The Trump Crime Family is Stealing this Election. The Media is Exposing Their Schemes.
On November 7, the dust settled on the Presidential election that lasted four days. Within twenty minutes, ABC, CNN, Fox, NBC, MSNBC, Associated Press and CBS, which were responsible for observing the election, announced at around 11:24 PM EST that the Democratic presidential candidate, 77-year-old Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won the election and would become the 46th President of the United States. Meanwhile, the incumbent president, facing a grim pandemic of more than 100,000 confirmed cases a day and no beds in several state’s hospitals, is venting his frustrations on his own golf course.
That man, Donald Trump, who had left America and the international community in divide, hate, mendacity and violence, had nearly disintegrated American democracy and gravely damaged the country’s image, was not pleased with the news that he is about to step down.
Trump, who had always been good at portraying a strongman political image and has repeatedly expressed his admiration for authoritarians such as Saddam, Putin and Duterte, did not want to admit that he had lost the election. In addition to falsely declaring himself the winner in the early hours of November 4, before the arrival of a large number of mail-in ballots, he held a press conference the next day, believing that what he was about to release was his desperate comeback. In this conference, he unapologetically told reporters that there is collective fraud in the mail-in ballots, the Republican election observers were denied access to the scene, he will start lawsuits against the results of the swing states, and arrogantly claimed that if the government only counted “legal votes”, he could easily win the election.
It was really not a new trick for him: back in 2016, when he lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote, he claimed that his popular vote defeat was due to massive fraud, and he even took the trouble to form an investigative team for it, but the whole thing ended up going nowhere, with no voter fraud conclusion reached.
MSNBC chose to cut the feed and use the data to correct Trump’s mistake; ABC, CBS, and NBC switched to other programs. CNN host Jake Tapper was filled with grief and anger, saying, “What a sad night for the United States of America to hear their president say that, to falsely accuse people of trying to steal the election, to try to attack democracy that way with his feast of falsehoods. lie after lie about the election being stolen.” Fox News Channel also interrupted Trump’s press conference, citing lack of evidence to support his claims.
Tapper’s grief and anger is far more powerful and convincing than Trump’s hypocritical denial. Trump’s conspiracy theories about himself had so far offered no reasonable or valid evidence, yet were often falsified by the facts. Multiple state secretaries of state — many of whom are members of the Republican Party that Trump supported during the election process — have repeatedly stated that massive fraudulent voting with the ability to shift electoral votes are completely non-existent. In an effort to coerce Philadelphia officials who were counting the votes to give results favorable to Trump, the Philadelphia city commissioner’s office responsible for overseeing this election received repeated phone calls threatening to kill election workers en masse. Republican election observers, on the other hand, were never barred from the site — the only people barred were a tiny fraction of those who walked into the wrong precinct to oversee the election.
And in Nevada, one of the most hotly contested counties of the election, a middle-aged man wearing a white “BBQ, Beer, Freedom” tank top abruptly interrupted a press conference with the Clark County registrar to yell at the microphone. “The Biden crime family is stealing this election, the media is covering it up,” he vociferously claimed. However, he was ignored by both the reporters and registrars in attendance, and the agitated Trump supporter could only leave the microphone in dismay after a few dry hollers. The scene, which was wildly circulated online, became the underlying motive of Trump and his right-wing political coalition’s refusal to acknowledge the election results — there were many of his supporters whose opinions coincided with his own theories.
Not coincidentally, throughout the duration of the election and up until now, there have been large numbers of Trump supporters in cities in swing states like Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Detroit, waving “TRUMP 2020” flags and demanding “stop the steal” in a strident manner. Many of them are affiliated with far-right ideological groups that Trump repeatedly refused to condemn.
Of course, not all Republican politicians want to act like their president. In Congress, four Republican senators and six Republican congressmen congratulated Biden on his victory. However, these did not include Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, nor any of the members of Trump’s cabinet; believing they could steal the day, they remained steadfast in their support of Trump’s corrosion of the democratic system. In a press conference with reporters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even said directly that “there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” echoing Trump’s assertion that he had already declared himself the winner of the election. Though it’s unclear, but Pompeo might have been trying to make a joke, but it’s unlike that Trump will receive it thusly.
