Chaos Was Trump’s Plan All Along

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, August 17, 2023

 

In any good mystery novel or short story, there is an item that will later reveal itself to the reader as a clue they should have seen all along. A tidbit hiding in plain sight that, in retrospect, is the key to solving the case. It could be a surreptitious whisper by one of the suspects, the style of shoes they wore, or an inconsistency about their whereabouts during the crime. (For instance, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” do you wonder why there is a bell cord in the victim’s room that isn’t attached to any bell? By the end of the story, Sherlock Holmes makes it all clear.)

 

One wouldn’t call Donald Trump a mystery, but when divining whether the former president knew he was intentionally creating a conspiracy to overturn a U.S. election, the evidence has always been there, plain as day.

 

As in any good whodunit, the clues were buried in a torrent of misdirection. Of course, picking out Trump statements that are truly shocking and noteworthy is difficult to do in real time, as once he utters an absurdity, he moves on to the next one before anyone can run to their computer to properly mock it. At one time, he’s suggesting he is singularly qualified to handle Covid-19 because he had an uncle who was a scientific genius. Then he’s suggesting that people cure Covid by injecting bleach. Or he’s proposing firing a nuclear weapon into a hurricane and correcting the Weather Service’s hurricane-path projections with a black Sharpie.

 

But there he was, in Oshkosh, Wis., in August of 2020, declaring that he could lose the presidential race in 2020 only if the election was “rigged.”

 

“We have to win the election,” Trump told his supporters at the outdoor campaign event. “We can’t play games. Go out and vote. Do those beautiful absentee ballots, or just make sure your vote gets counted. Make sure because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”

 

“Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election, so we have to be very careful,” he said, adding, “The only way they’re going to win is that way. And we can’t let that happen.”

 

Weeks later, Trump was asked whether he would commit to the peaceful transfer of power.

 

“Get rid of the ballots,” he said, and there would be a “very peaceful . . . continuation.”

 

“We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” he later said. “I don’t know that it can be with this whole situation — unsolicited ballots. They’re unsolicited; millions being sent to everybody. And we’ll see.”

 

He is talking, of course, about absentee ballots, a method of voting that spiked during Covid-19 and that he himself used.

 

These statements flew by the public consciousness, as he continued to say outlandish things that pulled our attention away. But there is absolutely no reason for a president to tell people that the only way he is going to lose is if there is fraud unless he is laying the groundwork to overturn the election. Presidential candidates never talk about what happens if they lose — they simply deflect and talk about what will happen when they win.

 

But by citing the absentee ballots, Trump attempted to create the suspicion of fraud before any existed, planting the pretext for his later claiming that the election was stolen and the justification for trying to overturn the results. And he had to start watering this poisonous vine before the election so his followers could have time to mobilize to carry out the plan.

 

This week, Trump’s preelection activities finally became part of the criminal proceedings against him. In her very first accusation against Trump, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis noted that four days before the election, Trump had discussed with an unindicted co-conspirator a draft speech that “falsely declared victory” and “falsely declared voter fraud.”

 

“The speech was an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy,” she concluded.

 

In other words, chaos was the plan all along.

 

Contrast Willis’s indictment with that of federal special counsel Jack Smith, which supposes that Trump decided to engage in criminal activity the moment he saw unfavorable vote counts. Smith’s indictment says, “Shortly after election day — which fell on November 3, 2020 — the defendant (Trump) launched his criminal scheme.”

 

But clearly, Trump had been slow-roasting this plan for months, given his statements well before Election Day. He had steeped his followers in the vote-fraud hoax throughout the campaign, hoping they would rally to his defense if he lost and complained about votes being stolen. Predictably, they did.

 

Many legal experts have said Smith’s federal indictment is weakened by the fact that in order to show Trump “lied” to animate his criminal conspiracy, prosecutors must first show that Trump did, in fact, believe that he had lost. In this respect, Trump’s defenders are relying on the George Costanza defense as articulated in Seinfeld: “Just remember . . . it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

 

There has been strong pushback to this argument, given that a sincere belief in a falsehood does not entitle one to engage in a criminal activity. (Of course, one does have a constitutionally protected right to lie, but those protections do not allow one to lie in the act of committing fraud. There’s a new HBO series about telemarketing scams in which the callers raise millions of dollars by falsely telling people that they are raising money for police organizations — those lies are criminal acts.)

 

But Willis’s indictment clears the mens rea bar by showing that Trump wasn’t simply reacting to election results he sincerely believed were unfair — he was enacting a conspiracy he had planned well in advance of the election. He spent months on the campaign trail priming his supporters for operation Imaginary Voter Fraud, and, the day after the election, he lit the fuse.

 

Prior to the election, Trump knew the statements he would be making would be bogus. He didn’t know what specific claims he would be making before he made them; he just knew that he would one day claim voter fraud. And that the specific details would all be determined at a later date.

 

And why wouldn’t he run with this conspiracy? Trump has never been held accountable for anything in his life. He knew that, if he was charged with a crime, he could always run for president, say it’s politically motivated, and soak people to pay for his legal defense.

 

In fact, his current campaign is largely a scam, as it exists to raise money to cover his legal bills. So far, the PAC supporting Trump has spent $27 million — or 30 percent of all the money it has raised — on Trump’s defense, which is just beginning. It is a legal-defense fund with a candidate attached to it, not the other way around.

 

But now America is treated to a leading presidential candidate who has to run his campaign while out on bail in four jurisdictions, whose primary defense is that he is just as ignorant and thickheaded as he believes his supporters to be. While asking for another term in office, he is continuing to act as if he is ignorant enough to believe every deranged, disproven election-fraud theory that exists.

 

And if he were to break character, it would ruin his defense. Thus, Trump must stay in the role, as if he is a method actor playing a buffoon. He is Daniel Day-Clueless.

 

That Trump knows that his election claims are lies has been obvious all along. He told us months in advance. We didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to piece this together for us — but it remains to be seen whether a jury in D.C or Atlanta will.