Donald Trump is very mad with his former stooge Mike Pence because he has it in his thick skull that Pence could’ve overturned the election and kept Trump president. He’ll hold this grudge forever like some racist elephant.
Trump’s so pissed, in fact, that he wants to throw his former vice president under the January 6 commission bus. He argued in his latest typically unhinged statement that the commission should investigate why Pence didn’t overturn the election when he had the chance. He said Pence “could have sent the votes back to various legislators for reassessment after so much fraud and irregularities were found.” In reality, although Trump whined like a baby and said the election was rigged against him, no one actually found any fraud or irregularities, aside from the election tampering and coercion Trump himself pulled. Folks are currently investigating his own fraudulent efforts remain in office.
Pence, who can count, understood that Trump’s "elite strike force” had filed 62 state and federal lawsuits and lost 61. (Their one “victory” had no impact on the outcome in Pennsylvania.) The Trump campaign lost in the Supreme Court and in state courts in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. The Trump campaign demanded and lost recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia. They lost everywhere, man
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So, under these circumstances, Pence just wasn’t comfortable cancelling democracy. Maybe if the score had been 60 to 2.
Trump has seized on proposed changes to the Electoral Count Act as evidence that Pence did have the power to unilaterally overturn the election. Sunday, he wrote: “What they are saying is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away.” Wrong. Congress is hoping to clarify that the vice president just opens up envelopes and reads the results like an award show presenter. They can’t just declare, “This is bullshit! Elizabeth Olsen deserves the Emmy more than Kate Winslet! We need a reassessment.” Sure, someone could try and it would create a tense moment. But if they explicitly tell future award show presenters, “You can’t reject the winners. That’s not how this works,” they’re not admitting that someonecould’ve done so previously.
You don’t want to spend too much time examining Trump’s thought processes, but you have to wonder why he thinks Pence wouldn’t reject Biden’s victory if it were in any way legal. He’s not like filibuster humpers Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. He would've acted in his own self-interest. (Pence has laughably tried to compare the filibuster — a Senate rule — to the electoral vote certification.)
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Also, if the vice president can reject election results they don’t like, why didn’t Biden, who was vice president at the time, overturn Trump’s victory in 2017 and spare us all this nightmare. Al Gore also ignored his god-like VP powers in 2001 and accepted the Supreme Court handing Florida to George W. Bush.
The danger with Trump is focusing more on how bone-dead stupid he is and ignoring the existential threat he still poses. He freely admits that he wanted the election overturned, despite what his defense claimed during his second-annual impeachment trial, and he chillingly declares that if Pence had rejected the results, “there would have been no ‘January 6’ as we know it!”
We all know the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol weren’t Antifa or aggressive tourists, but Trump now fully owns them as his personal mob squad. Sticking our heads in the sand won’t make this fascist go away.
[ Washington Post ]
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Every day I thank heave that TFG is so abysmally stupid. Imagine the harm he could have done with a brain.
Come the 2024 election and Trump wins.
Does Kamala Harris have the right to cancel the election?
Yes, yes, I know. Silly question.