I watched the horror show that was Donald Trump’s address to his base Thursday night, the one not covered by ABC and NBC on their traditional over-the-air networks (the ones fewer and fewer people watch, anyway).
It was a predictably appalling display because it showed the depths to which the president will sink to rig the midterms and save his base of absolute power. Six years after the 2020 General Election, he still pretends he got screwed out of his rightful victory despite every court in the land finding his claim lacked even the thinnest degree of merit.
The math is pretty clear.
Trump lost to Joe Biden by seven million votes. Even if every one of the 280,000 noncitizens Trump says exist voted against him, that still leaves him roughly 6.72 million short. The picture he painted on Thursday of a grand conspiracy by China and The Deep State to steal the 2020 Election was pretty much the same mumbo-jumbo, just with a perplexingly bizarre foreign twist.
None of the supposed evidence of his getting screwed that was released after his speech changes a thing. Everyone knows it, Trump included. It’s just a game he’s playing to build a leverage case going forward. That, at the end of the day, is what all of this gratuitous grievance is about.
There were two especially frightful undercurrents to the speech that need be pointed out, one right there on the surface and the other strategically hidden.
The first was the utter conviction with which Trump spoke in his barrage of bogus babble. This is perhaps the secret of his support from the MAGA base. His shamelessness comes across to the sane as the speechifying equivalent of a Cyclospora infection. But to his people, he is the pied piper.
There is never any actual evidence. Trump relies on bold assertions and unwavering confidence to mask the absence of facts. Leave it to a raging sociopath who is expert at sounding like he believes his own bull to connect with the stupid, the brainwashed, the vulnerable. He spews it loudly and repeatedly, and somehow that’s taken by them as indisputable.
But beyond that is the second and more disturbing aspect to the speech: Trump’s motivation for doing it in the first place. It had nothing to do with actual safety and security concerns in our voting; it’s about what he will do to stay in power. The answer is anything and everything, including eroding confidence in the legitimacy of our elections and destroying the system itself.
In short, Thursday’s speech was a declaration of war on the midterms. Trump knows the polls are showing a Republican bloodbath in the House at the very least and possibly even a loss in the Senate. So, his address was solely about establishing a pretext to dispute and potentially overturn otherwise free and fair elections.
He knows at this point that he probably isn’t going to get his voter-suppressing SAVE America Act passed. If his party tanks the midterms, there’s a chance he gets impeached a third time. And there’s a fresh look at his involvement in the Epstein Files. And all of his stock and crypto deals are suddenly closely examined under a microscope.
Plus, we see how the man reacts to losing. He can’t handle it. He will deny., deny, deny, then deny some more – shifting blame to those who would wish him ill. He has no understanding of, nor appetite for, accepting a loss with grace and humility and moving on.
So we have determined that there is nothing Trump is above to keep his presidential gravy train running. The speculation is all pretty much out there but bears repeating, since democracy itself is about to face its sternest test in many a generation.
His trying to cancel the midterms outright is one option, of course. But I doubt Trump could get away with it even from those in his own party. I don’t see how he could manufacture a national emergency serious enough to easily justify it. Plus, what would canceling them mean? Would America be OK with never having the elections at all? It seems like an implausibility.
Of greater concern is sending in the ICE brigade to generate enough chaos to throw the elections into the courts. Also, claiming nonexistent Chinese interference, Trump could order the Department of Homeland Security to seize ballot boxes to account for the supposed massive fraud that his Thursday speech already outlined.
Along those same lines, Trump might also challenge the voting procedures enough to litigate the thing into oblivion, so it holds up the certification of the midterm races for months and freshly minted senators and representatives are unable to be seated in Congress. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in both houses continues forth.
There is also the looming possibility of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers being dispatched to blue states to protest and wreak havoc, January 6 style. This time, it could be a hundred times worse.
Don’t expect the courts to save us. If we have learned nothing else over the past year and a half, it’s that the president will stop at nothing to get what he wants and no entity has the will and authority to obstruct him. And if the whole thing winds up in the Supreme Court, all bets are off, as we know. There is very little evidence of that corrupt body doing the right thing.
The overwhelming expectation is that something is going to happen. But I’m choosing not to be a hopeless pessimist. My thought is that while it’s hardly a sure thing, the system will hold and Trump won’t succeed. For one thing, we’re more than onto him. There will be no surprises this time.
I have to believe we can ultimately triumph over an 80-year-old mentally ill criminal. But it won’t be easy.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)