"Shut Him Down": Trump Will Claim He Won the Election on Night of November 3, and Biden Is Trying to Steal It: Bush 2000 Tactic. A BuzzFlash Editor’s Commentary.
August 20, 2020
George W. Bush was able to make it to the Supreme Court electing him in 2000 on a partisan 5-4 vote because his campaign seized the narrative that Gore was stealing the election from its “rightful” winner and kept the Gore-Lieberman campaign on the defensive. Trump will use the Bush 2000 playbook on November 3, when the polls close. (DonkeyHotey)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Don’t for a moment think that Trump mega-donor and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is going to stop trying to help Trump steal the election through the USPS, whatever he says to dampen down the national pushback. The removed sorting machines are disassembled and mailboxes in storage, and don’t count on him having mail carriers treat the ballots as first class.
However, Trump has another goal in his sabotaging of the US Postal Service, as he does in all his and other Republican strategies to disenfranchise as many Democrats as possible, particularly people of color, students and the poor (massive evictions will assist him, since most former tenants won’t have time to re-establish a new voting address). Disenfranchisement is Republican voter fraud on a massive (millions of votes) scale and has accelerated since the Supreme Court lifted oversight of many Red States in 2013 in the Shelby v. Holder case. It should be prosecuted on a national scale with hundreds of GOP defendants engaging in voter theft. They should be tried, convicted and sent to jail.
Trump, in addition to plotting with Republicans to squash the right of as many Democrats as possible to vote or to ensure their vote isn’t counted, is ginning up the delegitimizing of the vote count, knowing that he is going to lose, at a minimum, the popular vote and very possibly the electoral college when all votes are counted. What Trump wants to prevent, as the George W. Bush campaign did in 2000, is to stop the mail-in votes from being counted (or recounted) even if postmarked prior to November 3.
To accomplish this, Trump plans on declaring himself the victor of a “rigged” election, even if he appears to be losing the night of November 3. By doing that, his supporters and Republican strategists will make it appear the case, by controlling the narrative, that Joe Biden and the Democrats are trying to steal the election. This will then make it very hard to count the outstanding mail-in ballots, as Trump calls for his cult to take the streets and bogs the counting of mail-in ballots down in litigation.
The only scenario that might forestall this scenario is a Biden-Harris landslide.
For George W. Bush, who would almost certainly not have become president if all the votes had been counted and recounted in November of 2000, the turning point came over two weeks after the election. Roger Stone and Tom DeLay were two of the organizers of the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot” that stopped a recount of ballots in voter-rich Miami-Dade County through the thuggish intimidation of Capitol Hill GOP staffers who had been flown down from DC. From that point on, the Bush campaign claimed that Al Gore and his running mate, Joe Lieberman, were trying to steal the election.
Yes, ultimately it came down to a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote to install Bush in the White House, but with control of the false narrative, that Gore was trying to overturn the will of the voters, Bush’s campaign was able to stop any further recount after Miami-Dade gave up, out of fear for the safety of the recounters, on trying to get the vote right. This allowed Bush campaign staff and supporters to push the media toward a stance that Bush had won and Gore was trying to change the vote count. Bush supporters mocked Gore as a “loserman.”
Given that Trump has weaponized his followers to be prepared for Democrats allegedly “stealing” the election and “warned” of potential violence in the streets as he moves toward dictatorship (he is once again saying he is owed a third term), it is not surprising that in an “NBC News/WSJ Poll: 45% of American voters [are] losing confidence in the 2020 election.” Indeed, since 2016 confidence in the election results has dropped 14 percentage points to the same 45% figure.
On August 19, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany once again confirmed that Trump might not accept a defeat given alleged and unproven “voter fraud.”
Get ready for Trump creating a militarized cult resistance to an election loss amidst his claims that the absentee ballots (which will likely be mostly Democratic) left to be counted are “illegitimate.” Get ready for the RNC and Trump lawyers to hit the courts to stop them from being counted.
Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney (NY) waited for three weeks to be declared the winner in a primary challenge earlier this summer because of the backlog of absentee ballots that were postmarked before election day. The uncounted absentee ballots when polls close on November 3 will likely take even longer to count in many states.
Trump is laying the groundwork for keeping them from being counted and lighting the fire of thousands of “Brooks Brothers Riots.”
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