In the lunatic Powerpoint that Donald Trump's former Chief of Staff and loyal cumrag Mark Meadows turned over to the committee investigating the January 6, 2021 coup attempt, there are two words that completely undo any assertion that there was any real fuckery in the election. Without those two words, these weak-minded, strong-arming fucktoads could have perhaps tried to say that they were more concerned with the integrity of the elections than anything else, that they were standing firm for America's democratic traditions and laws. But there was no way that they were going to be allowed to make the case without them because that's all it really was about and no one was gonna be fuckin' permitted to forget it.
The two words? "Trump wins."
It's not that we all didn't know that the goal was to wipe away the legal election of Joe Biden in favor of another term lurching through shit with Donald fucking Trump. But the Powerpoint file makes clear: they wanted to do anything they could to install Trump, even if it tore the country apart. The short sentence "Trump wins," in all capital letters with two exclamation points after it, appears twice. It's a declaration of purpose and a call to arms against reality.
When I saw that in the goddamned file, I couldn't help but wonder how this could have gone if they hadn't been so stupidly evil, if Trump's morbidly obese ego hadn't put his cheating his way to victory front and center. Would it have given cover to more Republicans to sign up to the Big Lie if they had played it as about election integrity as an end in and of itself? Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and begged for him to conjure out of thin air the exact number of votes for Trump to win the state. Instead, Trump could have merely said he was concerned about the vote there and wanted to assure that Biden's victory was real.
That's how you do shit subversively. You put enough questions out there without the overarching narrative of overturning the election. You give enough cover for Republicans to fuck around with the actual vote count. You give Pence an excuse to slow things down. As another page in the Powerpoint put it in a list of possible actions by the Vice President, "VP Pence delays the decision in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of the all the legal paper ballots." He might have done so if the goal was generic election legitimacy.
I don't know if anything would have gone differently, but "Trump wins" is like walking up to a murder scene and saying, "Oh, I wanted him dead."
And that's the thing about the whole coup attempt (and we can stop being coy about this shit. Call a coup a "coup"): the people behind it weren't fucking around. They just smoked their own stash too much and believed that others in the various levels of government throughout the country would go along with the coup. Or they were riding Trump's mania like a surfboard, hoping they'd catch a sweet wave of Republican officials willing to shitcan democracy for the sake of the ego and potential criminal liability of a fake billionaire and wannabe Mussolini.
The rest of the plan of the gang that couldn't coup straight includes references to a "federalized National Guard" counting paper ballots and the Supreme Court affirming the suspension of the part of the Constitution dealing with the appointment of electors. In other words, Meadows and others believed they had corrupted the government enough that every branch, every area would do its bidding. Or, if not, they would fire, say, Attorney General William Barr and appoint someone who was even more of an anus-licking lackey. Hell, they were advising that Trump declare a "national security emergency" to secure all the ballots so that they might be recounted by their own people.
I'm betting that Trump and his inner circle of syphilitic whores were deranged enough to believe that they could just roll over local election officials, that they could intimidate a lowly voting-system implementation manager like Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, and that others, like Michigan legislators, would be dazzled by having a meeting with the actual Donald Trump, the orange godhead of the GOP. I'm betting they were counting on all that being enough to tilt the scales in their favor.
And when it wasn't enough, well, fuck it. They went full insurrection as a last-ditch effort.
I sincerely don't understand why anyone who in any way supports the Big Lie is allowed anywhere near a decent reporter or news show, let alone run for or stay in office. Who the fuck cares what Josh Hawley has to say about anything if he won't agree that 2020 was a fair election? If your neighbor likes to fuck weasels to death, you shouldn't care about his opinion on lawn maintenance. How could you even ask him? Every time you look at him, you wanna say, "Jesus, there must be ten jizz-covered weasel corpses in your backyard, Josh Hawley. You can keep your perspective on racism to yourself."
I believe that the January 6th committee is moving towards some kind of reckoning. But the longer it takes, the more that our Netflix-fucked attention spans shove the coup attempt back into the delusional recesses of the brain, where weird thoughts like "George W. Bush wasn't that bad" are born. What should be hammered again and again by Democrats is this message: they tried to take an election away. And if they didn't try to do it themselves, they are almost all helping cover up the fact that it happened and it's still happening. Maybe it's time to treat the fucking criminals like the fucking criminals they are.
"Trump wins" needs to stay in the realm of the masturbatory fantasies of the soon-to-be-imprisoned.
