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23 May 21
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FOCUS: Eric Lutz | Is Arizona a Fresh Start for Trump Dead-Enders?
Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair
Lutz writes: "Back in November, on the same day Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Alabama Republican Mo Brooks announced that he would fight the results of the vote—and urged his colleagues to do the same."
Even local Republicans are demanding that Maricopa County stop its dangerous “audit.” But Trump and his allies are pushing for other states to use the partisan proceeding as a blueprint to undermine the 2020 results.
ack in November, on the same day Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Alabama Republican Mo Brooks announced that he would fight the results of the vote—and urged his colleagues to do the same. “There’s no way I’ll vote in the House to ratify the Electoral College votes of states where illegal votes distorted the will of the people in those states who voted legally,” the congressman wrote November 7. “This election was stolen by the socialists engaging in extraordinary voter fraud and election theft measures,” Brooks said weeks later. “In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States.”
The remarks were, like Trump’s own relentless fraud claims, the desperate conspiratorial ramblings of a man unable to accept reality—and may have been easy to dismiss as such, were it not for the four years of lies and delusions that preceded them. Other Republicans quickly took up the charge, making clear that they had no interest in turning down the temperature, but rather in helping to fan the flames. By New Year’s, Brooks’ election protest had found voice in the upper chamber, where Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz announced they, too, would object to the certification of Biden’s win. The groundswell continued to build, with Trump encouraging his supporters to flood Washington the day of the certification for a “wild” demonstration. After two months of all this, the country was clearly headed to a dangerous place. And yet, what ultimately happened January 6 still somehow managed to shock: Trump, Brooks, and others whipped the armed MAGA faithful into a frenzy and directed them to march to the Capitol, where lawmakers were beginning to formalize Biden’s win. The rioters stormed Congress, stalking the halls in search of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and other officials Trump had rallied his supporters against. And though the insurrection was ultimately quelled and the chambers would later reconvene to finish the work of democracy, the lies that led to the deadly attack continued to spread, laying the foundation for the myriad voter suppression bills GOP-led legislatures across the country have gone on to push.
The episode underscored how quickly and easily one dangerous falsehood can snowball into something much larger and harder to contain—and should be a lesson for Democrats and anyone who believes in American democracy, as Trumpworld attempts to use the grotesque “recount” effort underway in Arizona as a blueprint to help undermine confidence in the election results in other states. As was the case with Trump’s original fraud claims, which he began harping on before the election even happened, the whole thing is an absolute farce—a clown show being overseen by a company called “Cyber Ninjas” and that even local officials in the conservative-stronghold of Maricopa County just want to be done with. “Our state has become a laughingstock,” the county’s GOP-led Board of Supervisors wrote in a letter to the Arizona Senate, which ordered the partisan review. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”
But that, of course, is precisely the point of all the crap Arizona Republicans are pulling—and the absurdity of the exercise doesn’t mean it won’t catch on. Trump, who previously suggested in a rambling monologue to Mar-a-Lago guests that the Arizona effort could be the first step to reversing the results of an election settled months ago, called for a similar audit in Georgia, where he spent much of the interregnum urging Brad Raffensperger and other officials to throw the results in his favor. His allies are amplifying his demands: “Georgians still have questions about irregularities found in the 2020 election and they deserve answers,” Vernon Jones, who is mounting a primary challenge against Republican Governor Brian Kemp, said in a statement Wednesday. “We must get to the bottom of all of this.” Trump supporters, meanwhile, are mounting pressure campaigns in their own states, with efforts by the MAGA faithful in places like Michigan, New Hampshire, and California to trigger election audits. “I think there is clearly a justification to do that type of audit that they’re doing in Maricopa County,” Ken Eyring, a pro-Trump activist in Windham, New Hampshire, told the Washington Post. “That’s what I wanted to see done here.”
The Arizona recount may be a joke, but it could have serious consequences. We’ve already seen what can happen when a lie, even a laughably transparent one, takes root: The one Trump and Brooks told last November grew into a deadly insurrection by January. The ongoing audit in Maricopa County is, indeed, “comical,” as the Board of Supervisors described it in their blistering rebuke of Karen Fann, president of Arizona’s state senate. But it still has the potential to become something bigger and even more dangerous as Trump, his allies, and his supporters rally behind it.
Many officials and lawmakers, concerned about the implications for democracy, have recognized that, and are working to combat the assaults on voting rights, hyper-partisan redistricting plans, and other GOP schemes to chip away at the pillars of democracy and enshrine minority rule. Maddeningly, though, those efforts to fight Republican malfeasance are being undercut by those who stubbornly refuse to recognize the gravity of the situation. Just this week, the red state Democrat Joe Manchin published an open letter with Lisa Murkowski, a moderate Republican, calling for lawmakers to work on a “bipartisan” basis to protect the right to vote—a nice sentiment that ignores the obvious fact that Republicans right now are the very reason the franchise needs to be protected. To keep a GOP largely unified in its disdain for democracy from succeeding in its project, Democrats need to be prepared to take drastic measures to secure and improve the electoral process; right now, though, they can’t even seem to get Manchin to see that Republicans are openly trying to subvert it. “Joe Manchin says voting rights legislation must have bipartisan supermajority in Senate while Republicans at state level are ruthlessly trying to prevent Dems from ever winning another fair election,” as Mother Jones’ Ari Berman put it on Twitter this week. “Total asymmetric warfare.”
It is tempting to dismiss the desperate efforts by Trump and his allies to continuously relitigate a an election that occurred seven months ago: Biden is in office, the Democrats have majorities in the House and Senate, and Trump is farting around at his golf club as a glorified blogger. But it is imperative that Democrats, and those who want democracy to prevail over Trumpism, treat this as the emergency it is now. To do anything else is to allow yet another risible stunt to build into something far more serious, something far harder to subdue.
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