No, I’m not talking about a contest for the 2024 GOP nomination.
In this posting, I’ll be talking about the conflict between Pence and Trump vis-a-vis overturning the 2020 election. Trump claims Pence could, and should, have done so; Pence says he couldn’t, and in any event, he didn’t. So who’s right? This is such a no-brainer it’s a school question, and we’re gonna have a little fun with it as if we’re in a high school debate class.
Trump continues to claim (a) he won the 2020 election, and (b) it was stolen with fraudulent votes. Because there’s no evidence of this, and it’s palpably untrue, the viable choices are he’s (i) delusional, or (ii) a liar. Given his track record, I opt for liar.
People with functioning brains and at least some capacity for logical thinking tackle a question like this by asking, what does the evidence say? But for three-fourths of Republicans, there doesn’t need to be any evidence, because they operate on an entirely different plane, one that has nothing to do with facts or logic. To understand them, you need to dig into the psychology of cults.
As for (b), I know how and why Trump and two-thirds of Republicans think the election was stolen from him with fraudulent votes. I won’t dignify their views on this by calling them it either reasoning or honest belief, but there’s a certain logic to it which I’ve previously explained here in a post I titled, “What fraud means to a Republican.”
Quite simply, in their minds, “Black votes are ‘fraudulent,’ and letting black people vote is ‘fraud.’ It’s as simple as the fact that 152 years after passage of the 14th amendment, Republicans still don’t look at black people as human beings with rights.”
We come now to this article in today’s AOL News, which says, “Mike Pence issued a forceful rebuke of Donald Trump on Friday, saying the former president is wrong to claim that Pence had the authority to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”
“President Trump is wrong,” Pence said in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society in Florida. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
He’s right, of course. Backing him up is the Constitution, the law, and the founding principle of our system of government, which is that power belongs to the people. At Gettysburg, Lincoln said the Civil War was fought so “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
On Tuesday, AOL News reports, Trump admitted he tried to convince Pence to “change the outcome” of the 2020 election; but, “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!’” What power was he talking about? A power for the vice president to sweep aside the votes of 155 million citizens and choose the president himself.
The idea that one person can set aside a national vote and dictate who will be president is nonsense. Nothing in the Constitution or laws supports that, and it’s contrary to our nation’s founding principles. So where does it come from? Not stated by Trump, but implicit in what he did say, is an imperious “because I said so.”
It makes no sense for the government to go to the enormous expense and trouble of holding a nationwide election, and collecting and counting 155 million votes, if the vice president or anyone else can disregard the results. No one who thinks about it for five seconds could possibly reach that conclusion, not honestly, anyway.
I think a big part of the problem is that Trump owned a business where he bossed people around and nobody ever challenged his authority. Businesses aren’t run like democracies, which is why businessmen often have trouble making the transition to public office. Trump didn’t even try. He tried to transplant his business dictatorship into the White House.
There’s further reason to believe Trump didn’t think this through. If it did work that way, then every vice president could do that; and come January 6, 2025, Kamala Harris could do what Trump wanted Pence to do. But don’t expect logical consistency from Trump La-La-Land; you’ll only tie your brain into knots. There’s no logic to any of this, only Trump’s selfish interests. In his world there’s no room for anything else. That’s why Mike Pence is shouting at the wind.