If you are one of the Americans who still thinks Trump won the election against Joe Biden in 2020, then you are at odds with Trump himself. Trump knew he lost that election. New evidence from over 71 witnesses written up in Jack Smith’s 165 page brief clarifies that Trump in fact knew he lost the election and what he did to stay in power despite knowing he had lost.
Many Americans have been trying to figure out Trump’s state of mind leading up to and after the insurrection on January 6th. What was Donald Trump thinking when he contested the election? Was he certain he had won the election or was he pretending he had won to have a reason to try to intervene in state election proceedings, put pressure on the systems that might help him stay in power, as well as urge his followers to “fight like hell” on January 6th?
The new brief filed by Jack Smith settles that question about Trump’s state of mind. Here are some of the important statements cited by Smith in his brief that would be entered into evidence.
When one of his lawyers told him that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court, Mr. Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”
On a flight with Mr. Trump and his family after the election, an Oval Office assistant heard Mr. Trump say: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Those accounts were among new evidence disclosed in a court filing made public on Wednesday in which the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump made his case for why the former president is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election. (New York Times)
These and other statements are important because they clarify Trump’s state of mind or mens rea. To be convicted of a crime the prosecution must be able to show that the defendant KNEW what he was doing was wrong. The statement Trump made that it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell is especially revealing when it comes to his mens rea.
That statement mirrors his call to action on the Ellipse to his followers: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump’s call to action was crystal clear to his followers. After he said that, they marched to the Capitol armed with items they used to batter the Capitol police who tried their best to protect lawmakers. The mob was trying to stop the counting of Electoral College votes. This was Trump’s last chance to stop the transfer of power. His other efforts had failed. Despite what JD Vance said in the VP debate, Trump did not engage in a peaceful transfer of power, he was forced into a transfer of power after trying every which way he could to prevent that from happening.
JACK SMITH’S NEW BRIEF
The brief starts out with the following strong assertion in response to Trump’s contention that the Supreme Court ruling in the immunity case means he should never face criminal consequences for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election:
The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to
overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so.
Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme
was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant
acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit,
the government function by which votes are collected and counted a function in which the
defendant, as President, had no official role. In Trump v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 2312 (2024)
Reading over Jack Smith’s brief is maddening because it is so ridiculously clear from the evidence that Trump knew he lost the election but pushed everyone to pretend he didn’t. Over and over and over again, Trump, the obsessive micromanager pushes and pushes, wrangles, insists, and makes specious claims to get people he hopes will be his allies to join with him in his false re-creation of reality about the election. Smith’s brief recounts what happened state by battleground state, recounting what Trump did behind the scenes to try to get Republicans to agree to lie along with him. Some did and others didn’t. Over and over Trump insists that unqualified voters, dead people and noncitizens voted, and he is told over and over that he is mistaken, but he refuses to take that as an acceptable answer and keeps pushing the fact free alternate universe in which he baselessly claims he won.
PENCE TRIES TO HELP TRUMP TO ACCEPT THE TRUTH THAT HE LOST THE ELECTION
One of the most damning aspects of the brief is the way we see behind the scenes that Pence keeps trying gently, carefully and patiently to help Trump accept the truth that he lost, but Trump cannot accept it. Pence keeps at it, suggesting that Trump doesn’t have to think of the loss as a failure but just more of a setback. He could run again in 2024. Trump says that is too far off for him.
The facts revealed in Smith’s brief about what happened on January 6th are not new but go into greater detail and provide more statements from people in the room with Trump behind the scenes. Smith asserts that Trump is acting in his personal not official capacity on January 6th and the facts support that. We “see” Trump hunkered down in the room off of the Oval Office watching Fox News and on Twitter, in relative isolation, stewing about his situation as the Electoral College votes are about to be cast which he sees as his last chance to stay in power after losing the election. He posts on Twitter about Pence letting him down (which he tells the crowd is THEM being let down). That has the intended effect of riling up the crowd.
As Trump is watching on TV, he sees the crowd attack the Capitol, there is hand-to-hand combat with the Capitol Police outnumbered and the crowd smashing windows to gain entry. Ashli Babbitt, climbing in through the door to the building gets shot (and dies) as the police try to keep the crowd from entering the building where the votes are about to be counted. The mob is yelling “Hang Mike Pence” as it gains access to the building. Lawmakers are endangered including Pence. And, tellingly, when Trump is told about the danger to Mike Pence from the mob storming the Capitol, he not only refuses to take any official action as a normal commander-in-chief would and should to protect the vice president (and other people), we learn what he says. He says “So what”. This shows a cruel lack of concern about Pence. As Jack Smith points out, this is a man acting not as a president in an official role but a vengeful guy who didn’t get his way.
After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.
Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to the brief.
In insisting that this post was an unofficial act, Mr. Smith noted that Mr. Trump’s advisers had been urging him to issue a message to quell the violence, but he had refused and instead tweeted about Mr. Pence.
