“In the two years prior to election day, Trump repeatedly announced that Democrats were going to try to rig the 2020 election against him. He said it at rallies. He said it in interviews and tweets. If we take him at his word, he knew perfectly well an attempt was coming. And so I ask: What was Team Trump’s fraud prevention plan? What did he actually do to reduce the chances of ballot-stuffing, voting machine manipulation, fraudulent mail-in ballots, Chinese election-tampering, etc.? From what anyone can tell, the answer is: nothing. It should have pushed for the abolition of computerized vote-counting machines altogether, since their vulnerability to error has been amply documented for decades....A Trump shambolic legal team” was “headed by a hard-drinking, disorganized, near-octogenarian Rudy Giuliani, who has no expertise in election law….Add to all this…an odd passivity underneath all the vituperative language.”…
2/9/21, “Tal Bachman: A Quick Post-Mortem,” The Bachman Beat, via SteynOnline
“It’s been a tough few months for conservatives, but I figure it’s time we try to get clarity on where we are, why we’re here, and where we might go in the future. Yes, it will sting, but what’s the alternative?…
As nightmarish as it is to contemplate it, the Biden presidency appears to be the proxy regime of a high-speed Asian superpower right now transforming the United States into its vassal state. It’s running the same play in other countries, too….
As it happens, the governing philosophy of these people [Communist China] amounts to a noxious stew of plutocracy, technocracy, totalitarianism, Orwellian pig-snobbery, oligarchy, racism, amorality, corruption, crony capitalism, feudalism/serfdom, “social credit”, repression, imperialist dictatorship, fascism, communism, and probably three or four other lousy things I can’t think of right now.
Trump was the bulwark against this. He ran against it in 2016….But whatever his virtues, I suggest it is time for conservatives to fully accept the fact that Trump failed at the Power Game.
Yes, he faced extraordinary opposition. Intelligence agencies tried to frame him. Media concocted fabrications about him. His own administration officials regularly planted damaging leaks about him, or even undermined him publicly. Military leaders joined in insubordination against his legal orders to quash riots. The House of Representatives impeached him on blatantly specious grounds. Establishment Republicans—overtly and covertly—thwarted him whenever possible. Beltway goon George Conway decided it was more important to trash Trump than save his own marriage and provide a healthy environment for his children. Public figures pretended to decapitate him, and mocked his wife and son. Mob pressure targeted members of his administration for career ruin, intimidation and harassment, and social media “disappearance” in perpetuity.
And yet, as the soccer players say, Trump scored a lot of “own-goals”. There’s no way around that. And if conservatives ever hope to get back into the Power Game again, they need to know exactly what mistakes Trump made, and then, never repeat them.
Here are just a few.
Trump hired people he should never have hired, then didn’t fire them when he should have. Sessions. Bolton. Nielsen. Barr. Tillerson. Mattis. Milley. Esper. Scaramucci. Omarosa. Haley. Pruitt. Wray. He even seriously considered hiring the soulless snake Mitt Romney as his secretary of state. On and on the list could go. Trump began by claiming he was only going to hire “the best people”. In the end, it was Trump himself who concluded he only hired the worst people, since he so often went on social media to trash the very people he had hired.
That in so doing Trump only made himself look foolish and incompetent to undecided and swing voters didn’t seem to occur to him….
Trump also wasted hours yakking with inveterate Trump-hater Bob Woodward in the vain hope he could charm Woodward into liking him. He did the same with Chris Wallace and other Trump-hating reporters. He never seemed able to accept that no matter what he did, the DC Swamp Monsters were always going to hate his guts. He was an outsider, he wanted to blow up their cozy little world, he was a Republican, and the old Dale Carnegie techniques about charming people into liking you are just never going to work on DC Swamp Monsters. So why bother trying? Why bother boosting the credibility of media goons who are just going to go out and turn more voters against you?
It might be objected that these are fairly superficial errors, so let me turn to something more serious.
In the two years prior to election day, Trump repeatedly announced that Democrats were going to try to rig the 2020 election against him. He said it at rallies. He said it in interviews and tweets. If we take him at his word, he knew perfectly well an attempt was coming.
And so I ask: What was Team Trump’s fraud prevention plan? What did he actually do to reduce the chances of ballot-stuffing, voting machine manipulation, fraudulent mail-in ballots, Chinese election-tampering, etc.?
From what anyone can tell, the answer is: nothing. There was no fraud prevention plan.
Most conservatives continue to give Trump a pass on this on grounds it is the states, not the federal government, who run the election process. But the fact is, Trump and the RNC could easily have helped coordinate anti-fraud measures among Republican Party machines (and Republican governors and state legislatures) in swing states. Yet they didn’t.
