Another Perfect Call

Junkie

I guess I really am a political “junkie”.  I read the Mueller report, cover to cover, and I watched almost every minute of Mueller’s testimony (poor man).  And I read the “whistleblower’s report” and sat through every step of the impeachment process.  I can’t say I started as an “unbiased” juror of the Trump Presidency, but I can definitely say that I found him guilty on every count.

So it was with some reluctance and fatigue that I faced losing thirty minutes of my life, reading another transcript.  This time it was of another “perfect call”, made to the Georgia Secretary of State.  I would have just listened to it, but I knew that way led to somnambulism.  So I sat and read through every “um” and misquoted figure.

My first impression is the same that one that I got from the President’s conversation with Zelensky of Ukraine:  how can this be the PRESIDENT of the United States, the “leader” of the free world?  The dialog wasn’t diplomatic; it wasn’t even professional. Mario Puzo should have written it for The Godfather movie.  There clearly was the gangster, “…I’m making an offer you can’t refuse,” tone throughout.

Intent 

Did President Trump commit a crime in this conversation?  The answer is a firm “maybe”.  As Michael Cohen testified so long ago, Donald Trump never actually says what he’ll do: he just implies it.  So when he told the Georgia Secretary of State that he could “be in big trouble” it implied a threat but didn’t technically make one.

At best, the conversation was that of a whiny loser begging for the counters to change the count.  At worst, it was the President of the United States threatening a state official to get him to “rig” an election.  But after wading through the entire conversation, I’d think there’s a third conclusion that gets Trump “off the criminal hook”.

I think Donald Trump believes everything that his sycophants are telling him.  He believes that the Democrats pulled off the greatest election fraud in American history.  And he also believes those Democrats were stupid enough to rig the election for Biden, but failed to bring the rest of the Democratic ticket along. 

Feeding a Delusion

We always knew that the Trump staff scheduled rallies to make the President “feel better”.  We know he needed the adoration of the crowd, the MAGA hats and “lock her up” chants.  So it isn’t a stretch to believe that Trump thinks that since thousands came to his rallies, he should have won the election.  His thought process:  it was true in 2016, why wouldn’t it be true today. (That wasn’t true then either).

And that’s scary in so many ways.  It means that Trump’s thinking completely discounts the pandemic’s impact on the election.  He compared his rallies to Biden’s, when Biden specifically determined NOT to do rallies in order to control the spread of COVID.  Sure the President ridiculed the “drive-in” rallies of the Democrats, but that should have been just rhetoric.  But it wasn’t:  Trump really didn’t get it.  He thought that Biden made a political decision that he couldn’t compete in drawing the crowds, and so didn’t try.  

Worse than Criminal

Donald Trump is the President of a United States that is losing over 3000 citizens a day to COVID.  That’s more than a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11, every day.  But when it came to the campaign, Trump operated like it wasn’t even happening.  And now we can see that wasn’t just a tactical decision, it was a denial of reality.  And (sorry Trump haters) it wasn’t a cold blooded “I don’t give a damn”: it was a real belief that those deaths weren’t important, and maybe not even happening.

In the last days of Watergate back in the summer of 1974, Richard Nixon was drinking heavily.  He wandered the halls of the White House, talking to the portraits of deceased Presidents.  He told them how unfair the nation was, and how all “the good” he could do was now gone.  His Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, made sure that any military orders from the White House came through his office first.  The executive staff made sure that a deluded or drunk President couldn’t start a war.

Donald Trump believes:  he believes that he won the election, he believes that the Republicans in Georgia and Arizona and the other states are cheating for Biden, he believes that COVID should be ignored.  The most powerful man in the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, the leader of the free world isn’t a criminal:  he’s delusional.  And his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is right there along with him, encouraging the delusion.  Absolute Trump loyalists recently replaced the civilian leadership of the Defense Department.

That shouldn’t make anyone feel better.