Trump’s Plan

StormTrumpers (illustration by Steve Bell)

The Republican narrative insists of its grievances over “election integrity.” But the evidence being produced and displayed by Rep. Bennie Thompson’s House January 6 Committee is giving form to what was a deliberate, cynical and likely criminal effort to attack and disrupt the Congressional certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one elected administration to the next.

The evidence increasingly points to Trump’s own awareness that he fell short in both the popular vote totals and the awarding of electors from the states, and there was nothing left to do in order to maintain power than to put his mob into action, whom he had told during the final debate with Joe Biden to “stand back and stand by.”

Trump’s plan, typically, was to sic the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, three-percenters and the rest of his anti-antifascist street thugs on Congress and “We’ll see what happens.”

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump,” the former president told Breitbart on March 11, 2019. “I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” (Photos: [L] by Brendan Smialowski-AFP, taken at Bikers for Trump event, Aug. 11, 2018, at the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, NJ; [R] by Lauren Hudgins, taken at a Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, a week before the Bedminster event; and edited by Christian Picciolini)

In the third public hearing on June 16, the House Jan. 6 Special Committee examined the illegal and unconstitutional theory that, as leader of the US Senate, the vice president could overrule the will of the people and choose the president himself. As Trump & Co.’s legal challenges to…