On Father’s Day, most dads spend time with their kids, whether they’re children or adults, and enjoy their family. The twice-impeached ex-president who lost the popular vote twice is spending his day in apoplectic rage, spewing anger and bitter gall about the perceived unfairness of a hearing that lays out a criminal conspiracy headed by none other than that same failed ex-president.
Although Trump continues trying to blame the evidence against him on a “partisan” attack, it isn’t landing the way it would have if nearly every witness weren’t a longtime Republicans  or someone Trump himself appointed to their office, including former senior communications advisor Jason Miller, former Attorney General William Barr, and even the White House advisor and eldest daughter of that former president, Ivanka Trump.
Each of those three, along with others who were in Trump’s orbit, have all testified that they knew the election fraud lie was false. If Trump has any witnesses that could exonerate him, he hasn’t sent them forward. Instead, he demanded that every one of them violate their subpoena and refuse to testify.
In an op-ed by Dan Rather, the reporter who has covered every presidential scandal since 1961, he writes that:
‘In the hearings this week, the esteemed Michael Luttig, a retired conservative federal judge, starkly concluded that had Donald Trump been successful in his attempts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, America “would immediately have been plunged into…a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”‘
When the hearings continue, the next will focus on the campaign Trump went on to pressure public officials to overturn the democratically decided presidential election for him. Â One of those officials, Georgia Secretary of State (and Republican) Brad Raffensberger, is scheduled to testify in the next hearing about that pressure, including the phone call Trump references in his tantrum posts.
Raffensberger and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp recorded one of this infamous phone calls, one that featured not only the pressure by Trump to “find” votes but vague threats of legal trouble should they refuse, and released it to the public.
In that “perfect” phone call, Trump told the secretary of state of Georgia, the man in charge of Georgia’s elections:
‘We only lost the state by that number, 11,000 votes, and 779…I just want to find 11,780 votes.’
The truth is that Trump always knew he had lost the election. His longtime advisors went along with the scheme – Bill Barr famously went on television and said that voters needed the recounts and legal objections to continue so they could ensure that their elections were valid as if there was a legitimate reason to believe otherwise, but called Trump “detached from reality” during his depositions for the hearing – but advised him behind closed doors to drop the ridiculous claims.
Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, but his die-hard followers will never, ever believe it. Because of that, democracy teeters on the balance. Dan Rather summed up the situation perfectly when he wrote that:
‘Trump and his confederates — and I choose that word in full recognition of its historical meaning — sought to foment this chaos through the raw exploitation of power and intimidation to nullify Joe Biden’s victory. That a conservative of Judge Luttig’s stature would speak with such unequivocal force, and that it would be echoed by Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and the Republican staffers on the committee, makes clear that there is a delineation in what they are investigating that is based not on politics but on fidelity to the law and America’s democratic principles.’
My thoughts on the existing dangers to American democracy https://t.co/psI0c017OO
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) June 19, 2022
