The Big Lie Exposed, The Coup Plan Revealed, But Trump Will Run Again

From the election to the insurrection, more revelations
Without even touching on the troubles with Biden's economic plan, the border crisis, the debt celing, it has been a whirlwind couple of weeks with new revelations about the Trump presidency pouring forth from the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book, "Peril", and capped by the comical announcement that Arizona recount #4 had found, contrary to its clear intent, that not only had Biden won (for the 4th time), but that they had found 360 additional votes for him than before.

Where to begin? How about how the lie became The Big Lie?

Two weeks after the election that Donald Trump said was rigged, his lawyers gathered on November 19 at Republican national headquarters to tell us in a widely viewed news conference that voting machines had used software developed in Venezuela that had been jiggered to keep Cesar Chavez in power; that the leadership of Dominion Voting Services, which produced the vote-tabulating machines, had ties to George Soros and the left-wing movement antifa. (Chavez died seven years ago.)

Hair dye trickling down his cheek, Rudy Giuliani exclaimed,

"This is real! It is not made up. It is not, there's nobody here that engages in fantasies…You should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro".

But now comes the discovery that they knew all along they were turning a lie into The Big Lie. In a defamation suit filed by the actual Dominion employee who had done the software coding, an internal White House memo surfaced that had been circulated just days after the election showing the Trump legal team was indeed spewing nonsense.

The memo had been produced by a group who had been charged by the campaign's communication's director to "substantiate or debunk" the Dominion allegations. Debunk was the result. The memo said Dominion had no connection to Smartmatic, the software firm, had no ties to Venezuela, nor antifa, nor Soros, and "The only apparent evidence that votes were being counted in Spain was that Smartmatic is owned by a Spanish person".

Imagining the power that would accrue to them if they were to turn the election upside-down and perpetuate the Trump presidency, the group had fallen in behind Trump, who a week earlier had tweeted the extravagant claim shown here. The lawyers went ahead with the lie which brought down upon them a lawsuit by Dominion asking for billions in damages.

The lie metastasized into a full-blown attempt to overthrow the government. Woodward and Costa described the scene at the White House on January 5, the night before the rally that would boil over into insurrection.

Trump opened a door of the Oval Office to the outside and left it open to the January cold, the authors were told by people who had been in the room that night. Trump wanted to listen to the chants of his supporters in the streets of Washington. “He said to his aides, ‘Listen to them, these are my supporters, they want us to act tomorrow’", Costa related. Woodward mused about Nixon, who, in the closing days of his presidency and probably fuelled by alcohol, took to talking to the portraits of presidents on the White House walls. For Trump it was listening to crowds cheering for him.

Costa said that on that night Steve Bannon was in the Willard Hotel blocks away with Giuliani and others in a "war-room type meeting" and Bannon had said to Trump, "It’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib". The next day would see an attempt to do that precisely when thousands would assault the Capitol and 147 Republicans would vote against certification of the states' electoral counts for the presidency.

Hearing himself quoted in a Woodward/Costa interview, Bannon confirmed he had said that.

“Yeah, because [of] his legitimacy. Let's look at The Economist's poll…42% of the American people, four two…think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately".

For Bannon, that 42% of the American people have swallowed the Big Lie, never mind the true election results, is justification for us to take down Biden. Showing his concern for the good of the country, Bannon went on to say about the Biden administration,

"It killed itself. Just look at what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. Okay? But we told you from the very beginning, just expose it, just expose it, never back down, never give up and this thing will implode.”

The "Peril" authors had unearthed a memo that laid out just how Trump and his plotters were to kill the Biden presidency in its crib. By conservative legal scholar John Eastman, once a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, the memo gives Vice President Pence a script to follow:

Pence is to open and accept the vote counts of the states in their alphabetical order starting therefore with Alabama. He next gets to Arizona but says, because he has received multiple slates of electors, he'll defer action on Arizona until all the other states have been tallied. He holds up six other key states for the same reason and when counting is otherwise complete declares that no electors "can be deemed validly appointed in those states" which leaves only the counts of those states that were undisputed. Remembering that their counts are known — it's two months past the election — their counts of their 454 electors are 232 for Trump and 222 for Biden. Trump is therefore declared re-elected.

