ELECTIONS
MAGA activists plot revenge on Republican
‘traitors’
The swift move to vengeance offers a preview of how
Trump and his MAGA community plan to reshape the GOP in the coming months.
By TINA
NGUYEN
01/05/2021
04:30 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/05/maga-trump-revenge-republican-traitors-454924
MAGA
figureheads and pro-Trump activists are vowing to excommunicate Republicans who
vigorously oppose the doomed effort to keep President Donald Trump in power.
The threats
have played out in recent days with Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger, who was once seen as a possible ally in Trump’s efforts to
overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the swing state. But Raffensperger
has consistently refused to validate Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims, and
on Saturday, he bluntly told the president the rigged-election theories were
simply wrong. After a recording of the Saturday call leaked to the press, the
MAGA world erupted with incandescent range.
“A national
security threat,” proclaimed Charlie Kirk, MAGA youth leader and Turning Point
USA co-founder. “Brad Raffensperger should immediately be investigated.”
In the
coming days, that MAGA revenge complex could target everyone from low-level
members of Congress to Vice President Mike Pence, as Congress meets on Jan. 6
to formally certify Biden’s victory. “Republicans,” Trump warned on Twitter,
“NEVER FORGET!” speaking to lawmakers who have said they will not oppose
Biden’s certification. And Trump allies are plotting to fund potential pro-MAGA
primary challengers to oust those disloyal Republicans.
“We’ll put
some money behind” trying to oust these Republicans, said Alex Bruesewitz, one
of the organizers of Stop the Steal, an organization linked to high-profile
MAGA personalities that is helping organize a major Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally in
Washington.
The swift
move to vengeance offers a preview of how Trump and his MAGA community plan to
reshape the GOP in the coming months — creating Trump loyalty tests for
Republicans, then working to evict anyone who doesn’t fall in line. The goal is
to identify those who are most worthy of inheriting the MAGA base with Trump
out of office. But the result may be that no one except Trump can rally the
MAGA coalition.
“I think
that Trump and his supporters in the base, or his supporters in the Republican
Party, are going to continue to be a big part of the party for the foreseeable
future, including in 2022,” said Alex Conant, a GOP political consultant and
the former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential
campaign. “Most congressmen don't wake up in the morning worried about their
general election. They worry about their primary.”
At the
moment, Trump is focused on eviscerating Raffensperger, who has rebuffed
Trump’s attempts to subvert the Georgia election results — and so, too, is his
base.
While
Trump’s allies launched a normal fusillade of personal attacks against
Raffensperger — GOP strategist Karl Rove called him “anti-Republican” — they
also called for criminal charges. Some suggested it had been illegal for the
call to be recorded, even though Georgia law only requires one party in a
conversation to consent to an audio recording. Others went further.
“Traitors
in our midst,” tweeted Chanel Rion, White House correspondent at the pro-Trump
outlet OAN, along with the hashtag “#InvestigateRaffensperger.”
Next, MAGA
attention will focus on Capitol Hill, where Congress will meet on Jan. 6 in a
joint session to formally certify November’s presidential election. Pence will
oversee the proceedings as vice president. Historically, the gathering is an
afterthought, a noncontroversial rubber stamp on an already settled outcome.
But in the
Trump era, the president, scores of Republicans and throngs of his supporters
are insisting that lawmakers should refuse to sign off on the results,
incorrectly arguing that the election was rigged.
Trump-supporting
entities are trying to concoct novel constitutional powers that Pence could
wield at the last minute from his largely ministerial perch, which mostly
involves opening the envelopes with each state’s Electoral College votes, and
then handing them to a secretary for recording. Alexander Macris, a video game
writer who became known for his role in Gamergate, the online harassment
campaign targeting women, suggested in a viral essay that Pence could
re-interpret the 1877 Electoral Count Act in a way that would allow him to
simply not count the votes.
Edward
Foley, the director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University,
flatly rejected the interpretation.
“I mean, it
was raised in the 19th century, but it’s never been accepted in the sense that
the Supreme Court's never adopted it. It's never even prevailed at Congress,”
he said.
That hasn’t
stopped pro-Trump outlets like The Gateway Pundit from making tantalizing
offers directed at Pence.“Pence can place himself in the history books
alongside Thomas Jefferson or he can sign off on the destruction of the United
States as we know it,” read an op-ed on the site.
Others have
traded carrots for sticks: Prominent conspiratorial-minded figures, such as
pro-Trump Georgia lawyer Lin Wood, claimed that Pence could be arrested, tried
for treason and executed by firing squad if he did not act on Trump’s behalf.
