Jackie Calmes, Tribune News Service
Did you miss it? On Tuesday, the electoral college made official what we've known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency. Americans could be excused for being unaware that electors met in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia to cast votes. In nearly every presidential election year, the constitutionally required but largely ceremonial event passes with little notice.
The tragic exception, of course, was in 2020: Loser Trump followed weeks of lies and scores of lawsuits alleging election fraud with an illegal scheme creating fake pro-Trump electors in battleground states — a prelude to the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. (Unlike Trump, his accomplices in the scheme are, justly, still being prosecuted.
It's great that the transfer of power is proceeding peacefully, as it always has except at the onset of the Civil War, and, yes, in 2021. Yet you can thank President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he'd be raising another ruckus. Or worse, that there'd be violence. Trump suggested as much, telling Time in April, "If we don't win, you know, it depends." States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that "someone's going to get killed" because of his provocations, and who endured death threats himself, said of the electors' meeting this week, "To be honest, I forgot about it."
As Trump declared in last month's victory speech, "It's time to unite." But as Biden said afterward in congratulating him: "You can't love your country only when you win." Biden — who still hasn't received Trump's acknowledgment of Biden's 2020 victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that "we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. ... It can be trusted, win or lose."
Indeed. And that's why, in this week of the uneventful electoral college vote, Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry's faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — instead of joining him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.
Trump has gone silent about "rigged" elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. "A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!" he posted on election day. City and state officials, including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia's board of elections, reposted Trump's lie to insist there was "absolutely no truth" to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.
Days earlier, Trump claimed, "Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before." He spread a false conspiracy theory of vote stealing in one county, adding, "We caught them cold." No, he hadn't; there were no vote thieves to catch. After Trump won Pennsylvania — surprise! — he clammed up about Democrats' alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?
Even before the election, Trump stifled his talk that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, but only after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates were being shortchanged, appealed to his "yuge" ego: "Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to as soon as they can," one said during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago. "You gotta tell them it's OK." Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020 election. The president-elect continues to lie that he won it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked. What's worse, looking ahead, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.
So it is that he's tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be US attorney general. She was part of "the first wave of the Big Lie," as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to spread disinformation about dead voters and ballot dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump's ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: "We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania."
In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the Jan. 6 committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. (Yet it's former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee's vice chair, that House Republicans now want prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This year, Bondi echoed Trump's falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a leader of a pro-Trump policy institute. And she promised retribution for Trump's indictments: "The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted."
No doubt Bondi as the next attorney general would carry out Trump's calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars. "Is she going to continue ... pushing out the Big Lie?" California's new Democratic senator and Jan. 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC. That was a rhetorical question, of course.
Meanwhile, US Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said “unelected billionaire” Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump brought the Capitol to the brink of a federal government shutdown by making cynical, false claims to further Trump's political agenda.
During a telephone interview Friday afternoon, the New Hampshire Democrat noted that several Granite State projects hung in the balance, including disaster relief funding for the US Coast Guard, farmers and industry along with critical grant money for the state's community health centers. "All of this was driven by an unelected billionaire who was puffing up his chest and an incoming president who didn't want to have the crushing federal debt take place on his watch," Shaheen said. Trump had opposed in part the first state government shutdown ending plan because it didn't include raising the federal debt ceiling.
"President-elect Trump is desperate to have the debt ceiling go up under President Biden's watch, not his own," Shaheen began. "Why? That's because Trump intends to bring (legislation) to Congress making permanent his tax cuts for the 1% super wealthy that estimates are will add at least $4 trillion and as much as $10 trillion to the debt."
Late Friday afternoon, the US House approved the third proposed deal to avert a shutdown. The Senate was expected to pass that bill later Friday night.