Donald Trump adopts Joseph Stalin’s approach to stealing elections
In a speech given to a group of Republican National Committee donors earlier this month, Donald Trump adopted Joseph Stalin’s philosophy about elections; or to be more accurate, about stealing elections.
After treating the crowd to a replay of 2020 Election Theatre, where he won the election in a landslide, Trump channeled his inner Stalin when he suggested that Republicans would win more elections if they were the ones counting the votes (via BusinessInsider.com):
Former President Donald Trump during a Saturday speech to Republican National Committee donors continued to relitigate the 2020 election, arguing that Republicans needed to get “tougher” at the ballot box, according to The Washington Post.
“The vote counter is often more important than the candidate,” Trump reportedly said, adding that he picked up the concept from conservative radio host Mark Levin. “We have to get a lot tougher and smarter at the polls.”
He then leaned into his election fraud theories, stating that Republicans needed to be more vigilant about the tabulation process, despite there being no evidence of widespread election malfeasance in 2020. (emphasis mine)
Joseph Stalin has been credited with saying, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” Clearly, Trump was suggesting the same thing.
Donald Trump’s adoption of Joseph Stalin’s approach to stealing elections is simply the latest example of the lengths he’s prepared to go to feed his egomaniacal narcissism.
Back in January, we learned that among the records Donald Trump’s lawyers were attempting to withhold from Jan. 6 investigators was a draft of an executive order to stage a military coup to allow him to remain in power.
Though never issued, the order along with an accompanying document titled “Remarks on National Healing” showed the lengths Trump was prepared to go to steal the 2020 election, and taken together, the two documents point to how crazy things were getting during his final weeks in office.
The draft executive order was dated Dec.16, 2020, and is consistent with advice Trump received from lawyer Sidney Powell. This was followed by a Dec. 18, 2020 meeting between Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office.
In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios. Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn were both present at the meeting.
A month prior to the meeting, Trump pretended to disavow Sidney Powell for spreading QAnon’s conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen. In a desperate attempt to get back into Trump’s good graces, Powell promised to turn the tide in Trump’s favor and “release the Kraken” — a reference to her alleged mountain of evidence — against Trump’s political enemies.
When it came time to deliver, Powell’s “Kraken” was just another failed QAnon conspiracy theory.
Still, Powell and fellow QAnon nutjob Michael Flynn were pushing the idea of launching a military coup a few weeks prior to the meeting, and they called Trump to “temporarily suspend the Constitution,” put the country under martial law, and “set up military tribunals” to investigate the election using the Insurrection Act.
Desperate to remain in office and running out of options, Trump latched on to the idea and welcomed Powell back into his company of crazies.
Trump’s suggestion of giving Powell a top position to investigate the election seemed extreme even to the most devout members of the cult, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from a man with dictatorial ambitions; especially since he and Powell had been in constant contact with each other when plans for launching a military coup was being developed.
According to Trump, this little get-together had nothing to do with martial law, a military coup, or appointing Sidney Powell as special counsel, but if his denials were true, why did he retweet people who called for martial law? Why did he hold this strategy meeting at the White House? Why were the two leading advocates of a military coup to steal the election (Powell and Flynn) invited to attend?
These unanswered questions had many top-level officials extremely concerned that Trump was considering such a power grab in his attempt to overturn the election and remain in power (via Axios):
Their fears include Trump’s interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance.
A senior administration official said that when Trump is “retweeting threats of putting politicians in jail, and spends his time talking to conspiracy nuts who openly say declaring martial law is no big deal, it’s impossible not to start getting anxious about how this ends.”
“People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” the official added. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.”
Even after Biden’s victory, Trump, egged on by supporters like Sidney Powell, refused to concede. Instead, he holed up inside the White House as he continued to assert that he actually won the election and eventually led his army of cultists in a last-ditch effort to establish his dictatorship with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Speaking of the January 6 attack, a federal judge said in a ruling yesterday that Trump “likely” broke federal law while trying to overturn the election results.
Donald Trump and attorney John Eastman “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” US District Judge David Carter wrote. “Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory.”
There can be no doubt that Donald Trump seeks absolute power at any cost, even if that cost means adopting Joseph Stalin’s philosophy about stealing elections.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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