Image Credits: Yuri Gripas/Reuters.
What I find fascinating is that there’s not a hint of consideration for what’s right or legal.
Two days after the 2020 presidential election, as votes were still being tallied, Donald Trump’s eldest son texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “we have operational control” to ensure his father would get a second term, with Republican majorities in the US Senate and swing state legislatures, CNN has learned.
In the text, which has not been previously reported, Donald Trump Jr. lays out ideas for keeping his father in power by subverting the Electoral College process, according to the message reviewed by CNN. The text is among records obtained by the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021.
“It’s very simple,” Trump Jr. texted to Meadows on November 5, adding later in the same missive: “We have multiple paths We control them all.”
Two days after Election Day, Trump was still technically leading in enough states to be reelected, but all the experts knew that those leads would slip away. That’s why Trump was already trying to stop the counting of votes. So, Donald Trump Jr. understood that he was calling for a coup.
And the thing is, you have to consider what comes along with a coup. It’s not like you just flip a switch and get to stay in power. You can anticipate that the courts are not going to side with you. You can’t have any confidence that the military will back you up. You can be sure that there will be an uprising from tens of millions of Biden voters that will have to be put down somehow. You’ll basically be destroying the country’s entire history of democratic elections and you’ll be in an instant civil war where you’re only advantage is that you have the keys to the White House gates.
And yet this looks like the best option you have. How much of a criminal do you have to be to think this is your best option? It’s not like ex-presidents and the families of ex-presidents typically live difficult lives.
