Just how sick is the Republican Trump cult? Let’s examine this seriously.
Start with the recent Georgia election office FBI raid (bizarrely including National Intelligence Director Gabbard). They seized tons of previously recounted 2020 ballots — still struggling to somehow prove the “stolen election” lie.
Actually believing that shit. Twisting their whole political consciousness.
Contentious issues and divergent viewpoints are endemic to politics. Like the 1950s red panic — vastly overblown. McCarthy never had a list of 205 State Department communists, he lied. Yet the U.S. Communist party was real, numbering tens of thousands (mostly a holdover from the ’30s). And there really was spying, that’s partly how the Soviets got the A-bomb. Also, the red scare included fear of homosexuals, five thousand said to be in government! Ridiculous — there must have been vastly more.
The point is that such past political controversies were grounded in at least some factual reality. Today it’s very different.
Trump had said he’d accept the 2020 election outcome — only if he won. A shockingly brazen rupture from American tradition. And he laid the groundwork by talking vote fraud, with no shred of evidence, even before the election. Afterwards, that went ballistic.
Obviously he was crying vote fraud simply because his bloated ego could not face losing. That’s all it ever was. Only a fool can’t see that.
After all, Trump didn’t have a Washington-like rep for honesty. Establishing himself as the lyingest politician ever, a pathological, brobdingnagian liar.
Trump did mount something like 60 lawsuits challenging the election. All thrown out of court, many by Republican judges, including his own appointees. Even his toady Attorney General Barr told him it was all nonsense. Not a single Biden vote was ever found fraudulent. In Arizona, MAGA partisans engaged a dubious election “audit” by a sketchy outfit — that wound up finding more Biden votes.
Yet, like a dog chewing a bone, Republicans can’t let go of this “stolen election” obsession.
Careful analysis shows that with modern voting technology, U.S. ballot fraud has been exceedingly rare. A key pillar of MAGA fraud claims is supposed non-citizen voting. This is connected with “replacement theory” — accusing Democrats of somehow swapping out real American voters with foreigners. As if that’s even possible. Anyhow, non-citizens voting is illegal, and why would they endanger their status by trying? It all makes no sense.
Yet the regime continues to exploit their “vote fraud” fraud as a pretext to actually mess with elections via voter suppression — making it harder for Democrats to vote.
And why was the “stolen election” lie so widely swallowed? Because Trump cultists just couldn’t believe he lost; that voters actually preferred Biden. That’s how divorced from reality they’d become: blind to all Trump’s awfulness that so repelled so many Americans. (If anything defies belief, it’s how many still voted for him.)
The great irony is that there was a big conspiracy to steal the 2020 election — by Trump! Not even hidden. He phoned Georgia’s Secretary of State pressuring him to “find” 11,780 more votes. The effort even included fake electors. Lawyers Giuliani, Eastman, Powell and others got penalties for their role in the fraud scheme. And of course Trump openly incited followers to attack the Capitol on January 6, to stop the proceedings finalizing the election. In that violent attempted coup, people were killed.
This whole sorry saga was a body blow to American democracy. All the election fraud nonsense, however specious, has undermined public confidence in voting. And for over two centuries we could pride ourselves on the always peaceful transfer of power. Trump destroyed that.
Attorney General Bondi claims she’s depoliticized the Justice Department while blatantly doing the exact opposite. Yesterday before Congress she screamed that Trump is “the greatest president in American history.” This is U.S. politics gone off the deep end. This is very very sick.
