As Trump Rails Against Loss, His Supporters
Become More Threatening
The president’s baseless claims of voting fraud have
prompted outrage among his loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats and
even some Republicans say has become dangerous.
By Nick
Corasaniti, Jim Rutenberg and Kathleen Gray
Dec. 8,
2020
Updated
10:05 p.m. ET
With a key
deadline passing Tuesday that all but ends his legal challenges to the
election, President Trump’s frenzied campaign to overturn the results has
reached an inflection point: Certified slates of electors to the Electoral
College are now protected by law, and any chance that a state might appoint a
different slate that is favorable to Mr. Trump is essentially gone.
Despite his
clear loss, Mr. Trump has shown no intention of stopping his sustained assault
on the American electoral process. But his baseless conspiracy theories about
voting fraud have devolved into an exercise in delegitimizing the election
results, and the rhetoric is accelerating among his most fervent allies. This
has prompted outrage among Trump loyalists and led to behavior that Democrats
and even some Republicans say has become dangerous.
Supporters
of the president, some of them armed, gathered outside the home of the Michigan
secretary of state Saturday night. Racist death threats filled the voice mail
of Cynthia A. Johnson, a Michigan state representative. Georgia election
officials, mostly Republicans, say they have received threats of violence. The
Republican Party of Arizona, on Twitter, twice called for supporters to be
willing to “die for something” or “give my life for this fight.”
“People on
Twitter have posted photographs of my house,” said Ann Jacobs, the chair of the
Wisconsin Elections Commission, who alerted her neighbors and the police about
the constant threats. She said another message mentioned her children and said,
“I’ve heard you’ll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door.”
Mr. Trump
himself has contacted numerous Republican state officials, pressing them to
help him overturn the election he clearly lost. He has subjected others to
repeated public shamings, lambasting governors to take action they are not
legally allowed to take to keep Mr. Trump in power.
But absent
a single significant victory in his dozens of lawsuits — and with a key defeat
delivered by the Supreme Court on Tuesday — the president’s crusade is now as
much a battle against the electoral process itself, as he seeks to cast doubt
on free and fair elections and undermine
Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he takes the oath of office.
“There is
long-term damage when this kind of behavior is normalized,” Jeff Flake, a
former Republican senator from Arizona, said on Twitter. “It is not normal, and
elected Republicans need to speak out against it.”
Last week,
a top Republican election official in Georgia, Gabriel Sterling, implored the
president to stop attacking the voting process in the state, saying it had
prompted threats against officials and poll workers.
Tuesday’s
procedural deadline, known as safe harbor, serves as something of a guarantee
that Congress must count the slate of electors certified by the deadline, and
acts as an accelerant to resolve any outstanding election disputes. It also
likely limits further legal challenges to halt or disrupt the official
certification of electoral votes that Mr. Biden needs to claim the presidency.
Many
Republican leaders in critical swing states are standing behind the president’s
false narrative, unwilling to contradict his claims. Along with the president,
their stance is further convincing tens of millions of Americans that the
electoral process is too corroded to legitimately deliver the presidency to
anyone whose name is not Trump.
Those
supporters have started to flood the voice mails, cellphones and inboxes of
dozens of elected officials across the country with angry messages and threats,
as well as countless officials who handle local elections. The tenor has seemed
to grow more menacing as Mr. Trump’s efforts appear even more unlikely to
succeed, some officials said.
“They’re
getting more angry, and we’ve been getting emails all the time, all hours of
the day and night,” said Jennifer O’Mara, a Democratic state representative in
Pennsylvania. She said her staff had been subjected to threats, as had her
Republican colleagues. “A lot of calls are saying we won’t be forgetting.”
Jocelyn
Benson, the secretary of state in Michigan, said she had just finished putting
up Christmas decorations with her 4-year-old son when she heard dozens of Trump
supporters shouting outside her home. Some chanted “Stop the Steal” and
demanded an audit of Michigan’s election results, which showed Mr. Biden
winning by roughly 154,000 votes.
“Ever since
the president first tweeted at me and every time there is an additional attempt
to spread false information, you see an uptick in the threats,” Ms. Benson said
in an interview on Tuesday. “And now apparently, they’re in front of my house,
in the dark of night, in this very private, quiet residential neighborhood. We
are concerned not only for the safety of my family, but my neighbors as well.
“This
challenging, divisive moment that we find ourselves in, the only way to get out
of it is for elected officials on both sides of the aisle to condemn what’s
happening.”
Malcolm
Kenyatta, a Democratic state representative from Pennsylvania, said he received
dozens of emails every day. “It’s a bit more pronounced when you’re Black and
queer like I am, that they go down the rabbit hole of parroting all the
nastiness and vitriol that we see from the president all the time,” he said.
He said one
person created a fake email address under his own name and then sent him
profane threats.
Darrin
Camilleri, a Democratic state representative in Michigan, said he had received
one email that said, “Be prepared to take your last meal,” and another that
read, “We’re looking forward to bring back firing squads.”
Mr.
Camilleri said his parents were also receiving harassing and threatening calls.
“We’ve sent more than 20 death threats to the House sergeants to look into,” he
said.
The safe
harbor deadline all but ensures Mr. Biden will receive the 270 votes in the
Electoral College he needs to win the presidency, and most likely wind up with
306, the same total Mr. Trump won in 2016 (two defected, however). Though
Congress will determine which states meet the safe harbor deadline, it is
traditionally considered met when a state certifies its votes.
As of
Monday, all but one state — Hawaii — had certified their elections.
Though the
safe harbor deadline is technically about the relationship between states and
Congress, it also largely insulates states that have certified their election
results from legal challenges.
“It plays
into litigation because courts are aware of this deadline and want to give the
states this benefit, so they do their best to try to comply with it,” said
Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California,
Irvine.
But despite
more than a century of precedent, allies of the president are continuing to
file baseless lawsuits seeking to upend the election. On Tuesday, the Texas
attorney general filed an audacious lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four
other states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia — with more claims
of election irregularities, and no evidence to support them.
Texas asked
the justices to put its case on an exceptionally fast track, but the court has
acted with measured deliberation in considering similar requests and may defer
consideration of whether to hear the suit until it can have no practical
impact.
And the
Republican legal efforts were dealt yet another loss late Tuesday afternoon,
when the Supreme Court rejected a request by Republicans in Pennsylvania to
overturn election results in the state.
There were
no dissenting opinions.
Nick
Corasaniti covers national politics. He was one of the lead reporters covering
Donald Trump's campaign for president in 2016 and has been writing about
presidential, congressional, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns for The Times
since 2011. @NYTnickc • Facebook
Jim
Rutenberg is a writer-at-large for The Times and the Sunday magazine. He was
previously the media columnist, a White House reporter and a national political
correspondent. He was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public
Service in 2018 for exposing sexual harassment and abuse. @jimrutenberg
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