“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” then-President Donald J. Trump urged while in a recorded phone conversation with the Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp, during the tense days of Trump’s bizarre challenge of the 2020 Presidential Election.
Oozing mid-twentieth-century Gambino Crime Family energy, the forty-fifth president effectively incriminated himself in a half-baked scheme to swing the Georgia elections away from the Democrats after the votes had been counted.
Donald Trump was operating under the belief that Joe Biden and his Democratic Party had stolen the election—or at least that is what he convinced himself of in the weeks and months following his tragicomic defeat in the 2020 Presidential Election.
In my opinion, there is little doubt that the bastardizing of our election laws in the name of COVID-19 prevention (such as mailing out ballots to everyone without any real verification) likely corrupted the national election process. But, to be clear, there’s no proof that it swung the election.
No matter what your thoughts are on whether Joe Biden rigged the 2020 election or not, no such fantasies made it on a recording. Maybe Trump was speaking off-the-cuff. Sadly, though, such loose talk during what was then a contentious and ongoing legal and political challenge to the 2020 Election opens the former president up to serious legal charges (which he is now suffering through).
Trump has proven an inability to adapt to his environment. After all, this obscene recording of a sitting American president demanding a governor of his own party “find 11,780 votes” was made less than a year after President Trump had defeated his overamped impeachment. Having almost been taken down by an impeachment based on an illegally recorded phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, one would have thought that Trump would’ve learned the dangers of speaking plainly on an open line.
Alas, it’s not in Trump’s character to admit he’s made a mistake or has been wrong.
Move Over MacBeth for Donald Trump
They say that the presidency brings out a man’s true character. Those of us on the Right (myself included) convinced ourselves that the 2016 election was so critical that it didn’t really matter whether Trump had character or not (he did not and given that he was up against the Bush Dynasty and the Clinton Cabal, it did not matter then).
What mattered was that we nominated the most electable candidate.
Trump was obviously the most electable candidate that year. Twenty-sixteen was the year that we stopped the proverbial plane from crashing into the ground below because Trump overcame the staggeringly corrupt Clinton machine. Trump stormed the cockpit of the national plane to save it from the madmen and women flying it into the ground.
But once Trump wrested control of the national plane from Hillary Clinton and her band of globalists, it turned out that Trump was a poor pilot, with no experienced co-pilot, no ground control operators to bring him home safely, and no flight crew to keep the plane running in its crisis. The plane went vertical once Trump took the controls, soaring high for a moment, giving everyone a false sense of hope, only to juke hard to the left, and then stall yet again.
Once in power, Trump’s character deficiencies and lack of governing experience—coupled with the ingeniousness of his “Deep State” enemies in Washington, D.C.—became insurmountable for the forty-fifth president.
Trump has proven to be one of the most interesting political figures of our era. He will, quite possibly, go down as one of the most dynamic, uniquely American politicians ever. What makes him so compelling is not just his ideological heterodoxy (praising Social Security and advocating for protectionism while demanding lower taxes and waging war on Woke Culture), but his deeply personal flaws.
The Democrats and their allies in the permanent Administrative State threw everything at the forty-fifth president for four years.
Yet, he endured. He was accused of being a Russian spy. People closest to him ended up betraying him. Trump went through endless character assassination attempts by a mainstream media that cared less about the truth of Trump’s presidency and more about wrangling power from a man they viewed as a shameless usurper.
He survived all this—including an impeachment attempt—only to be brought down by his own iniquities. If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be having a field day with this president.
Can We Trust a Man Who is His Own Worst Enemy?
Today, Donald Trump rages against an Establishment whose only weapon they have against him is his own actions and words.
Nothing they’ve concocted has stuck to “Teflon Don.” It was Trump’s inability to control his lust that brought about his first indictment at the hands of Democratic Party hack, District Attorney Alvin Bragg of Manhattan. Thanks to this indictment, whether it goes anywhere or not, the waters have been tested by the Democrats during a presidential election year for indicting a candidate for office—that water has proven to be warm enough for such prosecutorial abuse to occur.
With Trump’s first indictment, it now becomes easier to get Trump on other charges – and that process has started. As it turns out, Trump’s own words recorded by a Republican governor during the Georgia vote counting in 2020 is now the next self-inflicted wound. And this wound is a doozie. In fact, the Alvin Bragg indictment is a nothingburger compared to the legal trouble that Trump will find himself in once indicted in Georgia, as it appears that that is going to happen soon.
All because Donald Trump couldn’t leave well-enough-alone in 2020.
Trump is not the first presidential candidate to have had his election stolen – if you believe that line of thinking – or at least corrupted. Richard Nixon infamously suffered an electoral defeat at the hands of John F. Kennedy and the Democratic Party in 1960, partly because of JFK’s family connections with Chicago mobsters and JFK’s vice-presidential pick, Lyndon B. Johnson’s deep ties with Texas powerbrokers (who were rumored to have been counting cattle as Democratic votes). Some of Nixon’s advisers urged him to contest the election.
Nixon refused. He knew that he’d be back, it was just a question of when. If Nixon whined about his defeat by JFK, his political future would be over. Americans, at the end of the day, hate sore loser above all else—even when that person lost due under questionable circumstances. It’s just who we are.
Because Nixon kept his powder dry for what must have been an interminable decade for a political creature like Nixon, he was able to ride into the country’s rescue at a much more important inflection point in our history than was his first presidential bid in 1960.
Many have argued that Nixon quite literally saved this country from the brink of disaster in the 1970s (yes, while miring the nation in a senseless political scandal known as Watergate, though that was nothing compared to the disaster that would’ve been visited upon the country under the Democrats at that time).
All Trump had to do in 2020 was bite his tongue and assure his voters he’d be back, spending the next four years building his war machine. Everyone fundamentally knew that Biden would muck things up—and, boy, has he ever. But most people wanted to see if Trump could navigate this situation without his usual childishness.
The Tragedy—and Fall—of Donald Trump
Trump failed the test. Now, he’s being hoisted by his own petard. Whatever you may think of Donald Trump, the fact is that he is his own worst enemy and now, after years of avoiding consequences for his irresponsible actions and words, he is being held accountable at the worst possible moment; the time when the country needs a dynamic leader like him.
Trump may yet still get the GOP nomination in 2024. But, because of his character flaws and his subpar record as president, he’ll lose to the Democrats. It’s baked into the political cake by this point.
As Trump himself might have once tweeted, “Total disaster!”
A 19FortyFive Senior Editor, Brandon J. Weichert is a former Congressional staffer and geopolitical analyst who is a contributor at The Washington Times, as well as at American Greatness and the Asia Times. He is the author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower (Republic Book Publishers), Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life (May 16), and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy (July 23). Weichert can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
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