That effort could have, and should have, coordinated legislative and lawfare swing state countermeasures against last minute changes to voting processes designed to make fraud easier. It should have initiated legislative efforts to make voting methods more secure overall. It should have sent RNC money to anti-fraud squads. It should have organized and scheduled designated poll watchers (and local media) at high-risk polling stations. It should have pushed for the abolition of computerized vote-counting machines altogether, since their vulnerability to error has been amply documented for decades. It should have organized state law enforcement supervision at all polling stations. It should have organized federal law enforcement attendance at various polling stations under the rationale they were enforcing federal voting and civil rights laws.
And last, but not least: Trump should have had a top-tier team of legal experts standing by on election night to challenge any dubious results, just in case that national anti-fraud effort failed.
But he didn’t organize anything like that. Instead, as noted, he spent his time trying to get Bob Woodward and Chris Wallace to like him, rambling for hours at Covid press conferences, and, in short, all sorts of other things which just were not as important as ensuring the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
For Trump supporters, maybe the most heartbreaking thing of all was that even with that dereliction of duty, Trump could conceivably still have salvaged victory. Overstock.com billionaire Patrick Byrne has written an entirely plausible, and perfectly frustrating, account of his own attempts to ensure election integrity after election day. What he found was a shambolic Trump legal team headed by a hard-drinking, disorganized, near-octogenarian Rudy Giuliani, who has no expertise in election law, and whose legal strategies were never going to induce a court to overturn a state vote count.
And even when he could still have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, Trump declined to replace Giuliani, declined to follow Byrne’s sensible suggestions, and declined to fire his own personal lawyer, Pat Cipollone, who by various accounts, held Trump in contempt, leaked constantly, and did everything possible to obstruct Trump’s hopes of winning re-election.
It never seemed to occur to Trump that if, as he claimed, he had proof hostile foreign entities had conspired with domestic traitors to rig the election, that constituted an act of war meriting military response. We are left to wonder whether that proof actually existed. If it did, Trump failed in his first duty of protecting America. If it didn’t, he wasn’t telling the truth during an emotionally fraught, high-stakes time.
Add to all this Trump’s inability to forge a long-term leadership coalition of competent, like-minded people united under his direction; his inability to govern systematically(as opposed to erratically or instinctively); his inability to moderate his coarse communication-style so as to be more “presidential”;
and an odd passivity underneath all the vituperative language,
and you have a guy who possessed some extraordinary skills...just not the extraordinary skills needed to remain in power.
Now:
Against all this chaos, Team Biden ran a highly organized, highly strategized, highly effective campaign to win. Most Trump supporters believe that effort included outcome-changing fraud; but the point is, if it did, Team Biden got away with it—and one big reason they got away with it is because of what we’ve already discussed: Team Trump, both before and after the election, didn’t do what it could have and should have to enforce the law and ensure election integrity. They let their guard down. The Democrats saw it, and exploited that advantage. Of course they did. That’s what they do. That’s why they win.
And now, the weird alliance of leftist rabble and plutocrats—foreign and domestic—runs everything. They don’t just control
the entire United States military,
the White House,
Senate, and
the House: They control
he universities. They control
the non-profits. They control
big business. They control
the public schools. They control
Wall Street. They control
the movie studios, most of
mainstream media,
the book publishing houses, and
the cable companies. They control
Big Tech and social media. They control
the newspapers,
the magazines, and
the musicians. They control every, or
nearly every, single institution of influence
in the entire country.
And they control them all, because for years, decades, they have outplayed conservatives in a million different ways in the Power Game. Trump’s recent unforced errors represent only the latest spate of conservative own-goals. Conservatives have been getting their faces kicked in for a century. Every conservative “victory” for the last century has amounted to nothing more than a speed bump during a relentless slide leftward toward national dissolution.
And so, they control everything, and while the outward trappings of democracy (like elections) are currently being left in place to deceive a largely somnolent public, the real shadow rulers have seized more power than ever.
What can patriots do to retake their beloved nation? That’s a big question, so I’ll take it up next time.”
© 2021 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.
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Comment: Trump was destined to fail because of one word: Ivanka. Her fluffiness’s deeply held views were the exact opposite of Trump voters’ deeply held views. Jared doesn’t count because he wouldn’t have been de facto president if he hadn’t been Ivanka’s husband, though Pres. Trump hated hearing that, insisted that globalist scammer Kushner was doing a fantastic job. Jared made clear his contempt for 2016 Trump voters and their wishes, considered them trailer park trash who would vote for Trump no matter what. Amazingly, many aren’t aware that Jared’s business accepted a $250 million credit line from Soros in 2015.
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