Stop right there, Democrats will "howl" (Eastman's word). A count of 270 — just more than half of all electors — is required.

Pence is told to accede, because the 12th Amendment stipulates that "the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President" with "the representation from each state having one vote" irrespective of the hugely disparate population counts that have evolved since 1787. The delegations from Republican states outnumber counterparts from Democratic states, 26 to 24. Trump is now constitutionally re-elected.

This page laid out close to that same scenario, leading to the House choosing the president, in July of 2020 in "To Stay in Power Will He Steal the Election?" We don't know how seriously Trump and his retinue — Giuliani, Bannon, Meadows, Powell — pursued this plan for a coup d'état to overthrow the government but it is unmistakable that 147 Republicans in Congress voted against certification attempting to throw the decision to the House where Trump would be declared president for a second term.

Former Vice President Mike Pence was declared something of a hero for refusing to overstep the role the Constitution prescribes. The 12th Amendment says he is only to "open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted". But "Peril" tells us of Pence consulting with Dan Quayle, hoping Quayle might come up with some way to help Pence help Trump pull off his caper — two Hoosier ex-vice presidents deciding the fate of the nation. "You don't know the position I'm in", said Pence. Quayle replied,

"I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That's all you do. You have no power."

When Pence pressed, elder statesman Quayle took away Pence's hero garlands, countering with,

"Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away.”

Trump had the crowds in mind as we saw the night before. Congress should not be allowed to certify the election of Joe Biden in the January 6 ritual. His believers know nothing other than what he says and he urged them to come to Washington. "Be there, will be wild!", he tweeted. And they came. He would incite the huge crowd to march on the Capitol to disrupt the certification process,

That was the backdrop of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley's phone calls to his China counterpart Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army. The insurrection had been just two days before his second call to assure China that we would not attack them. China, observing Trump, feared that he just might.

And yet we listen to the Republican reaction, best described as comatose, numbly making no allowance for what ought to be done when the country faces a possible national security threat posed by an unstable president:

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, accusing Milley of "treasonous" and "reckless behavior" and "a dangerous precedent", urged Biden to fire him for "basically ignoring the Constitution deciding he's going to call a potential adversary and an enemy [sic] of the United States and collude with them".

Florida Representative Matt Gaetz on Newsmax thought "Gen. Milley actually placed himself above the president of the United States. I think these are very dangerous people. I think they need to be removed from their positions of power."

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show: "Gen. Milley — he needs to resign. If he doesn't resign, he needs to be fired. This is dangerous territory that we're in and there's got to be accountability."

Milley's actions drew the first headlines when Woodward's and Costa's book was released. "While these calls to Gen. Li were held on a top secret back channel, they were not secret", Costa could say on the basis of the extensive interviews they say were conducted for the book. Milley "was reading people in throughout the national military and security community", Costa said. Army Col. Dave Butler, Milley's spokesman, said the chairman's calls with the Chinese were routine and staffed by other agencies. Sources told Fox News that 15 people were on the teleconferences between the two generals. “The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs regularly communicates with chiefs of defense across the world, including with China and Russia", Butler said. "These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict." Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper also worked back channels with the Chinese to assure them the U.S. would not launch a nuclear strike, according to Axios.

Rubio wrote in a letter to Biden, "It threatens to tear apart our nation’s longstanding principle of civilian control of the military", but it is a single civilian in control of the military. What should be done when that individual is in mental decline?

There was Sean Hannity telling Fox News audiences that Milley was taking "away the president's ability to do his job as commander in chief, one of those jobs would be, perhaps, to launch a nuclear weapon". The Trump cheerleader ironically added, "Our republic is designed to prevent a military and political coup".

Trump said he had no intention of attacking China and called Milley a "dumbass" and a "nutcase". With no hint of self-awareness of his own actions, Trump said Milley "should be tried for treason".

