on Election Day, while more Democrats would vote by mail, so the ballots counted in the days after Election Day were more likely to break for Joe Biden.
“They’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it,” Bannon said, “that’s our strategy.”