Dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must

On Twitter, Julian Sanchez offers a news clip featuring video (starting at 5:08) of Roger Stone dictating a Trump campaign memo two days before the 2020 election:

Starting at 5:08, Stone says:

Although state officials in all fifty states must ultimately certify the results of the voting in their state, the final decision as to who the state legislatures authorize be sent to the Electoral College is a decision made solely by the legislature. Any legislative body may decide, on the basis of overwhelming evidence of fraud, to send electors to the Electoral College who accurately reflect the President’s legitimate victory in their state, which was illegally denied him through fraud.
[⋯]
We must be prepared to lobby our Republican legislatures by personal contact, and by demonstrating the overwhelming will of the people in the their state — in each state — that this may need to happen.

Sanchez says:

So they were plotting to cry “fraud” and attempt to steal the White House even before the election.

Stating the obvious and all, but this seems relevant to the question of whether Trump believed what he was saying. They’d decided on this course before any of the specious “evidence of fraud” had even been fabricated.

Obviously I remember Trump planting the “if I lose they cheated” seed well in advance, once it was apparent he was likely to lose. But I hadn’t realized the whole scheme of pressuring state legislatures to throw out the results was being actively planned so early.

John Holbo expands:

[ deep breath ]

It’s worse. It’s so, so bad — so much worse even than that — that it’s hard to keep the big picture in view. But let’s try.

Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as “dangerous” and “fraudulent” as early as April, 2020. So they were plotting to cry “fraud” and attempt to steal the White House even before the election. In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless.

But let’s just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many Republicans’s have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.

Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat — to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by Democrats. To repeat (this is so incredible but it’s true): he was so invested in stealing the election, even as early as April, 2020, that he calculated that it was worthwhile to sacrifice his chances of winning the election honestly, to increase his chances of winning dishonestly.

Can I really crawl inside his head and know this was his plan, not just his moment-by-moment instinct? Isn’t he just a guy who always screams ‘fraud?’ It’s like breathing? Yes. Even so. His Machiavellian mind, or lizard brain, as you like it, was enacting the plan by April. By April, he was putting an awful lot of chips on this:

Election night, Trump is ahead in at least some key states, and then we get up the next morning and he’s behind. Then he screams fraud. Then there’s total chaos, and Trump hopes to emerge holding the vote bag — somehow.

This has been his modus operandi in business for decades. Profit in the chaos of collapse. Trump is the guy who convinced me Gary Gygax was right. There is such a thing as “chaotic” as a stable alignment. Trump wants to do it the chaos way. He feels he’s strongest then.

I’ll say it one last time and move on to my next point: expending political capital, diminishing one’s own strength, to invest in capacity to convincingly allege fraud, based on nothing, shows intent to falsely allege fraud.

We want what we are willing to spend to get. Trump spent.

Next point: what are we forgetting about election 2020? What has faded in the rearview? And what are we forgetting about January 6, as well? What common denominator of both events - that seem so seared into our brains - has sort of slipped away?

Answer: the ex ante likelihood of way more confusion than there turned out to be, in the event. Epistemic chaos. The day before the election, it seemed so, so likely that there would be at least a few places in which the results would be legitimately disputed, after the fact. Maybe there would be violence on the day. But at least there would be nailbiters, jurisdictions in which something goes wrong, at least looks bad. Trump was planning on that. If there is any epistemic chaos, he can scream ‘fraud!’ and provoke a constitutional crisis.

Then it’s a jump ball and he figures Republicans are going to be more ruthless than Democrats in that sort of environment. (Probably right.) Plus there’s a Republican majority on the Supreme Court.

The fact is: there wasn’t any ‘epistemic chaos’ whatsoever. The election results were very clear, and no credible allegations of fraud emerged. Fox called it for Biden in Arizona on election night. 2000 mules is silly. The Kraken ain’t even a shrimp.

And yet, even with that level of crystal clarity, here we are, in 2023, and the 2024 Republican Prez nomination is all about Trump still trying to retroactively gaslight us about 2020. Imagine if he had had anything to work with. Anything at all, beside the pillow guy’s nonsense?

That is to say:

• Trump was planning on chaos.
• chaos seemed awfully likely.
• if there had been chaos, he might have pulled it off. It came shockingly close to working with no chaos.

Which brings us to January 6. What went wrong on January 6 for Trump? The same damn thing that went wrong on election day: no chaos. Of course there was plenty of chaos on January 6, but no epistemic chaos. No real uncertainty about what happened or who was at fault.

Trump was bargaining on some clash that was more ambiguous. Imagine if there had been some Antifa there. Imagine if anyone on the left had done anything wrong - even one thing that even looked sus - on that day? Imagine if the left had not been pure as Caesar’s wife on Jan 6?

But in fact it was totally clear that it was Trump’s fault. It’s all on damn film. There aren’t any real doubts. And still Trump has convinced his followers and he leads the Republican Party. Imagine if there had been actual moral confusion — as opposed to just violence — on the day?

Trump was planning all along to leverage reasonable doubt, on election day, on January 6, to steal the election. He figured he could make doubts break his way. And I think he was probably right.

Because there turned out to be no doubt. And he’s still making a show of it, with absolutely nothing to work with. No one even has a theory anymore about how 2020 was stolen. People at least think they have a blurry snapshot of Bigfoot. So, to conclude this thread: yeah, they were planning to cry ‘fraud!’ and steal the White House as early as early November. Trump was demonstrably planning it as early as April. Heck, he was probably vaguely planning it from November 7, 2016.

But who knows? Maybe, after he won that first time, he planned to ‘go straight’ for a change. Maybe victory went to his head and he dreamed of being a great President by non-fraudulent means. I’m willing to believe he dreamed of that for a day or a week. I’m not such a cynic!