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What is the steel man for the Trump fake elector scheme being no big deal? To be clear, I'm not talking about a steel man of Trump's behavior as it relates to J6 itself (the tweets, the speech, the reaction to the crowd, etc.), I'm talking exclusively about the scheme where, according to the Democrat/J6 report/Jack Smith narrative, Trump conspired to overturn the election by trying to convince various states, and later Pence, to use a different slate of electors. Here is the basic narrative (largely rephrased from this comment along with the Jack Smith indictment):
There was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election (in the event someone replies with evidence there was, you would also need to prove that Trump knew it at the time to justify his actions)
Trump's advisers, advisers that were appointed by himself, repeatedly told him there was no outcome-determinative fraud after looking into it. Despite this, Trump still insisted there was outcome-determinative fraud. Trump still insisted even after he started losing court cases left and right about there being outcome-determinative fraud. Assuming 1 is true this means that Trump is either knowingly lying or willfully ignoring people he himself picked
Trump, despite knowing there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (assuming 2), still tried to change the outcome of the election. First, he tried the courts where he knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in court filings. When that failed he tried contacting various state legislatures and other state officials to ask them to certify his slate of electors. When that failed, his final option was to try to convince Pence to either use his slate of electors to win (a slate of electors not officially certified despite claiming to be certified), or to invalidate enough state's electors to make it so no one gets 270 electors, throwing the election to the house where Trump would then hopefully win given it becomes 1 state 1 vote there.
With that narrative, here are the Trump critiques that I want a steel man defense of:
Trump knowingly lied about there being outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election. This is wrong.
Trump tried to use this lie to change the results of the election. This is wrong.
Trump used this lie to get slates of electors to falsely certify they were the chosen electors of that state. This is wrong
Trump tried to convince various state legislatures that these were the lawfully chosen slate of electors and to decertify the Biden slate and certify his slate. This is wrong.
Trump tried to convince Pence to step outside of his constitutional authority to make him president. This is wrong
The strongest steel man that I can come up with involved the case of Hawaii in 1960
The New York Times summarizes the situation,
While this is the closest prior case of something similar, and thus no big deal, what Trump did is still different enough that it can be meaningfully distinguished:
Both Nixon and Kennedy had good reason to believe they won. Trump didn't.
Kennedy's first slate of electors, the ones that weren't certified, weren't the ones eventually counted. Only the ones certified by the state were counted. Trump's false electors were never certified, so asking Pence to certify them was completely unprecedented.
Nixon accepted that Hawaii had final say over what was and wasn't their slate of electors. Trump didn't and continually insisted his slate was correct.
Another argument that I don't think is strong, but nonetheless might be the strongest steel man:
This is not a strong argument because then it would've just been a constitutional coup and those are still wrong. The way many Latin American countries have constitutional coups is that they stack the court that allows them to reinterpret their constitution to give them more power or that allows them to violate term limits. This is still wrong despite technically being legal. The problem is the norm breaking, not the technical legality.
I think the steelman basically looks like "Trump was living in Trump-world where there is massive fraud, and in Trump-world his actions were justified because the alternative amounted to the end of democracy, so it wasn't unvirtuous for him to try it though it was correct for him to get slapped down".
The reason I have a hard time accepting this is that, in hindsight, an implied condition of my request for a steel man of Trump is that it would also not negatively effect the reasons to vote for him. It's kind of hard to say "Trump is either incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy" as a way to defend him while simultaneously saying he should be president (to be clear, I'm not saying you think that he should or shouldn't be president)
The best reason to not vote for Trump is all the 2020 election stuff, so that steel man is probably the best argument to defend Trump in his 2020 election scheme, but simultaneously adds a whole new best reason to not vote for him.
I mean, of the Trump-voters here, I'd say probably about 30-40% are also living in Trump-world (which totally explains their intentions to vote for him), and the rest are so shit-scared of Kamala Harris that they think Trump's still the lesser evil*.
(I'm not a Trump-voter or a Harris-voter, because I'm not American. I'm grudgingly hoping Harris wins, but my main concern is totally orthogonal to any "normal" politics concerns; I'm concerned about WWIII and Trump's advanced age, although I'd far prefer Vance to Harris as leader of the free world.)
*If I had to point to a single thing as "if it were anyone but Trump opposing her this would be a slam-dunk", I'd point to the Fair Game notice on Elon Musk in retaliation for his uncensoring of Twitter. This is an ongoing attempt to censor the press for direct partisan advantage by use of government force - the sort of thing that can easily spiral into one-party state via media control - and it happened under Biden who's known to be more moderate than Harris. Frankly, I'm deeply disturbed by the extent to which this hasn't been a massive scandal.
What’s the “Fair Game notice”?
The literal Fair Game notice was/is a Scientology term; L. Ron Hubbard would declare someone "fair game", and this meant "use any and all means to ruin this person" (frivolous lawsuits, slander, illegal spying and leaking to tabloids, framing for crimes...).
There seems to be something akin to a Fair Game notice (though presumably not with that exact name) in place against Elon Musk following his purchase of Twitter (and gutting of its censorship bureau); loads of different federal agencies have done things to screw over unrelated Musk businesses (the one I recall off the top of my head is the FCC retracting the rural-Internet grant to Starlink, on the basis that it hadn't met the target yet, despite the target not being due for another couple of years; there's a dissent from that order which lists a bunch of others, though I don't know all the details, as well as noting that Biden was fairly open about this). My understanding is that this is half of the reason Musk's star has been waning recently (the other half being that Twitter isn't his sort of business and it's distracting him).
As noted, due to Twitter being among other things a news service, this is in direct opposition to freedom of the press (as well as impartial justice). You can plausibly argue that this is significantly worse than Watergate due to the sheer scale of the corrupt operation (the Sedition Act was still worse, but that was 225 years ago). But, uh, this seems to have not been a huge scandal, which has disturbing implications about the USA.
Has Musk's star been waning? The Starship booster landing the other day was probably the technological achievement of my lifetime.
His nominal net worth was less in early 2024 than it was when he bought Twitter; it's somewhat more now, but it's still nothing compared to the ridiculous rate at which it grew before that.
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His star has been waning, in that his image is under attack.
His achievements have been waxing, and this incongruence is part of the dirty political tricks we're complaining about.
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