I usually open this column with some funny anecdote or a little quip to get you hooked into the story I’m about to tell. But with only 17 days left until one of the most significant elections in United States history, I’m all business.
This article and the next will be my last two before the election, and I wanted to dedicate each to one of two threats against our country that we can directly influence and prevent with our civic participation.
Today’s will be America’s public enemy number one: former President Donald J. Trump.
It may seem like I’m bloviating or stretching the truth when I use such harsh words. But even if we ignore his heinous actions like being convicted of embezzling campaign funds as hush money or admitting his attraction to his own daughter, the story of Jan. 6, 2021 is the nail in the coffin for the treasonous person that is the Republican presidential nominee.
To summarize the story into four words: Trump attempted a coup. The story of how exactly he tried to do so involves hundreds of characters, thousands of legal papers and a few good guys who saved us.
The most important part of his strategy, his ace in the hole, is where we begin.
By now, we’re hopefully familiar with the electoral college, in which a set of electors represents the popular vote winner of each state. And upon realizing Trump might lose the 2020 election, he and his acquaintances used this system to hatch a theory.
The Vice President has two explicit jobs granted by the Constitution, one of them being presiding over the counting of electoral ballots in presidential elections. So, in 2020, if Mike Pence had the ability to decide whether electoral ballots were approved, what stopped him from approving fake electoral ballots?
Damningly, Republicans in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin soon individually met to falsify ballots after election day before sending them to Washington, D.C.
The next part of our story is the more public part. We remember the cries of “election fraud!” and “stop the count!” We saw Trump bring 64 court cases of voter fraud after election day. We saw half of the Department of Justice threaten to resign if Trump appointed Jeffrey Clark, someone who promised to use the DOJ to overturn the 2020 election.
All of these examples were proven false at the time and continue to be proven false today. Yet we still hear them.
Trump attempted to undermine American trust in the voting system — and he succeeded.
That brings us to the last part of the story: Jan. 6, 2021. The day the electoral votes were to be certified by Pence.
Remember that the alternate ballots are there. Remember that there’s no trust in the voting system. So Trump, aware of all of these things, holds a rally right next to the U.S. Capitol, where the vote certification takes place.
Trump, knowing that the courts won’t overturn the election, relies on Pence as the last chance to keep him in power. So he encourages his rally-goers to “soon be marching over to the Capitol.” He tells the rally goers, and all of America, “because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.”
Pence does the right thing and accepts the real electoral votes instead of the fake ones.
And just like that, the U.S. Capitol gets breached. A gallows is erected, with chants to “hang Mike Pence.” Bombs were planted, and both rioters and law enforcement died. Trump sat and watched on TV. He said Pence “deserves” it.
The punch line of this story? Naturally, it’s to ask what any of this may have to do with us.
Trump is not fit to be president. He attempted a coup, and Americans died because of it. He bred distrust in our system, distrust we’re still feeling today. He committed treason, yet he still walks free as the Republican nominee to become President of the United States.
This is not a time to be complicit and watch America’s very foundation wither away at the hands of one man. Everything I described above was only when he was four years deep into politics. What would he do if he became president?
