An opinion piece laying out some of the statements from Trump advisors.
https://archive.ph/rF4rc
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.
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 was 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 in mid-November.
A strategy of confusion
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.”
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.
Read the entire article at the link above.
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