Updated: November 16, 2020 9:49:11 am
President Donald Trump walks to the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Friday, November 13, 2020, to present an update on Operation Warp Speed. He lost a series of court cases in key electoral states over the course of the day. (Anna Moneymaker / The New York Times)
The problem erupted inside the main tally room in Detroit late in the morning on November 4.
It was the day after Election Day, and until then the voting tabulation process for the city’s various canvassing boards had run smoothly inside the TCF Center, the cavernous convention hall that houses the North American International Auto. Show.
As batches of ballots arrived in vans, workers methodically inspected them and recorded them at 134 separate tables, each overseen by observers for voting rights and so-called electoral contenders from each party.
But the stance of Republican contenders changed when the count was tipped in favor of Joe Biden and word spread that President Donald Trump would sue. A witness, a non-partisan observer, Julie Moroney, heard a Republican organizer say, “Now we are going to contest all the ballots.”
Supporters of President Donald Trump gather in the Pennsylvania state capital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 7, 2020 (Victor J. Blue / The New York Times)
Republican volunteers suddenly raised their objections across the room: allegations that the counting workers were entering obviously incorrect birth years or retroactive voting. In some cases, volunteers made general complaints of wrongdoing.
“What are you doing?” one worker asked a Republican observer who was challenging the ballots before he could even begin to inspect them, recalled a Democratic observer, Seth Furlow. The Republican observer responded: “They told me to challenge everyone.”
Furlow vividly recalled his discomfort with a scene in which mostly white Republican rivals clashed with mostly black poll workers.
Police had already escorted a handful of particularly disturbing observers out of the room. But tensions escalated when election officials noted that the number of contenders had grown far beyond what was allowed on either side and were barred from entry in an attempt to reduce their ranks. The cries of “stop the count” increased among Republicans.
The fraud that Republicans claimed to observe was not fraud at all, a Michigan state judge found Friday in rejecting a lawsuit brought by Trump allies. The various cases of alleged wrongdoing were in fact well-established procedures for dealing with data entry quirks, correction of minor errors, and protocols for social distancing, all intended to ensure careful and accurate vote counting.
But in the distorted narrative of Trump, his political allies and his supporters, the Detroit tally center was a crime scene where Democrats stole an election, a miscarriage that required outrage to be channeled through the courts, the presidential Twitter posts and cable news.
And that was the plan envisioned by pro-Trump forces from the start.
Like similar episodes in Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, the scene in Detroit was the culmination of Trump’s year-long strategy to use the power of the executive branch, an army of lawyers, the echo chamber of the media. Conservative communication and obedience. of his fellow Republicans to test his boldest exercise in bending reality: turning losing into winning.
Darkened by the post-election noise about the president’s efforts to falsely portray the electoral system as “rigged” against him, has remained everything that Trump and his allies did ahead of time to promote a baseless conspiracy devised to attract his most passionate supporters. , providing him the opportunity to make his historically anomalous bid to cling to power in the face of defeat.
That offer is now in its last throes. The judges are dismissing the president’s lawsuits, as various fragments of alleged evidence, an alleged box of illegal ballots that was in fact a case containing camera equipment and “dead voters” who are alive, fall apart. And yet Trump has yet to give up casting doubt on the integrity of the election as he seeks to smear Biden’s clear victory, by more than 5.5 million votes and also in the Electoral College, with false insinuations of illegitimacy. On Sunday alone, he posted more than two dozen election-related tweets that seemed to briefly acknowledge Biden’s victory before declaring, “I concede NOTHING!”
The roots of Trump’s approach date back to before his election in 2016, and he advanced his plans throughout his tenure. But his strategy to question the outcome of the 2020 campaign took serious shape when the coronavirus pandemic disrupted normal life and led states to promote voting by mail.
From the beginning, the president viewed mail-in ballots as a political threat that would appeal to Democrats more than his supporters. For this reason, he and his allies sought to block movements to facilitate absentee voting and delay the counting of mail ballots. This allowed Trump to do two things: claim an early victory on election night and paint ballots that were later counted for his opponent as fraudulent.
The U.S. Postal Service, after being under the leadership of a Trump ally, Louis DeJoy, took several cost-saving measures that severely slowed mail delivery rates and sparked great concern over the on-time arrival of ballots by mail.
In the Senate, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republicans blocked Democratic efforts to bring more money to the states so they could buy more sorting equipment to count the huge influx of mail-in ballots faster.
In key states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, Republican-controlled legislatures rejected attempts by civil rights groups and Democrats to change or suspend statutes that prohibited poll workers from starting ballot counting before Election Day. And once the count began, the Trump campaign and the president’s allies followed other tactics to slow or stop the count and cast doubt on the validity of the results.
Before Election Day, party officials at the state and national levels helped organize observer teams, a role that was once a symbol of the transparency of American democracy. But in this case, Trump and his allies encouraged their observers in key states to act aggressively to stop what they described as a widespread hoax and provide information that could feed into lawsuits and fuel rallies and coverage from friendly commentators and journalists.
As Pennsylvania State Senator Mike Regan, a Republican, said at a rally in Harrisburg last week: “The state party and our leaders have told me in no uncertain terms that they are coordinating with the Trump campaign, and so far , Pennsylvania has done everything the Trump campaign asked them to do. “
Almost everything would be done in the name of a falsehood: that the American voting system was so corroded by fraud that any losing result for the president could not be legitimate.
There was no greater supporter of that notion than Trump, who promoted it strongly from behind his presidential lectern or from his phone. A presidency that began with a lie, that President Barack Obama was not a citizen, now also ends with one.
In fact, when Trump acknowledged in September 2016 that Obama was born in the United States, he had already gone a long way in promoting a new false narrative that the election was rigged in favor of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
In the face of what he and the entire political world expected to be a loss, Trump repeated the claim regularly as international and domestic allies backed him: ambush video activist James O’Keefe, Russian troll networks, Sean Hannity and Infowars.
Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser and a perennial Republican trickster, created an outside group, Stop the Steal, that sought to recruit poll watchers to gather evidence of Democratic cheating. Trump’s advisers prepared the legal teams to fly anywhere he could file a claim.
Trump’s Electoral College victory made those 2016 plans unnecessary. But the incoming president had reason to cling to the falsehood as a way to cast doubt on the reality that he had lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million.
When thousands of the president’s supporters demonstrated in Washington on Saturday, the legal losses and electoral implausibilities were irrelevant. As they marched through the streets with a huge Trump flag dotted with white stars on a navy blue background, they repeatedly chanted the phrase Stone planted four years ago: “Stop the robbery.”
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