And out in the wilds of the QAnon conspiracy community, the process might not
even matter: Pence, some argued, might be a body double, put in place by a
Satanic cabal to further its plots.
Lawmakers
in Congress, meanwhile, have different concerns on their hands: Many will soon
seek reelection. And for a certain brand of politician, going MAGA is the
safest bet.
“Most of
these people that won during the [2020] primaries, they said, ‘I'm the most
like Trump.’ And that's why most of them won their primaries,” said Breusewitz,
the Stop the Steal organizer. “And so if they go back, the voters will hold
them accountable.”
Perhaps
conscious of this, several newly-minted representatives have vowed to keep
resisting even after Biden is sworn in. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) pledged
to push for a commission to investigate the election. Others are planning to be
among those protesting in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6. Reps. Marjorie Taylor
Greene and Lauren Boebert, who both gained notoriety for promoting QAnon
conspiracies earlier in their political careers, are scheduled to speak at the
rally.
As for
those who don’t sufficiently fight against Biden’s inauguration, Bruesewitz has
promised they will be punished.
“When we
say every Republican that does not stand strong with the president will get a
primary challenger, that does not mean we believe that we can beat every single
one of them,” he said. “But what it means is we will make them spend their
money. And we will urge their donors to not support them.”
Even with
at least 140 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans vowing to oppose
certification on Wednesday, Congress will still sign off on Biden’s win. Only a
simple congressional majority is needed to formalize the results, which is all
but guaranteed given the current makeup of Congress. And Pence himself has
remained chilly on the topic, with a spokesperson saying that while the vice
president backed the lawmaker’s right to object, it was up to them to actually
prove fraud.
For the
majority of Republicans, Conant argued, “This effort to undermine the integrity
of the election will only help Joe Biden. And I say that because it'll leave
Biden's opposition in Congress divided and many Republicans defending a very
unpopular position.”
Still, for
the right type of Republican, a vast MAGA empire is within reach: Trump’s
fundraising numbers skyrocketed after the election, as his campaign solicited
donations to fight nebulous voter-fraud allegations. Tapping into that energy
could give the most fervent MAGA Republicans a boost in the coming years.
But, as
Conant noted, that only works if Trump stays involved in Republican races
around the country — far from a certainty once he leaves the White House.
“I suppose
if Trump made his life mission to defeat everyone that wasn't loyal with him
until the very end, maybe it could have an impact,” Conant said. “Just count me
skeptical that he's going to spend the next two years playing in Republican
primary politics, when he never showed that much of an interest in doing that
when he was president.”
Still, Breusewitz,
the Stop the Steal organizer, argued Republican voters are now solidly aligned
with Trump.
“Republican
voters want to see the party grow in a direction towards the president’s, and
continue with the ‘America First’ and the MAGA movement,” he said.
'Fight like hell': grievance and denialism rule
at Trump Georgia rally
Unrepentant president urges voters to support
Republicans in the Senate runoffs on Tuesday and veers off script with bogus
claims of a stolen election
David Smith
in Dalton, Georgia
@smithinamerica
Tue 5 Jan
2021 05.51 GMTLast modified on Tue 5 Jan 2021 09.45 GMT
An
unrepentant Donald Trump has urged voters in Georgia to back Republicans in
Tuesday’s Senate runoffs and vowed revenge against Republican state officials
who refuse to overturn his own defeat.
On a chilly
night at a remote airport in Dalton, the US president mercilessly aggravated
divisions within his own party, embracing loyalists and castigating perceived
traitors. While it was ostensibly a campaign rally on behalf of Senate
candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, he could not resist veering off
script to push bogus claims of a stolen election.
“We won the
presidential election, we won it big,” Trump falsely told a sympathetic crowd, “and
we’re going to win tomorrow”. Loeffler duly joined him on stage and promised to
join a dozen other Republican senators objecting to Joe Biden’s electoral
college win on Wednesday.
Trump noted
that the press “didn’t like” a Saturday phone call in which he can be heard
badgering Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” enough
votes to thwart Biden’s victory there. He promised to punish Raffensperger and
state governor Brian Kemp, also a Republican.
“Your
governor, your secretary of state are petrified of Stacey Abrams,” he said,
referring to a Democratic voting rights activist who lost to Kemp in 2018.
“What’s all that about? They’re say they’re Republicans. I really don’t think
they can be.”
The
president added ominously: “I’m going to be back here in a year-and-a-half and
I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of
state.”
