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Trump makes coup deniers look silly

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Who are the silliest-looking people in the United States right now? Those GOPers in politics, social media, and media who keep denying that Donald Trump wasn’t really trying to pull off a coup but was seriously concerned about election integrity.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake nails it when he writes:

Key members of the Republican Party have spent the better part of six years pretending Donald Trump wasn’t really doing that. This is often followed by Trump himself confirming that’s precisely what he was doing.

Such is now the case with the plot to get Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally overturn the 2020 election.

Trump released a statement Sunday night asserting not only that Pence could have overturned the election himself but that he should have. The former president did so in the context of some Republicans pushing for a law that would clarify that the vice president doesn’t, in fact, have this power.

Citing Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-Maine) support for the push to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, Trump maintained the effort itself betrayed Pence’s actual authority.

“Actually, 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,” Trump said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”’

Many have noted that is, in effect, a confession that he was trying to pull off a coup to overturn the election, not fixated on election integrity. More of Blake:

Let’s set aside the dodgy logic here; Congress often passes bills to clarify the law, and this one would seem a good target for some clarity, given the stakes and what happened in 2020.

This is precisely the thing Republicans and even Trump’s own lawyers have assured us wasn’t the real goal on Jan. 6 last year — or was even “crazy” or, in Pence’s own words, “un-American.” That’s despite plenty of evidence that it was indeed an option Trump pushed for, and now we have this confirmation.

Before we dive in, it’s worth distinguishing what this is about. There were basically two main options laid out for Pence on Jan. 6:

1.The more drastic one: Pence unilaterally rejecting election results from key states and trying to declare Trump the winner. (At this point, a House with a majority of Republican-controlled delegations would decide the matter, with one vote per delegation.)

2.The supposedly more palatable one: Pence declaring certain states’ results to be in question, and “sending it back to the states” to decide what to do with their electors, effectively buying some time. (The idea was that, because Republicans control many of the Biden-won states in question, those states might send alternate electors and let the House — again, with a majority of GOP-controlled delegations — decide the matter.)

He notes that Trump now makes it clear that he was seeking option 1. At the end of his piece Blake writes:

He’s now reasserting, more than a year later, that that’s the path Pence should have indeed pursued. He’s advocated something so anti-democratic that his own lawyers and vice president have said it was illegal, “crazy” and “un-American.” That could certainly bear on both the Jan. 6 investigation — in that it reinforces Trump’s true motive — and the Electoral Count Act overhaul effort — in that it actually reinforces the need to clarify this.

But more than anything, it renders Republican efforts to suggest this was anything other than an attempted self-coup rather silly. And it also renders any suggestions that he wouldn’t try this kind of thing again even sillier.

However, there is now a fact in American politics: to many facts don’t really matter. It’s more about getting a political mantra and repeating it over and over again despite facts. The question is whether many independent voters are more discerning when it comes to the facts about January 6 and the self-admitted threat that Trump now poses to democractic norms in the U.S. if he regains the White House.

But even if he loses we may be left with one political party operating in a post-fact universe.

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