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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.
You keep saying "outcome determinative fraud" as though the first part matters -- how's anyone to know whether the fraud was 'outcome determinative' or not without serious investigative authority; maybe even at all, given the way the ballots get separated from the PII early on in American elections.
Actually you lead me to something I've thought for quite a while in the 2020 aftermath -- the way that courts require proof of fraud that turned the election directly led to the low quality of some of the Trump campaign's lawsuits. If you are expected to prove not only that there was fraud against you, but also that the fraud amounted to at least some specific number of votes, unless you have significant cooperation from the folks counting the ballots (hint: Trump did not) your only play is to throw everything you have at the wall and hope that enough votes are found to stick.
This didn't work ofc, but I'm not sure that anything else would have worked better -- why don't you try a steelman: put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much. What is your best move?
Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive. This must not be done in "throw everything you have at the wall" Gish-Gallop style, though, because if the 5th item on your list of evidence is pretty convincing but the first 4 items turn out to be nonsense then you risk nobody bothering to read past the 2nd or 3rd.
Even if everybody agrees the evidence should have made you absolutely positive, this doesn't get you inaugurated in 2020, but it does guarantee you 2024, a stronger showing in the House and Senate from 2022 on, and mass support for election reform in your favor that could last for generations.
If this evidence is less than absolute proof that more fraudulent votes were counted than the margin of your loss, your case is immediately dismissed and you are mocked/demonized for promulgating baseless claims of election fraud -- the other way at least there is some chance of having your day in court.
Who said anything about court? Your theory that judges are more likely to dismiss people who publish more evidence is an interesting one, but there is a reason why I said "publish", not "file". As I admitted, if the judges dismiss you then you still lose 2020, but if the voters don't then your team wins 2022 and 2024 and a lot of opportunities to prevent whatever fraud you detected from happening again. Maybe it takes time to go through evidence in the moment and make sure you're not hurting your credibility by putting credence in bad evidence too, but after three or four years have passed Vance shouldn't be dancing around when asked if Trump lost, he shouldn't be pointing to social media censorship (or whatever "big tech rigged the election" meant) as reasons why Trump morally won, he should be advertising "trumpwon2020.com" or whatever URL they picked to host all the evidence they have that Trump actually won.
If...
Fair, but "at least there is some chance" applies here too. Wasn't that the point of Trump's "you won't have to vote anymore" speech a while back, that if you can convince enough voters to beat the "margin of fraud" then you can get into power to shrink that margin to 0?
Isn't it much better, then, to convince these voters by specifically explaining to them how the fraud is working and what needs to be done to stop it? If you have a plan that's more detailed than "just elect Trump" then even if you fail at the presidential level you can still get election reforms going at local levels.
Trump is a narcissistic dude, and is probably much more interested in being elected himself* than repairing the electoral system per se -- this absolutely is a character flaw, but it doesn't mean that he's faking the interest in fixing the fraud.
*I do think that he wants this because he truly believes he's able to improve America, which is an important distinction between most politicians who are guided by more of a lust for power
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that he was faking.
IMHO Trump's only clear advantage over most Republican candidates is that, despite his very loose relationship with honesty in general, he will occasionally turn on "I'm going to piss off everyone who disagrees with me" mode as a costly signal of sincerity. Kamala's trying to backpedal on her previous statements on things like policing and border security in very weasel-worded ways that are obviously intended to barely placate moderates while being easy to un-backpedal from later. Vance's "Trump would have won except for big tech" phrasing is a great way to say something technically true without either actually agreeing with Republicans who think it was vote fraud or openly disagreeing and pissing them off. But when Trump goes full on anti-illegal-immigration or 2020-was-fraud or whatever he doesn't use his charismatic-real-estate-negotiator language, he brings out scare-the-normies level language that he's clearly not going to back down from. He might be mistaken but he's not lying.
My point is just that relying on him alone to fix any problems is strictly inferior to relying on both him and on grassroots-level efforts too. Maybe some of the evidence that convinced him was spurious (the reason I'm not convinced is that I waded through enough of that) and he'll go after those red herrings and never get around to other real problems, so the only way to get real problems fixed is to publish the evidence. Maybe he won't get reelected because that's just not happening again, and fixing any vulnerabilities will have to be done by others, so the only way to point out what to fix is to publish the evidence. Maybe he would have been reelected if he made a strong case for voter fraud evidence, but he didn't, so there are people who would have voted for the anti-voter-fraud Trump but will vote against the weird-fake-electors-thing Trump. Maybe he will be reelected and will go after real problems but will be thwarted by federalism or another branch or the deep state or whatever and fixes will have to come in at the local level. There's just so many ways that Trump making a public case could make things better. It seems like the one big risk here for him is that putting everything out in the open might reveal that none of it is convincing, but that's also a situation where "good for Trump" vs "good for the country" diverge, and I'd be on the "good for the country" side in that case.
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