We have moved into the unforeseen, political self-cannibalization phase of the 2020 election cycle. Republican infighting over the merits of President Trump’s rigged election theories has escalated, and at the worst possible time, as the party is tasked with holding on to the two remaining Senate seats.
The two Republicans vying for those seats, Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, have called on Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to resign. They put out a statement last Monday saying that he “failed to deliver honest and transparent elections.”
The president’s going theory had been that Democrats, who simply can’t be trusted, cheated, illegally manufactured thousands of votes in close states, threw out Trump votes, gave Republican voters faulty pens, and shut out Republican observers all the while. Now, Raffensperger is a Republican in Name Only, accused of presiding over and protecting the same, for having disputed that Georgia was stolen from Trump. Can one be a Trump Supporter in Name Only?
“And both senators and I are all unhappy about the potential outcome for our president,” Raffensperger said in a statement, pushing back against Perdue and Loeffler. More than that, Raffensperger provided his voter fraud bona fides, referring in his official capacity to metro Atlanta as if it were his problem child. “We have put a monitor in at Fulton County … one of our longtime problem Democrat-run counties,” he also said in the statement. None of that matters. Things are not going Trump’s way, you see, and Raffensperger is unfaithful.
It’s gotten worse since last Monday’s exchange of statements. Trump appointed Republican Rep. Doug Collins to be the special envoy to Georgia’s supposedly rigged election services. He has nothing else to do; the Congress is a lame duck. And he has nothing to lose — he already lost his bid for Loeffler’s Senate seat — in declaring that the election was stolen and that “Georgians deserve a free and open process, and they will get one.”
Now, Raffensperger is hitting back harder, unfortunately, in Trumpian fashion. “Failed candidate Doug Collins is a liar — but what’s new?” he wrote on Facebook. Trump has used that same construction a thousand times. It’s all so stupid.
One might say, “Of course he defends Georgia’s elections. It’s his rear end on the line!” Very well, but remember that Trump was saying what he is saying now as far back as the spring. The notion that he needed to lose a close election first in order to cast suspicion over it is not a notion worth considering. Trump drew up this template long ago. He prewrote this election outcome.
If Raffensperger is an irredeemable RINO, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich must be too. “There is no evidence, there are no facts that would lead anyone to believe that the election results will change,” Brnovich said last Wednesday on Fox Business. He said further, “If indeed there was some great conspiracy, it apparently didn’t work,” referring to the numerous seats in his state that flipped from Democrat to Republican. “People split their ticket.”
Raffensberger’s observation was similar. “President Trump received more votes than any other presidential candidate in Georgia history, and Senator Perdue received more votes than the president,” he said. Enough Republican voters wanted Republicans in office but didn’t want Trump that they saw gains while he lost.
That is what Trump has to reckon with. So long as external forces did something to him, so long as he acts as if he had no agency at all, he doesn’t have to consider what he might have done differently.
