https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-was-always-the-planI enjoy the righteous anger. Here's a couple sections:
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Tucker Carlson’s getting a lot of praise for calling B.S. on Powell’s allegations. I’m glad he’s doing it, even if I have problems with his late conversion to Trump-skepticism. I also have issues with acting like Powell is just freelancing here. She and Giuliani are doing Trump’s bidding, so this isn’t just Powell’s deranged theory—it’s the sitting president’s theory, too. We can all laugh or shake our head as Rudy Giuliani spews nonsense to the point where someone would be forgiven for thinking his leaking hair dye was literally bullshit seeping out of his head. That doesn’t change what he’s trying to do.
So Tucker is right when he says, “What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history.” And he’s right that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But he doesn’t close the circle. If our political system were sufficiently sclerotic and decadent that Powell’s con yielded the results she desires, it would be the greatest crime in American history, too. I don’t see the moral difference between stealing the election using cutting-edge Venezuelan algorithms and stealing the election by peddling deranged nonsense about Venezuelan algorithms.
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Which brings me to my final complaint and what really stews my bowels. What’s the end game? Again, I doubt Trump or his criminal accomplices actually believe they’ll succeed. But that’s very different from saying they don’t hold out hope that they still might pull off this caper. What if they did? What if instead of being the incompetent bungling demagogue we know Trump to be, he actually managed to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise cajole enough of the legislators, judges, justices, electors, and various officials required to hand him the presidency despite losing both the electoral college and the popular vote?
What would the country look like in Trump’s purloined second term?
Look, I think “What if this were Obama?” is one of the lowest forms of punditry. But if Barack Obama tried something like this, after losing fair and square to Mitt Romney, we’d be hearing lots of conservatives talking about “Second Amendment remedies.” And as loath as I am to hint, even for rhetorical purposes, that violence is justified, they’d have a point.