By John
McCormack
Thursday,
May 25, 2023
Elections are
supposed to be about the future, but Donald Trump is stuck in the past. He is
dead set on running for president in 2024 by campaigning on the very worst part
of his record.
In his much-hyped
return to the mainstream media, a CNN town hall on May 11, Trump doubled down
on his claims that millions of fraudulent votes were the cause of his defeat in
2020. He said he had no regrets about his behavior before and during the
Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and that he does not owe Mike Pence an apology
for ordering him to flout the Constitution and the federal law governing the
counting of Electoral College votes. He recast his December 2022 endorsement of
the “termination” of the Constitution when there is voter fraud as “cherishing”
the Constitution. He said that if elected in 2024, he would pardon many of
those convicted for illegally storming the Capitol, and he even left open the
possibility of pardoning leaders of the far-right extremist group the Proud
Boys who were recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for spearheading the
attack on the Capitol.
But two
and a half years after the 2020 election, the voter-fraud theories on which the
“stop the steal” campaign was based look weaker than ever.
In
November 2020, Trump and his allies eventually settled on the wild theory that
Dominion voting machines had been programmed to “say that a Biden vote counts
as 1.25, and a Trump vote counts as 0.75,” as Trump lawyer Sidney Powell said
at the time. “The algorithm was likely run across the country to affect the
entire election.” On January 6, in the speech he delivered near the White
House, Trump promoted the Dominion conspiracy theory. But by then it had
already been disproved by a hand recount in Georgia. Each voter used a touch
screen to print out a paper ballot that stated in plain text the names of the
candidates a voter selected. During the hand recount, with bipartisan election
observers present, human beings read those ballots and sorted them into “Trump”
and “Biden” piles. There was no way for those people to count a Trump or a
Biden paper ballot as anything less or more than one vote. In other words, if
there had been a systemic problem with the machine-counting of the ballots, the
hand recount would have caught it.
In April
of this year, the Dominion conspiracy theory received a final blow with the
resolution of the company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The truth is
an absolute defense against defamation, but the network settled with Dominion —
after the process of legal discovery — for $787 million. Trump is unlikely to
repeat the specific claims he made about Dominion while in office because he
would open himself up to civil liability as a private citizen; he is likely
protected from any personal liability for defamatory statements made while
president. That’s one reason why he has shifted to a different voter-fraud
theory.
“If you
look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government
cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes,” Trump told Kaitlan Collins,
the moderator of the CNN town hall. This is the claim at the center of the
Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, released in May 2022,
and it is a claim you’re likely to hear a lot more from the 2024 GOP
front-runner over the course of the next year.
***
True the
Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit, claims that by purchasing geo-location
cellphone-tracking data it uncovered an elaborate scheme to steal the election.
The scheme involved at least 2,000 people — the “mules” — who trafficked
fraudulent ballots from liberal nonprofits to ballot drop boxes in the five key
states that decided the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
and Arizona. True the Vote says it has obtained 4 million minutes — nearly
70,000 hours — of surveillance video of the drop boxes; the documentary shows a
number of people dropping off a handful of ballots. “What you’re seeing is a
crime: These are fraudulent votes,” D’Souza tells viewers as surveillance video
shows one person dropping off a handful of ballots.
According
to True the Vote, its criteria for detecting each of the “2,000 mules” is a
cellphone that over the course of the month leading up to the election made at
least five visits near a nonprofit and ten visits near different drop boxes.
The organization estimates that the 2,000 mules made an average of 38 trips
each to drop boxes, depositing an average of five ballots per trip, for a total
of 380,000 fraudulent votes spread across the five states. In the documentary,
D’Souza then runs the numbers: Without these ballots, Biden would still have
won Michigan and Wisconsin, but Trump would have narrowly prevailed in the
Electoral College by eking out wins in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
For a
conspiracy so vast, the outcome seems a little underwhelming: Subtracting the
alleged voter fraud facilitated by the supposed 2,000 mules would have given
Trump a victory of just one-third of one percentage point in Arizona and
Georgia, and the conspirators would not have been confident in advance that a
small number of votes would deliver the election to Biden. But D’Souza has a
solution to bolster the theory: more mules. “No one thinks that our 2,000 mules
were the only mules trafficking illegal votes,” he tells viewers. Taking
D’Souza up on this proposition, True the Vote then lowers the threshold for
determining who was a mule, counting cellphones that were detected near a
minimum of five drop boxes rather than the original ten. “This revealed a huge
upsurge in the number of mules, from 2,000 to 54,000 mules,” D’Souza says.
Voilà! Without the 54,000 mules, Trump would have handily won each of the five
states.
D’Souza
told me he was too busy to grant an interview for this article, and a spokesman
for True the Vote also did not accept an interview request. So I can’t be sure
why the movie is not called “54,000 Mules,” but I suspect it is because that
title would have made the biggest flaws in the conspiracy theory even more
glaring.
Despite
the supposed existence of 54,000 illegal-ballot traffickers who placed
fraudulent ballots at multiple drop boxes, D’Souza and True the Vote have
publicly named precisely none of them. Trump’s political operation, flush with
tens of millions of dollars, has identified no mules. Republican attorneys
general in Arizona and Georgia, desperate for Trump’s support, have been able
to expose not a single mule. According to True the Vote’s anonymous sources,
the mules are criminals working for $10 a ballot. To evade public detection
over the past three years, these 54,000 petty criminals must somehow have
maintained operational security and secrecy that would put SEAL Team Six to
shame.
Despite
the 70,000 hours of surveillance footage, the documentary does not
actually show a single person making more than one trip to a ballot
drop box. If there were 54,000 mules — or even just 2,000 — shouldn’t the
footage have detected hundreds of them?
