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Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is being lauded as the most patient man in America after listening to Donald Trump alternate between whining, threatening, pleading, and mocking him for over an hour on Saturday afternoon.
On the recorded call, Raffensperger, a Republican who threatened criminal charges against volunteers who brought water to Georgia voters waiting in hours-long lines at the polls in November, sounds like he expects Ashton Kutcher to unmute himself at any moment and shout PUNK’D.
For Trump, who is living in a fantasy world mashup of Fyre Festival and a Walmart parking lot at 2 am, watching far-right NewsMax media and Tweeting unfounded claims that are quickly tagged by Twitter leadership as “fraudulent,” it was just another weekend. After all, this is a man who surrounds himself with people like conservative medical malpractice attorney Lin Wood, who insists that Mike Pence will face a firing squad for treason and that Supreme Court Justice, John Roberts, continues to eat children.
Some highlights of the recorded call include Trump referring to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp as “George.” Additionally, Trump informs the Secretary of State that he won Georgia by “500,000 votes,” while making vague criminal threats to Raffensperger — and his attorney—and insisting Georgia’s ballots, which have been counted and recounted multiple times, as well as publicly audited, are fraudulent.
Trump also mentioned Stacey Abrams, Beloved Shero of Black Voter Engagement. “Stacey Abrams is laughing and she’s going around saying these guys are dumber than rocks,” Trump said, once again proving his unique capacity to accidentally stumble upon the right conclusions. “What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you.”
In response, Ms. Abrams, a grassroots organizer and coalition builder focused on engaging Black communities in Georgia and across the country, turned the focus back to the citizens. “It’s always a difficult and terrible thing when elected officials will lie in order to win,” Abrams said. “The average person understands this is a last ditch attempt to stay in power. But the real issue is who’s going to look out for our families, ensure we have COVID relief, that we have jobs, that we have a real recovery.”
The phone call, which violates several ethical principles of democracy and potentially crosses into criminal territory, is Trump’s latest move to ignore the will of the 78 million citizens who decisively repudiated him on November 3. Once again, the future ex-president proved there’s no norm he won’t violate, no loophole he won’t exploit, and no political precedent he won’t ignore for his benefit. At least Richard Nixon, who, like Trump, faced impeachment and had his own Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal, created the Environmental Protection Agency during his presidency.
Trump’s own legacy includes:
- separating children from their asylum-seeking parents,
- forcibly sterilizing Brown women,
- ignoring a viral pandemic that has killed over 350,000 Americans,
- multiple attempts to revoke Obamacare,
- serving McDonald’s to college football players,
- posing for pictures with Indigenous leaders in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, holding superspreader events,
- using his position to promote Goya beans,
- being snubbed by world leaders,
- asking other countries to interfere with our elections,
- trying to deter immigrants from “shithole countries,”
- paying off a sex worker for an encounter just after his 5th child’s birth,
- losing the popular vote twice,
- hypnotizing Republicans to do his bidding,
- undermining social support programs that help veterans and children,
- awarding Devin Nunes and Jim Jones the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
- criminalizing the tearing down of racist ass monuments,
- canceling diversity education programs that address our country’s long history of racism,
- lying about his friendship with child sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — and losing over 80 lawsuits that he and his sycophants brought following the 2020 election in which he did not even receive 48% of the popular vote.
January 20 — and a presidency in which the people need not know Georgia’s Secretary of State by name — cannot come fast enough.