Calling Donald Trump a criminal has been the Democrats’ modus operandi from day one. First was the Russia collusion hoax, in which, most likely, Barack Obama and his key aides were early and essential players. Next came the Ukraine telephone conversation hoax. Then the Great Post Office Job (mailboxes disappearing all over the country). And most recently, and now taking center stage, Trump’s projected refusal to accept the result of the coming presidential election. Breathtaking, really, when you think about it. Bold face lies, all. But not without effect. Obviously some people believe the canards — but then, some people will believe anything.
A group of fearmongers, mostly Democrats, calling themselves the “Transition Integrity Project” (give them credit for hutzpa), organized a whole war-game seminar on what to do if/when Trump decides to contest the results of the election “in an attempt to hold onto [sic] power.” It is startling reading. Members of the group include John Podesta, former White House Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton; Reed Galen, a key organizer of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project; as well as David Frum, Bill Kristol and Max Boot.
The TIP report says: “We … assess that President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power. Recent events, including the President’s own unwillingness to commit to abiding by the results of the election, the Attorney General’s embrace of the President’s groundless electoral fraud claims, and the unprecedented deployment of federal agents to put down leftwing protests, underscore the extreme lengths to which President Trump may be willing to go in order to stay in office.”
You may ask, “To whom is this report directed?” The answer must be people who haven’t been watching television and who therefore haven’t seen the riots, looting and mayhem inflicted upon numerous people and businesses in American cities by left-wing mobs for the last several months. To call them “protests” is pure fiction and discredits (assuming that was possible) everything that follows.
And only people who haven’t been paying attention could believe that massive voting by mail will not result in both fraud and chaos. An August 21 article in the Detroit News says, “Recorded ballot counts in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, spurring officials in Michigan’s largest county to ask the state to investigate ahead of a pivotal presidential election.”
In Patterson, New Jersey, the state’s third largest city, a judge ruled that a recent election had been irreversibly tainted. In the days before the municipal election in May, postal workers found hundreds of ballots bundled together. As a result of the investigation, nearly 20 percent of the ballots were rejected.
In January 2019, the Texas secretary of state’s office discovered that about 95,000 individuals identified by the Department of Public Safety as non-U.S. citizens had a matching voter registration record, and that approximately 58,000 of them had voted in one or more Texas elections.
Yet, the TIP authors write derisively of “the Attorney General’s embrace of the President’s groundless electoral fraud claims,” and later in the report state that “voting fraud is virtually non-existent.” Hutzpa indeed!
The president was asked if he would accept the results of the election. He replied, “I have to see. Look, you—I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”
What would you do if you were president and thought there was massive voting fraud organized by the Democrat Party? Wouldn’t you strive to stay in office in order to represent the people who voted honestly and in accord with the electoral system?
What will the Democrats do if they lose the election? What’s the war-game scenario for that? See below. Incidentally (or not), which candidate was it in 2016 who said the election was fatally tainted? Fortunately, she was not the incumbent with power to overturn the election, but her people have been trying for three years nevertheless.
Little nuggets of bias appear everywhere in the report. “We assess that there is a chance the president will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions—including illegal actions—to defy the popular vote.” They can’t resist slipping in “illegal actions,” of course, but what do they mean by “popular vote?” That’s not the way we score elections in the United States, as Hillary Clinton discovered.
It goes on, “Trump may use pardons to thwart future criminal prosecution, arrange business deals with foreign governments that benefit him financially, attempt to bribe and silence associates, declassify sensitive documents, and attempt to divert federal funds to his own businesses.” Really!
It all reads like a B-movie script. Or a piece by twenty-year-olds writing for the college lampoon magazine. But, no, it was written by grown men and women, with, obviously, too much time on their hands and far too much money flowing from their think tanks.
The TIP Report posits four different election scenarios. Amazingly, however, only one of the four scenarios posits a Democrat candidate not accepting the result. It is called “Game Three: Clear Trump Win.” In it, Trump clearly wins in the Electoral College but loses the popular vote, and Biden doesn’t accept it. That game play “ended in a constitutional crisis, with threats of secession, and the potential for either a decline into authoritarianism or a radically revamped set of democratic rules that ensure the popular will prevails (abolishment of the Electoral College, making DC and Puerto Rico states, and other changes).” Will the real villains please stand up?
What’s really going on with this Transition Integrity Project? A desperate attempt to get people of good will but essentially uninterested in everyday politics to vote Democrat “for the good of the system.”
Democrats are frantic. This may be closing time. They are in danger, not just of losing this election to Trump, but of losing enough of the black vote and the Hispanic vote to make it difficult for them to win elections for years to come. Trump’s economic policies (especially deregulation) and the rioting in cities controlled for decades by Democrats may convince enough people who have for years voted Democrat to vote Republican this time. And maybe next time too. And perhaps many times to come.
And in that case, for the Democrats, it’s game over.
Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.
Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.