John McCormack kissing the ring of the GOPe.
Posted on 05/27/2023 4:52:00 PM PDT by Ennis85
Elections are supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part of his record.
In his much-hyped return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in 2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology for ordering him to flout the Constitution and the federal law governing the counting of Electoral College votes. He recast his December 2022 endorsement of the “termination” of the Constitution when there is voter fraud as “cherishing” the Constitution. He said that if elected in 2024, he would pardon many of those convicted for illegally storming the Capitol, and he even left open the possibility of pardoning leaders of the far-right extremist group the Proud Boys who were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for spearheading the attack on the Capitol.
But two and a half years after the 2020 election, the voter-fraud theories on which the “stop the steal” campaign was based look weaker than ever.
In November 2020, Trump and his allies eventually settled on the wild theory that Dominion voting machines had been programmed to “say that a Biden vote counts as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75,” as Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said at the time. “The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the entire election.” On January 6, in the speech he delivered near the White House, Trump promoted the Dominion conspiracy theory. But by then it had already been disproved by a hand recount in Georgia. Each voter used a touch screen to print out a paper ballot that stated in plain text the names of the candidates a voter selected. During the hand recount, with bipartisan election observers present, human beings read those ballots and sorted them into “Trump” and “Biden” piles. There was no way for those people to count a Trump or a Biden paper ballot as anything less or more than one vote. In other words, if there had been a systemic problem with the machine-counting of the ballots, the hand recount would have caught it.
In April of this year, the Dominion conspiracy theory received a final blow with the resolution of the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The truth is an absolute defense against defamation, but the network settled with Dominion — after the process of legal discovery — for $787 million. Trump is unlikely to repeat the specific claims he made about Dominion while in office because he would open himself up to civil liability as a private citizen; he is likely protected from any personal liability for defamatory statements made while president. That’s one reason why he has shifted to a different voter-fraud theory.
“If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump told Kaitlan Collins, the moderator of the CNN town hall. This is the claim at the center of the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, released in May 2022, and it is a claim you’re likely to hear a lot more from the 2024 GOP front-runner over the course of the next year.
True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, claims that by purchasing geo-location cellphone-tracking data it uncovered an elaborate scheme to steal the election. The scheme involved at least 2,000 people — the “mules” — who trafficked fraudulent ballots from liberal nonprofits to ballot drop boxes in the five key states that decided the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. True the Vote says it has obtained 4 million minutes — nearly 70,000 hours — of surveillance video of the drop boxes; the documentary shows a number of people dropping off a handful of ballots. “What you’re seeing is a crime: These are fraudulent votes,” D’Souza tells viewers as surveillance video shows one person dropping off a handful of ballots.
According to True the Vote, its criteria for detecting each of the “2,000 mules” is a cellphone that over the course of the month leading up to the election made at least five visits near a nonprofit and ten visits near different drop boxes. The organization estimates that the 2,000 mules made an average of 38 trips each to drop boxes, depositing an average of five ballots per trip, for a total of 380,000 fraudulent votes spread across the five states. In the documentary, D’Souza then runs the numbers: Without these ballots, Biden would still have won Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump would have narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College by eking out wins in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
For a conspiracy so vast, the outcome seems a little underwhelming: Subtracting the alleged voter fraud facilitated by the supposed 2,000 mules would have given Trump a victory of just one-third of one percentage point in Arizona and Georgia, and the conspirators would not have been confident in advance that a small number of votes would deliver the election to Biden. But D’Souza has a solution to bolster the theory: more mules. “No one thinks that our 2,000 mules were the only mules trafficking illegal votes,” he tells viewers. Taking D’Souza up on this proposition, True the Vote then lowers the threshold for determining who was a mule, counting cellphones that were detected near a minimum of five drop boxes rather than the original ten. “This revealed a huge upsurge in the number of mules, from 2,000 to 54,000 mules,” D’Souza says. Voilà! Without the 54,000 mules, Trump would have handily won each of the five states.
D’Souza told me he was too busy to grant an interview for this article, and a spokesman for True the Vote also did not accept an interview request. So I can’t be sure why the movie is not called “54,000 Mules,” but I suspect it is because that title would have made the biggest flaws in the conspiracy theory even more glaring.