Many people who know who the real loser of the election is have responded forcefully to Trump’s outrageous rhetoric. In addition to celebrating the end of four absurd years in the streets publicly and jubilantly, they overwhelmed the “election fraud” hotline and website set up by the Trump team with countless prank phone calls and uploads. The Trump team’s tactics failed in less than a few days after they were launched, and Fox News, which the right wing had been so enthralled with, directly cut off the White House press secretary’s feed, which she rambled that the Democrats “welcomed election fraud.”
Trump intends to relaunch legal channels, continuing the paranoid belief in the “illegal voting” propaganda, believing that it can give his political forces enough power to overturn the actual results of the election. On the one hand, his legal team in a number of states launched a barrage of lawsuits, in order to ask for a recount and deny the results of the election, on the other hand, the various swing states of the Republican political leaders are responsible for overseeing the election of the Secretary of State pressure, demand that if the offices cannot quickly count the “legal votes,” they need to quickly resign.
However, the biggest trouble comes from Trump’s attorney general, called by many in the media as Trump’s “real personal lawyer,” William Barr.
On November 10, Barr gave the Justice Department’s federal prosecutors permission to pursue allegations of “vote tabulation irregularities” in certain cases before the certification of election results was completed, saying that he had already done so “under certain specific circumstances.” The head of the Justice Department’s Election Crimes Division resigned in protest, angered by Barr’s overstepping of his authority by pursuing the cases without evidence. The act of this believer in the “Unitary Executive Theory (an extreme legal theory that holds that Article II of the United States Constitution gives the President unlimited executive power)” has broken a tacit agreement that the United States Department of Justice has maintained since its inception: that it does not use its power to side with political parties in elections.
However, Barr could not accept defeat when he was close to a leader that espoused his views. In a memo to federal prosecutors and the director of the FBI, he made it clear that he believed in and supported the grand conspiracy theory of “illegal voting”. In this memo, he wrote:
“now that the voting has concluded, it is imperative that the American people can trust that our elections were conducted in such a way that the outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters.”
In the absence of any substantive allegations or evidence, the true purpose of such a text is simply to spread unsubstantiated fear and to create a false sense of panic.
Despite the best efforts of the Barr Justice Department and various state Republican legislatures to discredit the mail-in ballots before the election and package them as a Democratic plot to steal the election, these challenges have been largely ineffective in the courts. Numerous arguments that “mail-in voting leads to fraud” have been rejected by judges in various states as pure speculation.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that the Republican Party has largely thrown out all legal challenges of this kind, which were promoted by Democratic political leaders to avoid the risk of infection, there were numerous conspiracy theories and disinformation attempts on and after Election Day to demonize the direction of these ballots, and even claimed that ballots favoring Trump were shredded, invalidated, or burned. This false panic, along with the acts of Biden gaining an advantage in swing states by mailing in ballots and Barr launching an investigation, connected a complete chain of logic in the minds of countless conspiracy theory members and became an unimpeachable established fact.
The cloud of suspicion won’t last long, however; just today, a rumor that was being spread by a lot of right-wing media collapsed.
It followed the signing of an affidavit by a U.S. Postal Service worker alleging ballot tampering and fraud. In the affidavit, the postal worker claimed that postal supervisory officials in Pennsylvania orchestrated a scheme to mail replacement ballots in violation of regulations after the election. According to the House Oversight Committee, he has now retracted his allegations and claims he came to lie because he was paid nearly $136,000 to do so. The money came from a fundraising website that packaged him as a whistle blower, and the bulk of the donations came from members who were big Trump supporters.
The Trump administration, a bulky and massive machine still having the control despite losing the election, is doing its best in every way to prevent its political opponent from smoothly taking office as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021. Trump’s political appointee, General Services Administration Director Emily Murphy, has so far refused to officially recognize Biden as president-elect, further destabilizing the transition of power in the United States.