Moments after Donald Trump took the inaugural oath in 2017, we published "Psychiatrists Say Trump 'Dangerous' and 'Untreatable'” and that followed a couple of similar articles still earlier, during the 2016 campaign. A year later we ran "One Finger on the Button? Are We Crazy?" about the frightfully dangerous policy that the single person who sits in the Oval Office can decide to annihilate civilization. But in this country nothing is ever fixed, least of all the Constitution and its rigid adherence that endangers us.

Trump continues in a world of his own creation, untethered from reality by narcissism so advanced that his psyche could not tolerate a loss. He won the election, he insists repeatedly, not just won but "won by a lot".

He had expected reinstatement as president in August. Mike Lindell, the "pillow guy", played to his ego, assuring him of that. That the date came and went did not deliver Trump from his mania. In September, ten months after the election, he said on right-wing Gateway Pundit, "We won the election by a lot, and it's a terrible thing, and I do believe they're going to decertify this election". Decertification is Trump's invention. No such process exists.

His response to the 4th Arizona recount?

"Huge findings in Arizona! However, the Fake News Media is already trying to 'call it' again for Biden before actually looking at the facts — just like they did in November! The audit has uncovered significant and undeniable evidence of FRAUD!"

Trump's every utterance aims to discredit the democratic electoral process. "Until we know how and why this happened, our Elections will never be secure", he added about Arizona's secure electoral process. "This is a major criminal event and should be investigated by the Attorney General immediately." So that any loss can be branded a fraud, he spreads distrust of every election in his bid to destroy democracy. The day before the California election, he said, "Does anybody really believe the California Recall Election isn't rigged?". Gavin Newsom got twice the votes of his nearest opponent. But how many of his devoted know that?

The defeated president refuses to believe that Georgia went for Biden. "There's no way we lost Georgia. There's no way", Trump said at a rally there. In a notorious phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State, Trump asked him to find to find enough votes to win the state. "So what are we going to do here, folks?", he said to Brad Raffensperger, "I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break." The state counted its votes three times, by hand and by machine, with the results the same.

Despite that earning him a criminal investigation by the state's attorney general for tampering with the state's electoral processes, Trump has just written to Raffensperger, now over 11 months after the election", asking him to "start the process of decertifying the election…and announce the true winner". The Georgia Star News, a pro-Trump website had averred on August 30 that the chain of custody was violated in predominately Black DeKalb County. Rather than immediately, ballots picked up from a drop box were not transferred until the next day. Trump called the procedural slip-up "large scale Voter Fraud" that demanded that all 43,000 ballots should be nullified, giving him the win. Raffensperger held him off again, advising that a procedure violation would not invalidate the ballots themselves.

The September 18 protest in D.C. against the detention and arraignment of January 6 insurrectionists turned out to be a dud, fortunately. Trump preferred golf at his Bedminster club. But just before came a statement showing no second thoughts about the attack on the government.

"Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election. In addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!"

The House select committee investigating January 6 just subpoenaed four key figures in the Trump White House. Trump has said he will cite “executive privilege to prevent their testifying. "There’s no such thing as a former president’s executive privilege,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the investigative committee who also teaches constitutional law. President Biden might have the authority to invoke executive privilege for a former president, but is disinclined. He views the attack on the Capitol as “a dark stain on our country’s history” and is “deeply committed to ensuring that something like that can never happen again, and he supports a thorough investigation.”

Costa described the Woodward interview technique as spending lots of time with an interviewee and more than once. Sooner or later the subject would come around to whether Trump will run again. The authors say that most are convinced he will. Trump is buoyed by the difficulties Biden is having — the Afghanistan pull-out debacle, the thousands at the border, his fractious party destroying his agenda — and sees Republicans taking the House and Senate in 2022, bolstered by restrictive voting laws and extreme gerrymandering. He still is in total control of the party; other aspirants will scatter however late he chooses to announce.

Brad Parscale, who engineered Trump's successful social media campaign in 2016 and ran his 2020 digital campaign for a time, says Trump's motive for running this time is "revenge".