“The content of the 2:24 p.m. tweet was not a message sent to address a matter of public concern and ease unrest; it was the message of an angry candidate upon the realization that he would lose power,” Mr. Smith wrote.
There is only one conclusion that anyone with an open mind who reads this brief can have: Trump must never again get the power of the presidency. He is a demagogue in waiting. He is a natural dictator. He has no understanding of or interest in maintaining a democratic form of government in our country. If Trump is re-elected, he will be a dictator starting on day one and continuing every day until he eats the fatal cheeseburger and gets a heart attack or something else causes his demise. There is no way this guy will leave office after 4 years. This is especially true now that he has so many allies on the far right who support him and more than anything they want a dictatorship instead of a democratic republic so that they can stay in power along with him. Tyranny of the minority.
When you do not have the support of the majority, desperate people who believe they are losing their culture and way of life resort to cheating and lying to get and keep power.
OUR DEMOCRACY IS HANGING BY A THREAD
Steven Levitsky, Harvard professor of political science who has studied and written extensively (read Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt) about how democracies fail and authoritarians take over democracies, tells us that democracies need buy in by political parties to three bedrock concepts to stay healthy:
- People running for office have to accept the results of an election and concede defeat when they lose elections.
- People running for office must reject political violence.
- People running for office must break with violent forces.
Trump and the Republican Party are violating all three of these tenets which are foundational for a healthy democracy. The MAGA Republican party is an anti-democratic party. 86% of the Republican Party went along with Trump’s attempt to stay in power. This party is openly embracing violence. Have you noticed how many Republicans running for office pose with their families holding guns and rifles? This normalizes weapons and violence. Many Republicans challenge or refuse to accept election results if they lose. Trump is the poster boy for refusing to concede his own election loss.
MAGA Republicans are extremists. They have abandoned fundamental democratic principles. In the upcoming election they are already actively doing or signaling in advance that they will cheat, suppress or disqualify voters, resort to violence and push an alternate reality rather than concede if and when they lose. Trump is already setting our country up for violence if he loses by normalizing it and by falsely claiming things that could help him win such as – the Biden administration is not providing help to people in North Carolina- a flat out lie.
The Democrats need to predict what Trump will do and claim after this election to try to get Trump into power with the help of his MAGA supporters.
Here is what I think is coming:
Trump and his MAGA pals will claim that millions of migrants let into the country by the Biden/Harris administration voted for her and that the election was fraudulent. This will be the BIG LIE 2.0 for the 2024 election. It is a federal offense for any illegal immigrant to vote and the punishment is prison and expulsion which is why immigrants do not even try to do this. The MAGAs will claim, falsely, that this has happened and will try to send alternate slates of Trump loyal electors to the Electoral College to be counted in any state that Harris wins narrowly, not decisively. (If Harris wins big in a battleground state this scheme will not work in that state.) They will encourage violence if they lose.
The good news is that the battleground states mostly have Democratic governors who will reject this garbage and insist on a fair election in their state no matter which presidential candidate wins the most votes. Governors certify the election results. PA has Josh Shapiro, MI has Gretchen Whitmer, WI has Gov Evers, AZ has Katie Hobbs, North Carolina has an election for governor this November and Josh Stein, the Democrat, is leading crazy MAGA Republican, Mark Robinson, Georgia has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he has a good record of insisting on fair elections and rejecting Trump’s pipe dreams. Nevada has Joe Lombardo who is all in on Trump, unfortunately, but his state only has a few votes and hopefully he would be fair.
HOW TO GET TO A BETTER FUTURE
111 former Republican officials are backing Kamala Harris and call Trump “unfit to serve.” They understand the importance of defeating Trump in the next election. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/us/politics/republican-officials-harris-endorsement.html
The best result for our country would be a resounding defeat of both Trump and the MAGA version of the Republican Party for their own good as well as the rest of us. If Trump does not win and the Republicans lose the House, the Republican Party and Republican voters will start to realize they need a less crazy, less extreme leader. They might realize that MAGA extremism is a bad brand for them. They could decide to give up on Trump and move more towards the center.
If the Republican Party were to become more moderate it would appeal to way more Americans, especially younger Americans. Imagine a GOP that embraces reasonable climate change legislation, reasonable gun control legislation, reasonable border control and funding to support that, the right of a woman to make her own decisions about her body with the help of her doctor, fair maps and the right to vote, the end of the filibuster so that a simple majority in the Senate could pass legislation, term limits and enforceable ethics rules for Supreme Court justices, and much more. So much could be accomplished! A moderate Republican Party would not need to cling to power by cheating and lying. It could compete on a more level playing field.
But to get to a better America the Trump Republican Party has to lose this November. For the sake of all of us in our country, let’s make sure the MAGA GOP loses big in 2024.