President Trump is not an authoritarian or a dictator, and his claims that he really won the election are not a coup attempt.
No. Trump is a con man, and his insistence that he can overturn the election is his latest grift.
This isn’t a coup. It’s a fundraising attempt. Trump and Rudy Giuliani are tapping their marks for cash one last time so they can pay off campaign debts and line their pockets.
How many texts and emails has the Trump campaign sent you in the past week begging for money? They claim that with just a little more cash, they can finally produce the proof of a voter fraud conspiracy so massive that it overturned the election in four states. It’s been a constant barrage: 50 fundraising emails and about 30 fundraising text messages in the five days after Election Day, according to one count.
They call it the “Election Defense Task Force,” and many liberal commentators have their hair on fire, screaming that Trump is trying to steal the election. But he’s not, and he won’t.
Trump’s absurd and baseless claims about a stolen election are not best remedied by making absurd statements and baseless claims about a “coup”.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) November 10, 2020
There is no way Trump could gain enough votes or disqualify enough Biden votes in order to win. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson and Trump-supporting conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt have both made it clear that while there certainly was fraud (there always is), it was not on anywhere near the scale needed to flip the closest states.
The @realDonaldTrump needs to present a colorable theory of how to get from where he is (a less than 1% probability of winning Electoral College) to something closer. I follow it closely and am eager to hear that theory but it hasn’t been laid or much less presented in a court.
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) November 10, 2020
So, why is Trump saying he can win if he fights hard enough? It’s impossible to know for sure. But from what we know about the man and about his attorney Rudy Giuliani the safest bet is that this is another con from a lifelong con man, and once again, Trump’s supporters are the marks.
Team Trump is telling its supporters that if they donate, they can secure a Trump victory. That’s not going to happen. Instead, if you donate, you will be paying Trump’s old unpaid bills and also his millionaire lawyers.
If you fund his “Election Defense Task Force,” you are funding a PAC called “Save America,” Trump’s recount account, the Republican National Committee’s main account, and the RNC’s legal proceedings and headquarters accounts. Ultimately, where does all this money end up? Much of it will pay Trump’s lawyers, which include Giuliani. It will also be used to retire campaign debt, according to the “task force’s” fine print (since revised).
And when the RNC and the Trump campaign spend money, an inordinate amount of it goes directly to Trump.
Giuliani, Trump’s lead lawyer on recounts, has a history of milking Trump for millions. “Giuliani has bragged to other Trump allies that he has made millions of dollars since the president took office,” the Washington Post reported.
When Trump deployed Giuliani to do his foreign policy in Ukraine, Revolving-Door Rudy was simultaneously getting paid by overseas clients with interests that collided with U.S. interests and Trump interests. Giuliani was getting paid by foreign clients while telling Trump he was doing his bidding.
Now, Giuliani is working as Trump’s lawyer while telling Trump’s supporters that he’s trying to win an election. But lawyers don’t need to win a case in order to get paid. They just need to hope their client has deep pockets, and these Trump fundraising appeals are making sure of that.
This is the entire story of the Trump presidency. The media and the Democrats all cry that a wicked authoritarian is going to take away our democracy and our freedoms forcibly. Instead, a con man is going to get thousands to line his pockets willingly.
