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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.
Except the steelman doesn't say that; no matter how many times you assert it, "genuinely believes the election was stolen" does not equal "incredibly dumb or incredibly crazy."
I agree there's another option (given that no evidence of fraud exists): that he always believes what it benefits him to believe but this is actually not dumb but clever in his case because it advantages a political actor to be convinced of their righteousness. In other words his brain is built differently not for truth seeking but winning and that is a good trait in a politician who is on your side.
Personally, this is close my philosophy of Trump (minus the "this is a good trait" part). He has a different relation to the truth.
There's a certain type of boss where he tells his employee to do something. The employee says it's not possible. But he keep telling him to do it and he finds a way to say yes. There may or may not be steelman reasons he tried to say no. It may be possible but stupid. It may come with some major caveats. He might just come up with something that looks vaguely like what the boss asked for thinking it will shut him up. But to said boss, he doesn't care about the details. It's indistinguishable from the employee just not wanting to do it.
I think Trump's way of doing things is that he can get anything with the right amount of influence and schmoozing, and the details can be fudged. An example would be that in his NY fraud case, he argued:
That different forms of measurement can come up with different results, therefore it's subjective whether a property is 10,000 sq ft or 30,000.
When Trump bought Mar-a-Lago he agreed that the property was for a private social club, and this zoning could not be changed without approval. He listed it without any restrictions, on the basis that he thought he could renegotiate that if needed.
That things he own are worth significantly more simply by having his name attached.
I think he doesn't care about facts, he cares about people, because he can get people to do whatever he wants. So when he calls Raffensperger, it's not actually about whether there was fraud. He just has to convince him to find 11,000 votes. Whether those votes exist or not doesn't matter because there's always a way to accomplish something. Claiming fraud exists is no different than flattering your business partner. It's a thing you say that gets you a good result.
Yes, and it means people here claiming that he was acting in good faith when trying to dispute the election results, because he really believes there was fraud, are making a kind of category error. There is not really such thing as 'acting in good faith' for someone with a brain like his.
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