Despite the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D’Souza and True the Vote have publicly named precisely none of them. Trump’s political operation, flush with tens of millions of dollars, has identified no mules. Republican attorneys general in Arizona and Georgia, desperate for Trump’s support, have been able to expose not a single mule. According to True the Vote’s anonymous sources, the mules are criminals working for $10 a ballot. To evade public detection over the past three years, these 54,000 petty criminals must somehow have maintained operational security and secrecy that would put SEAL Team Six to shame.
Despite the 70,000 hours of surveillance footage, the documentary does not actually show a single person making more than one trip to a ballot drop box. If there were 54,000 mules — or even just 2,000 — shouldn’t the footage have detected hundreds of them?
In the year since the documentary was released, some individuals shown dropping off a handful of ballots at a single drop box have been publicly identified by their vehicles’ license plates, but there is no evidence that they acted illegally. The Georgia secretary of state’s office investigated three cases and dismissed each of them. In one case, an investigator tracked down a man seen in the film dropping off five ballots and was able to interview him and confirm by consulting voter data that the ballots had been cast legally by his family members. It is permitted in Georgia and many states to drop off the ballots of family members.
According to 2000 Mules, five left-leaning nonprofits filled out a million or more fraudulent ballots. For these ballots to count, the nonprofits would have needed to identify hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote and to know in advance that they would not actually cast ballots. Tellingly, the documentary and True the Vote have not publicly named these nonprofits.
In August 2022, D’Souza was set to publish a book based on 2000 Mules in which he did name the nonprofits, but his publisher, Regnery, claiming a “publishing error,” pulled the book from stores before it went on sale. “True the Vote had no participation in this book, and has no knowledge of its contents,” the group said in a statement to NPR at the time. “This includes any allegations of activities of any specific organizations made in the book. We made no such allegations.” When Regnery released D’Souza’s book two months later, the passage naming the nonprofits had been excised, according to an NPR reporter who had obtained a copy of the first version of the book.
What about the geo-location data? Even if the purported data show exactly what True the Vote claims, it does not prove a conspiracy. It’s entirely plausible that Uber drivers or deliverymen would come within 100 feet of ten different drop boxes over the course of a month. FactCheck.org reported that activists and politicians in some states held get-out-the-vote rallies at multiple drop-box locations. “The premise that if you go by a box, five boxes, or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr said in testimony to the January 6 Committee. The geo-location data “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation observed in September 2021 that, because there was no “other kind of evidence that connects these cell phones to ballot harvesting,” it lacked probable cause to open an investigation or get a search warrant to obtain the geo-location cellphone data: “For example, there are no statements of witnesses and no names of any potential defendants to interview. Saliently, it has been stated that there is ‘a source’ that can validate ballot-harvesting. Despite repeated requests that source has not been provided to either the GBI or to the FBI.”
The conspiracy at the heart of 2000 Mules looks even more preposterous when one examines the election results in Pennsylvania. The movie claims that mules were responsible for 275,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia alone (under the theory that there were only 2,000 mules in the five states). That would mean that nearly half of all votes cast for Biden in Philadelphia — and a majority of all mail ballots — were fraudulent, without anyone’s having detected the widespread fraud in real time. In 2020, Donald Trump’s margin in Philadelphia actually increased by nearly four percentage points over 2016, when Pennsylvania did not allow ballot drop boxes. While Trump carried Pennsylvania in 2016, he managed to lose it in 2020 because Biden did better than Hillary Clinton with white voters statewide.
In the end, the 2020 election was as simple as that. Trump improved his performance among minority voters nationwide but lost the Electoral College by sliding among white voters. It was not fraudulent vote dumps in America’s inner cities that cost him the election.
Those who understand why the 2020 conspiracy theories are false may find it exhausting to present the truth, fact by fact, but that task is important. Trump’s insistence on debunked voter-fraud claims has major implications for the country’s present and its future.
In ordinary circumstances, Trump’s loss in 2020 would be politically poisonous for him as he sought the 2024 GOP nomination. But by making it an article of faith among many GOP activists and voters that he really did win the 2020 election, he has made it harder for his rivals to attack him over his biggest vulnerabilities. But by indulging Trump’s voter-fraud conspiracies, another GOP candidate will seem weak and submissive — as if aiming to be Trump’s running mate instead of president. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes — that Trump really did lose in 2020 to a doddering old man who campaigned from his basement — is probably the wiser course, but a successful Republican challenger would find a way to make that point without sounding like a resistance warrior on MSNBC.
