Here is Jonah Goldberg article about it. Jonah is a conservative commentator:
gfile.thedispatch.com/p/this-was-always-the-plan(..)
The president of the United States is trying to steal an election he clearly and unequivocally lost.Even liberals frame this fact wrong. They keep saying that
Trump is undermining the legitimacy of the election. He is certainly doing that. But the undermining isn’t the end he most desires—it’s the means to that end.
The man is literally trying to steal an election.He may not think—anymore—that this is the most likely outcome. But he certainly thinks it’s one of the possible outcomes, and one of the few things we know about Trump is that
he likes to keep his options open. From the reporting, he’s pursuing a bunch of goals, many of which reinforce each other.
Claiming the election was stolen lets him pretend—to himself or the country—that
he’s not a loser. Claiming the election was stolen and pretending that he’s not a loser keeps his hardcore fan base with him, which will be good for him no matter what happens. It’s good prep work for some kind of
“Trump TV” and/or for a potential bid to run again in 2024—at least in his mind. But he surely also thinks there’s a chance, however slim, that he will actually get to steal the presidency. If this was all just a show, he wouldn’t need to invite Michigan pols to the White House, presumably to strong arm them.
Think about it this way: Let’s say there’s a 99 percent chance he won’t be able to do any of the things that could result in him staying in power. He won’t be able to flip various state electors, get the courts to invalidate millions of votes, or get this sent to the House. But odds are good that in his head he thinks he’s got a maybe a 5 percent or 10 percent chance. Maybe even better than that.
As outrageous as his effort to delegitimize the election is—and it is very outrageous—that outrage pales like a lit candle next to the noonday summer sun when you compare it to an effort to literally overturn the popular and Electoral College vote and steal the election. But because that outcome is so unlikely, and Trump’s effort to pull it off is so comically inept, people are focusing on the more likely outrage rather than the more outrageous outrage.
This was the plan.
It’s pretty clear now—as I think Matt Grossman pretty accurately predicted—that his goal was always to steal the election if he didn’t win fairly. He was pretty transparent about this long before the election. He spent months saying that mail-in or early ballots were rife with fraud.
He told all of his voters to vote on Election Day. He expected this would give him a “mirage” lead that night, and then, because he had already established the illegitimacy of mail-in ballots, he could pretend to be justified in proclaiming victory on Election Night.Sure, there would be lawsuits and the like later, but Trump would have momentum on his side. He even telegraphed over and over that he expected the Supreme Court to come to his rescue amid the chaos. That was his primary explanation for why he thought it was important to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed.
But as Grossman points out, there was just one problem: Trump wasn’t actually leading on Election Night. It’s one thing to declare victory prematurely when the tally on the scoreboard on your side is tied—it’s another to claim that you won when even the scoreboard clearly says you didn’t.
This, by the way, explains why Trump World was so very, very, very, angry about Fox’s decision to call Arizona. I’ll admit, I thought the anger at Fox was simply stupid, not evil. I wrote of the people screaming at Fox:
[They] … are the political equivalent of Kathy Bates in Misery. They think the Fox News Decision Desk is James Caan, and their collective sin is not writing the story the way the MAGA Kathys wanted. And they’re ignoring the fact that even if Fox banged out precisely the story the Kathys wanted on their metaphorical manual typewriters, it wouldn’t change the fact that the story they want is fiction. Trump lost because more Americans—in total and in the necessary states—voted against him. Grow up and deal with it.
But it turns out that the Arizona call ruined the pretext. If Pennsylvania had been the tipping point, they thought they could get the election thrown to the court. But the Arizona call combined with the undeclared result in Georgia preempted that.
So now the Trump team is falling back on sheer gall, breathtaking dishonesty, and gobsmacking insanity. Noah Rothman laid out the naked idiocy of what they’re trying to do. Sadly, he wrote his piece before Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell said, “Hold our beers.” The theory—theories? —they laid out yesterday made Billy Madison’s speech seem like the Gettysburg Address and Demosthenes’ Third Philippic rolled into one.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining why
any theory that hinges on the cutting-edge computer know-how of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela is going to have problems (see our fact checks here). I’ll just note that even if you sat there watching that thing and said, “This sounds plausible,” it doesn’t change the fact they offered no proof of what they were alleging. Nor have any of their lawyers when they have stood before a judge. On Twitter and in press conferences, Trump (and Trump World) are alleging world-historic crimes. In front of judges, their lawyers are muttering about Sharpies.