In the
year since the documentary was released, some individuals shown dropping off a
handful of ballots at a single drop box have been publicly
identified by their vehicles’ license plates, but there is no evidence that
they acted illegally. The Georgia secretary of state’s office investigated
three cases and dismissed each of them. In one case, an investigator tracked
down a man seen in the film dropping off five ballots and was able to interview
him and confirm by consulting voter data that the ballots had been cast legally
by his family members. It is permitted in Georgia and many states to drop off
the ballots of family members.
***
According to 2000
Mules, five left-leaning nonprofits filled out a million or more fraudulent
ballots. For these ballots to count, the nonprofits would have needed to
identify hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote and to know in
advance that they would not actually cast ballots. Tellingly, the documentary
and True the Vote have not publicly named these nonprofits.
In
August 2022, D’Souza was set to publish a book based on 2000 Mules in
which he did name the nonprofits, but his publisher, Regnery, claiming a
“publishing error,” pulled the book from stores before it went on sale. “True
the Vote had no participation in this book, and has no knowledge of its
contents,” the group said in a statement to NPR at the time. “This includes any
allegations of activities of any specific organizations made in the book. We
made no such allegations.” When Regnery released D’Souza’s book two months
later, the passage naming the nonprofits had been excised, according to an NPR
reporter who had obtained a copy of the first version of the book.
What
about the geo-location data? Even if the purported data show exactly what True
the Vote claims, it does not prove a conspiracy. It’s entirely plausible that
Uber drivers or deliverymen would come within 100 feet of ten different drop
boxes over the course of a month. FactCheck.org reported that activists and
politicians in some states held get-out-the-vote rallies at multiple drop-box
locations. “The premise that if you go by a box, five boxes, or whatever it
was, you know that that’s a mule is just indefensible,” Trump’s attorney
general Bill Barr said in testimony to the January 6 Committee. The
geo-location data “didn’t establish widespread illegal harvesting.”
The
Georgia Bureau of Investigation observed in September 2021 that, because there
was no “other kind of evidence that connects these cell phones to ballot
harvesting,” it lacked probable cause to open an investigation or get a search
warrant to obtain the geo-location cellphone data: “For example, there are no
statements of witnesses and no names of any potential defendants to interview.
Saliently, it has been stated that there is ‘a source’ that can validate
ballot-harvesting. Despite repeated requests that source has not been provided
to either the GBI or to the FBI.”
The
conspiracy at the heart of 2000 Mules looks even more
preposterous when one examines the election results in Pennsylvania. The movie
claims that mules were responsible for 275,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia
alone (under the theory that there were only 2,000 mules in the five states).
That would mean that nearly half of all votes cast for Biden in Philadelphia —
and a majority of all mail ballots — were fraudulent, without anyone’s having
detected the widespread fraud in real time. In 2020, Donald Trump’s margin in
Philadelphia actually increased by nearly four percentage points over 2016,
when Pennsylvania did not allow ballot drop boxes. While Trump carried
Pennsylvania in 2016, he managed to lose it in 2020 because Biden did better
than Hillary Clinton with white voters statewide.
In the
end, the 2020 election was as simple as that. Trump improved his performance
among minority voters nationwide but lost the Electoral College by sliding
among white voters. It was not fraudulent vote dumps in America’s inner cities
that cost him the election.
***
Those who
understand why the 2020 conspiracy theories are false may find it exhausting to
present the truth, fact by fact, but that task is important. Trump’s insistence
on debunked voter-fraud claims has major implications for the country’s present
and its future.
In
ordinary circumstances, Trump’s loss in 2020 would be politically poisonous for
him as he sought the 2024 GOP nomination. But by making it an article of faith
among many GOP activists and voters that he really did win the 2020 election,
he has made it harder for his rivals to attack him over his biggest
vulnerabilities. But by indulging Trump’s voter-fraud conspiracies, another GOP
candidate will seem weak and submissive — as if aiming to be Trump’s running
mate instead of president. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes — that
Trump really did lose in 2020 to a doddering old man who campaigned from his
basement — is probably the wiser course, but a successful Republican challenger
would find a way to make that point without sounding like a resistance warrior
on MSNBC.
Trump’s
obsession with 2020 could matter far beyond the 2024 primary, of course. The
2022 midterm results showed that swing voters were repelled by candidates who
embraced Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign; but if he wins the nomination and
the general election, January 6 would serve as a litmus test for cabinet
secretaries and lower-level Trump-administration staffers. Anyone who served in
the first Trump administration and was publicly horrified by January 6 — an
official such as Attorney General Bill Barr — would be persona non grata in a
second Trump administration. Few officials who were horrified by Trump’s
postelection conduct would want to serve under Trump anyway. A second Trump
administration would have to scrape the very bottom of the staffing barrel.
And if
he becomes the 2024 GOP nominee and loses again, it’s reasonable to assume that
Trump would again try to overturn the election result through extraordinary
measures. True, the system held in 2020, and a reform of the Electoral Count
Act that passed in 2022 reinforced it. Trump would not have the powers of a
sitting president. And in the states that will very likely decide the 2024
election, Trump will not have lackeys serving as governor, who play a key role
in certifying Electoral College results. Republican Brian Kemp, who stood up to
Trump’s efforts to overturn the Electoral College results in 2020, will still
hold the governorship in Georgia, while Democrats will hold that post in
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. But even a failed attempt — a second one,
no less — by Trump and other political elites to overturn the decision of the
voters would undermine the foundation of our democratic republic.
None of
this, of course, is a future the country or the Republican Party is destined to
face if enough primary voters simply choose to rally behind one other
Republican presidential candidate.
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