It is simply wild how Donald Trump's merry band of ratfuckers were interested in anything—anything—except counting all the votes in the 2020 election. Seemingly every day there is new evidence for the finding of U.S. District Judge David Carter that Trump's sprawling post-election campaign to throw out the results of that election in order to stay in power was "a coup in search of a legal theory." They began with a conclusion and went spelunking for evidence. This was evident in the texts between two members of Congress—Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Chip Roy—and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, in which two men holding offices of the public trust begged the chief manservant to the Executive to provide "ammo" and "a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play." That is: we have no evidence of fraud, but we need excuses to keep going.
The trend continued Wednesday with Politico's publication of a new batch of emails from Trumpist legal eagle John Eastman, seen previously drawing up a detailed plan for Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the results of an American presidential election—that is, to throw out the votes of American citizens—and install Trump in power in contravention of the expressed will of the American people. The new emails share a key quality with those aforementioned text messages: the language betrays the intent.
Eastman urged Pennsylvania state Republican legislators to retabulate the votes in that state to make Trump the winner. This would be accomplished by throwing out thousands of absentee ballots on the world-renowned legal basis of We No Likey. Well, to be fair, Eastman declared a bunch of ballots illegal because they arrived in the window created by the state supreme court's decision to extend the mail-ballot deadline. (As long as they were postmarked by Election Day, they could be counted up to three days after. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision.) Eastman concocted an equation using data from past elections to "discount each candidates’ totals by a prorated amount based on the absentee percentage those candidates otherwise received." A prorated amount! Maybe we could just count the votes? Surely not. Just carry the one and solve for autogolpe.
"Having done that math, you’d be left with a significant Trump lead that would bolster the argument for the Legislature adopting a slate of Trump electors," Eastman continued. Ah. And we've arrived at the only aspect of this that really mattered to these folks. (This is the same kind of "math" that Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to perform when he talked about finding 11,780 votes—one more than the margin of his defeat in that state. 2 + 2 = I won.) Eastman added that he believed the Pennsylvania legislature had the power to throw out the Biden electors—the ones based on the full tally of votes cast in the state—and appoint phony Trump electors regardless, but that his fabricated prorated mumbo-jumbo "would help provide some cover."
If there was actually fraud, you wouldn't need "ammo." If the ballots were truly counted illegally, you wouldn't need "cover." What you need cover for is an expressly political maneuver that you know the public will not accept on its own. This was a coup in search of a fig leaf. Never mind that they lost almost every damn court case, at the state and federal level, before judges appointed by Republicans and Democrats. John Eastman knew these American citizens' votes were illegal because too many of them weren't cast for Donald Trump. This was the strategy in all the swing states Trump lost: get enough citizens' votes thrown out to get the "cover" they needed to appoint some sham Trump electors and thereby steal each state's Electoral Votes. There is a recording of Donald Trump attempting this in Georgia. Surely, at some point, this constitutes a crime?