Four years ago, within hours of the mail-in ballots not yet fully arriving, but with Trump’s electoral votes establishing a likely victory, top Democrats in Congress, Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton and then-President Obama were both quick to acknowledge the results and led Trump into the White House a day later to begin transition procedures. Twelve years ago, after learning of Obama’s victory, Republican President George W. Bush, as well as Obama’s rival, John McCain, were quick to acknowledge the legal outcome of the election, and Bush 43 also took the Obamas on a tour of the White House within days. This time, Bush congratulated Biden’s victory as well.
Undaunted by Trump and Republican delays, Biden has continued to push ahead with the quickly initiated transition. On November 9, he announced a coronavirus task force of 13 medical experts with management experience, including a whistleblower who had been fired because he was frustrated with Trump’s slowing of the epidemic. The severity of COVID-19 did not stop with Biden’s victory: in North Dakota, the state where the pandemic is spreading fastest, the governor is requiring COVID-19 positive but asymptomatic nurses to also work because there are not enough medical care and beds; in Texas, where the death toll is skyrocketing, some places even have funeral homes that can no longer fit the dead.
Compared to the Trump camp, which insists on holding largely maskless, not socially distant rallies in the midst of a severe health crisis and publicly abused its scientific team, Biden’s camp has demanded from the beginning that the federal government do more in the face of the pandemic, including increasing the frequency and number of tests, increasing investment in vaccine research and development, requiring every state governor to strictly enforce the need to wear a mask, and requiring the FDA to introduce a more evidence-based and clear guidance report.
As we discuss this presidential election, many are confused as to whether the election fraud that was enough to change the outcome was real, and why the Trump team is so intent on doing everything in their power not to lose the presidency.
The first question is easy to answer: in addition to the aforementioned challenges against the legitimacy of the ballot and the fact that almost all of the information had been proven to be bogus, the New York Times called all of the Secretary of State’s offices in all of the states on November 10 to get a straight answer from them. With the exception of Texas (which Trump won by a huge margin), which didn’t answer, all the other states made it clear: while there were few cases of illegal or duplicate voting, and a few technical glitches and math errors, there was no widespread fraud in any of the states. Ballots are now being routinely inspected in all states for them to officially ascertain the results.
This has been affirmed by two different international organizations: a 28-member delegation from the Organization of American States, an international observer group invited by the Trump administration, released a preliminary report that directly states that there was no fraud in the election and criticizes the Trump administration’s dangerous attempts to frame the legitimacy of the election. In the report, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe similarly stated that it had found no evidence to support the allegations of systemic misconduct and condemned Trump’s erratic rhetoric as contributing to the undermining of American democracy.
On the other hand, Trump’s business landscape has been crumbling with a series of investigative reports. It has been documented that Deutsche Bank, which had gone out of its way to give wild grants to Trump, who had already been blackballed by Wall Street at the time, is planning to cut ties with Trump altogether. Currently, the bank has about $340 million in outstanding loans to the Trump Group; the three loans are secured by Trump’s properties, which began coming due in two years, are currently being paid for, and are personally guaranteed by the president. Over the years, Deutsche Bank has lent Trump nearly $2 billion.
Trump’s campaign also sent a series of emails to supporters about setting up an election defense fund, even though Trump is already a billionaire who financed his own campaign. In many of the emails, there were disclaimers claiming that half of any donations would go to the campaign’s general election debt settlement, while the other half would go to the campaign’s recount account. Another Trump-affiliated political action committee, which is raising money separately, said that 40 percent of the cost donations would go to the Republican National Committee; the RNC is currently extremely financially burdened by Trump losing the election.
During the Q&A, Biden found Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the election “an embarrassment” and further opened his attempts to unite the divide to difficulties. Though steady, Biden is not leaving no stone unturned: if the Trump administration does not formalize Biden’s victory and deny him access to key government resources, Biden’s transition team will consider legal action to require the General Services Administration to enforce the court order. And while Trump is furious and trying to do everything he can to salvage his screw-up, Biden has already accepted congratulations from a large number of world leaders and the United Nations and is getting serious about dealing with the epidemic, and can’t wait until January 20, when he will be officially inaugurated as the President of the United States.
