Photo via President of Russia
June 1, 2021, 12:50 pm
Yes, Donald Trump is still hanging on to the belief that he is still somehow president or will recover the position with some kind of election audit or lawsuit or other legal magic, and is reportedly telling close allies that this will occur come August. This is in spite of the many failed lawsuits and rather sad attempts to audit ballot counts in states like Arizona, where a clearly Trump-supporting company with no election audit experience was predictably unable to find anything before backing out of their attempt.
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According to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, Trump currently “expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information).”
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Pretty much the only people left in the world who believe such a thing will happen are Trump himself, the My Pillow guy Mike Lindell, and QAnon conspiracy theorists—though there are unfortunately more of those than you would like to think there are. Regardless, Haberman reports that Trump has been “laser focused” on the election audits that have thus far gone nowhere. Even Michael Flynn seemed to admit that his reinstatement as president would take nothing less that a “Myanmar-style coup” as he suggested that exactly this should happen in the U.S., echoing QAnon sentiments.
The encouragement of a violent coup is predictably making people a little bit nervous less than five months out from something that looked a whole lot like an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Experts on political coups and history have warned that failed coups are often precursors to successful ones. However, some may be reassured by the fact that ever more prominent Republicans are coming out to say that yes, Joe Biden is the real and legitimate president and dismissing Trump’s reinstatement dreams as delusions.
“It’s a delusional fantasy, obviously, but it’s a fantasy about a violent coup – which is really something from an ex-president,” said MSNBC Republican and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush David Frum.
Even Jenna Ellis, who teamed up with Rudy Giuliani to lead the legal team that started all those failed lawsuits trying to overturn the 2020 election, dismissed the idea that Trump will be reinstated as president even as she repeated lies about the whole thing.
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“The election was lawless, six states allowed their delegates to vote by false certifications, but the EC process happened,” Ellis tweeted. “The Constitution has only one process for removal of a sitting president: impeachment and conviction.”
“No, President Trump is not going to be ‘reinstated.’”
Rather than attempting an illegal and insurrectionist action (again) to overturn the will of the people, Republicans are largely focusing their efforts on passing more voter suppression laws, as Ellis emphasizes further down in her thread. Some of these efforts have already been successful, such as the law in Georgia that has been dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0” by civil rights activists, leading a group of over 100 U.S. university professors and political scientists to sign an open letter expressing serious concern about the “deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy.”
“Collectively, these initiatives are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections,” states the letter on these voter suppression laws. “Hence, our entire democracy is now at risk.”
*First Published: June 1, 2021, 12:50 pm
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