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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.
Trump believed that there was enough fraud to effect the outcome of the election
He needed a venue in which to make the argument for this and present the case for why he thought this
If there existed conflicting electoral slates, the Vice President had the power to reject the certification, and allow a period of time for the congress to have a debate about the validity of any complaints. Such a debate has occurred in 1876, 1969, and 2005.
This seems pretty wonky, and the type of thing that nobody would usually ever care about or even know about if it weren't for cable news/twitter/hysterics.
To be clear I think that this was a completely reasonable thing to do. I think that our system of government is based on (and functions best) when it is competing forces pulling each other in tension.
I think that consensus arrises from conflict.
Every time that Trump is allowed to make his case publicly, so long as the case has no merit, it will lose supporters. Or, if it does have merit, it will gain them.
By not allowing Trump to make his case, and for trying to punish him for it with absurd conspiracy theorizing about "January 6th", it signals that Trump's opponents might fear that his case does have merit, and that by presenting the evidence for it, it will gain supporters.
Trump was clearly not trying to "overturn democracy" or "change the results of an election" or any other bullshit like that. Especially the idea that he was trying to "change the results" (he wasn't, he was trying to determine them) should disgust anybody who cares about American Democracy.
Daylight is the best disinfectant, etc.
This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not. If you did, then all of Trump's actions are just pushing the boundaries and gray areas of the law in pursuit of trying to right his perceived wrong. However, if you think that he actually knew there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (with the best evidence of this being Trump's own advisers repeatedly telling him there wasn't along with repeated legal losses), yet pushed to overturn the election anyways, then the parade of horribles of "threat to democracy", "coup", "change the results", etc. would be fair to apply to him.
Also, repeating what I wrote in the other reply, if the best steel man involves Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud despite it being obvious to anyone else that would've been in his shoes, then it replaces the best reason to not vote for Trump with another really good reason to not vote for him.
I'm trying not to get too heated here, but I have to object to this characterization.
In my IRL circles, it's pretty much a unanimous consensus that there was electoral fraud by the Democrats in 2020… because there's similar electoral fraud by Democrats in every election, since probably the late 19th century at least. "My grandpa voted Republican till the day he died… and he's been voting Democrat ever since" isn't just taken as an old joke, but as a broad description of reality. Nixon was the winner in 1960. 2020 was exceptional only in the scale and brazenness of the mass ballot manufacture. Indeed, some hold that, were it not for the need of Republicans to overcome this "margin of fraud," the "silent majority" of Christian conservatives would win every time.
For an example of such views online, one can spend some time reading posts on sci-fi author Sarah Hoyt's blog, and the comments, on the topic — most recent is here. Or just read many of the comments over at Instapundit.
And sure, you can just dismiss all these people — and thus much of "red tribe" America — as all "dumb or crazy." It's not like we're not used to being stereotyped as a bunch of backwards, gap-toothed, inbred morons. (I suppose the Halloween horror movie season has me reminded once again of how many times Hollywood has used "murderous/rapist hillbillies" as antagonists.)
I don't understand your point, are you saying we don't need evidence for fraud because you and your circle have been so sure of it for so long? Do you believe every losing Republican candidate prior to Trump should also have denied the election result? What would you think if dems acted the exact same way?
Democracy only serves its purpose if you can convince the other half of the country that they lost fair and square. If they remain convinced you cheated, it's broken and will eventually spin out into civil war given enough time.
How rational, easy to prove or the character of the people who hold the doubt are all completely immaterial. All that matters is that they are in large enough numbers and capable of violence.
Democracy has to convince the losers, or it is defunct. That is how it is. And all complaints that this is unfair or insane are to lay at the feet of democracy as a concept, not at the those of the electorate. Since its entire claim to legitimacy rests on representation.
If half the people think the election is rigged, it is rigged in any practical sense. The ritual isn't powerful because the incantation was said in the exact right tone. It's powerful because people believe in it. And if they don't, it isn't; and you have to fix it or the magic won't work and peaceful transfers of power will stop.
Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.
A couple of weeks ago in the weekly attempt to enforce consensus on the election issue there were plenty of practical ways. Thing is, they all involved actually taking things seriously, not having a prior of 0 on cheating, and not trying to paper over the problem to maintain the appearance of the integrity of the system. As long as your solution set is limited to "keep doing insecure elections, refuse to disallow obviously fishy things like ballot harvesting, and have no remedy when election laws are violated e.g. by ejecting observers or having the observers not be able to object", yes, you can't convince one side that things are on the up and up.
To that side, what you're asking is "how can we cheat outrageously and have the result be accepted by you?" and obviously the answer to that is "you can't".
Or, to quote @naraburns in that earlier thread, 'Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."'
Ok, if you truly need better election security to be convinced to accept the results, then make that a core part of your platform. Don’t focus on a whole bunch of other things with election integrity only a marginal footnote, and then afterwards come out with “Heads I win, tails the election was rigged because you can’t prove it wasn’t!”
If that’s truly your biggest concern with democracy, then make it an issue front and center and make the Democrats pay when they try to avoid it, just like how the Democrats have done that this election by focusing on Trump’s disregard for the electoral process. Instead, the revealed preferences of the MAGA constituency don’t appear to be anywhere close to emphasizing election security as one of their foremost issues.
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