Trump’s obsession with 2020 could matter far beyond the 2024 primary, of course. The 2022 midterm results showed that swing voters were repelled by candidates who embraced Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign; but if he wins the nomination and the general election, January 6 would serve as a litmus test for cabinet secretaries and lower-level Trump-administration staffers. Anyone who served in the first Trump administration and was publicly horrified by January 6 — an official such as Attorney General Bill Barr — would be persona non grata in a second Trump administration. Few officials who were horrified by Trump’s postelection conduct would want to serve under Trump anyway. A second Trump administration would have to scrape the very bottom of the staffing barrel.
And if he becomes the 2024 GOP nominee and loses again, it’s reasonable to assume that Trump would again try to overturn the election result through extraordinary measures. True, the system held in 2020, and a reform of the Electoral Count Act that passed in 2022 reinforced it. Trump would not have the powers of a sitting president. And in the states that will very likely decide the 2024 election, Trump will not have lackeys serving as governor, who play a key role in certifying Electoral College results. Republican Brian Kemp, who stood up to Trump’s efforts to overturn the Electoral College results in 2020, will still hold the governorship in Georgia, while Democrats will hold that post in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. But even a failed attempt — a second one, no less — by Trump and other political elites to overturn the decision of the voters would undermine the foundation of our democratic republic.
None of this, of course, is a future the country or the Republican Party is destined to face if enough primary voters simply choose to rally behind one other Republican presidential candidate.
Wow. I never thought of that aspect of it. Trump hasn't done a single thing to secure any elections going forward!
Well, they better kick him out of office then, no telling what kind of damage he might do to our "democracy" while he holds the levers of power.
Hahaha...so says you.
We apparently have people frequenting this website who are all onboard with that slop.
Don’t worry. The dead man voting, cheat by mail and voting machines will work again. The idea that voting will stop the March to Marxism is delusional.
Nothing but dipshit rinos.
I love your simplictic answer. I hope you thinking the elections are not corrupt makes you feel better.
Probably right, I've seen no evidence of any changes anywhere, Arizona in 2022 is perfect proof.
And I have no idea why Trump supporters think his "mean tweets" will have changed anything since 2020. Tweets carry even less power than a sternly worded letter, and we know what those are actually worth, too. He needs a serious kick in the rear or get out of the way so someone else can try.
How did you get that I thought elections were not corrupt?
When I called that article “slop” that people on this very website were onboard with, including some on this thread, doesn’t that indicate I recognize the stupidity and ignorance of those who agree with it?
The same dipshit RINOs we see on this thread who think Biden really got 81 million valid votes.
You know what? You’re a blithering idiot, McCormack. Shove it. You stupid pansies at “National Review” should have plenty of practice at that.
Go away McCorSmack. Who needs ye?
Despite the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D’Souza and True the Vote have publicly named precisely none of them.I can't name your mother, either. Doesn't matter, the evidence stands. But thanks for playing.
Also see #20 for the type of evidence that "does not exist".
What happened in 2020 is not going to go away.
81 million “votes”....Riiiight
They stole the election!
With all the evidence to confirm
Now look at it another way too
Biden has a firm of dimentia..doesnt know where he is and is in no shape to manage anything.
Trump had a great term.. you saying biden could beat Trump??
Never!!!
The states were cheating made a difference were Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. There was cheating in Pennsylvania, but Democrats may have carried the state without it. The writer should have focused on the other three states.
I wouldn’t get hung up on the 81 million votes though. Lots more votes, legitimate and fraudulent, were cast in the 2020 election than in earlier elections. Biden had a 12 million boe margin in California, and it’s not impossible that he actually did win the nationwide popular vote.
Blah blah blah. Vichy Republicans ignore the illegal changes to election laws that allowed millions of fraudulent mail in votes to be counted. How does NR even still exist?
**Elections are supposed to be about the future,**
That has been said by young people who want
to get on to the next thing.
Finish the job.. stop the rigging before you go on..
Going on means you give in to the crime.
Yeah, I really trust DeSantis to lead us into the future, NOT!!!!
Stolen on media and social media bias at the very least. Probably stolen on all fronts.
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