Control of
the Senate depends on Tuesday’s elections in Georgia and it remains unclear
whether Trump’s scattergun interventions will help or hurt the Republicans’
cause against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
His
relentless war on the integrity of the election has triggered party infighting
and fears that some disillusioned voters may stay away from what they regard as
a broken system. His potentially illegal phone call to Raffensperger, revealed
on Sunday, could cause further damage and fire up Democrats.
Trump
sought to resolve the contradictions by arguing: “You must deliver a Republican
victory so big the Democrats can’t steal it or cheat it away.”
But he went
on to spend less time on Loeffler and Perdue’s merits than his own sense of
grievance and denialism, reeling off a long list of numbers that he claimed
showed he was robbed of victory in Georgia. The state counted its votes three
times before certifying Biden’s win by a 11,779 margin. Officials found no
significant irregularities.
More than
once, Trump read from a script that implied Senate wins are vital to keep a
president Biden in check, only to break off and deny Biden’s legitimacy.
“They’re not taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell.”
He also
repeatedly claimed that he had won Georgia in 2016 and did so again by an even
bigger margin in 2020. “There’s no way we lost Georgia. This was a rigged
election. We’re still fighting it.”
Previewing
Wednesday’s meeting of Congress to ratify the electoral college vote, he said
of Mike Pence, the vice president who will oversee proceedings: “I hope Mike
Pence comes through for us.”
Dozens of
Trump campaign lawsuits have been tossed by courts including the supreme court.
Trump complained: “I’m not happy with the supreme court. They are not stepping
up to the plate.”
Trump flew
to the venue on his Marine One helicopter, greeted by cheers for what was
possibly his last rally as president. Tents outside sold “Stop the steal” flags
and shirts. At the small regional airport, two giant US flags hung from cranes,
with numerous more flags dotted around the makeshift arena. Two big video
screens displayed the message: “Save the Senate & Save America.”
The crowd
was warmed up with familiar Trump rally music, some of which gained new
poignancy. Queen’s lyrics, “We are the champions, no times for losers” was
immediately followed by Frank Sinatra’s “And now, the end is near, and so I
face the final curtain ...”
Perdue
could not attend because he is in quarantine after coming into contact with
someone who has Covid-19 but he sent a video message. Trump and other speakers
warned that victories for Ossoff and Warnock would send America down a path of
far-left socialism.
The
president’s eldest son, Don Jr, urged: “Don’t let Georgia be the starting point
for the radical left in the United States Senate because that’s who they’re
running. There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat. That party is long
gone. It’s now a Marxist socialist party, a communist party.”
Don Jr
warned against Republican apathy because of the current election disputes,
suggesting that taking their ball home and not voting “would be the dumbest
statement in the history of politics”. He pleaded: “Guys, when you’re at a
disadvantage, you don’t take your ball home. You fight harder!” His voice
cracked with fury on the final word.
The crowd
chanted: “Fight! Fight!”
There were
also speeches by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and new congresswoman Marjorie Taylor
Greene, who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. She said:
“We’re not going to let Georgia go to two radical socialists.”
Some
attendees wore masks but many did not and there was little physical distancing
and little concern about Trump’s explosive call with Raffensperger.
Clayton
Bentley, 60, a retired fraud investigator from Rome, Georgia, was wearing a
blue “Trump: Keep America great” cap and tucking into a big bag of popcorn. “I
know Trump was only asking about the things going on here,” he said. “He said
all I need is 11,000 votes. I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing.
“He was
saying let’s get to the truth and let’s do what’s right to get to the bottom of
it. I feel that phone call was fine. He’s the president; he should be able to
call anybody.”
Janie
Lopez, 42, a counsellor from San Benito, Texas, agreed: “He wants to make sure
they cross the i’s and dot the t’s and this is the final count. He wants to
make sure this is a fair election.”
Lopez, the
daughter of Mexican immigrants, added: “I believe he won the election. How many
past presidents have run for a second term and lost? It doesn’t happen often.”
Susan Huff,
77, also felt that a Trump defeat did not make sense. “I do believe Trump was
cheated out of the win. You can’t have 73m votes and not win. You can’t have
rallies like this and not win. Something went wrong somewhere. I’ll always
believe that.”
Huff, a
retired school teacher wearing a red “Make America great again” cap,
acknowledged that Trump’s attempts to discredit the process could deter Republicans
from voting in the Senate runoffs.
“Some
people have said because of the election in November they won’t come out to
vote. But I hope they understand that if they don’t vote to get these people
in, we’re in big trouble. I don’t want socialism in our country: the only
people who make money are the ones at the top.”
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