US Elections Commissioner Demands Trump Prove Outrageous Voter Fraud Claims // The Madness of King Donald By Andrew Sullivan
'Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality - and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission..' Andrew Sullivan
Federal Election Commissioner Ellen L.
Weintraub threw down the gauntlet Friday, challenging President Donald Trump to
provide evidence for his outlandish claims that he would
have won the state of New Hampshire in the November election were it
not for massive voter fraud. “The President has
issued an extraordinarily serious and specific charge,” Weintraub said in a
statement that she tweeted on Friday. “Allegations of this magnitude cannot be
ignored.” The voter fraud
“scheme” Trump describes would “constitute thousands of felony criminal
offenses under New Hampshire law,” she noted. She concluded, “I
therefore call upon President Trump to immediately share his evidence with the
public and with the appropriate law-enforcement authorities so that his
allegations may be investigated promptly and thoroughly.”
Weintraub’s comments
came after reports that Trump, during a private meeting with former Sen. Kelly
Ayotte (R-N.H.) and other senators, insisted
voter fraud is the only reason that both he and Ayotte lost the state
in November. Specifically, Trump alleged that “thousands” of Massachusetts
residents traveled to New Hampshire to vote illegally, Politico reported.
Fergus Cullen, New Hampshire’s former GOP
chair, tweeted out his own request for proof of those claims on Friday. Cullen
said he would give $1,000 to the first person proving that even one
out-of-state person took a bus from Massachusetts to vote in New Hampshire. Throughout first few weeks of his
presidency, Trump has repeatedly disputed the fact that he legitimately lost
the popular vote to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
He’s attributed
his loss to widespread voter fraud, including voters registering as dead
people, voters registering in two states and undocumented immigrants voting
illegally. However, he has offered no hard proof of his claims, and officials
across the country have said they found little to no evidence of
fraudulent voting.
The Madness of King Donald By Andrew Sullivan
I guess I should start by saying this is not a blog. Nor is it what one might call a column. It’s an experiment of sorts to see if there’s something in between those two. Most Fridays, from now on, I’ll be writing in this space about, among other things, the end of Western civilization, the collapse of the republic, and, yes, my beagles. If you’re a veteran reader of my former site, the Dish, you may find yourselves at times in an uncanny valley. So may I. The model I’m trying to follow is more like the British magazine tradition of a weekly diary - on the news, but a little distant from it, personal as well as political, conversational more than formal.
I want to start with
Trump’s lies. It’s now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell
whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie.
Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the
truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political
fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth - even as they were
dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They
acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal
democracy to function at all. Trump’s lies are different. They are direct
refutations of reality - and their propagation and repetition is about
enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They
are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of
bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force
their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer
was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd
reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could
repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly
chilling.
What do I mean by
denial of empirical reality? Take one of the most recent. On Wednesday, Senator
Richard Blumenthal related the news that Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee
for the long-vacant Supreme Court seat, had told him that the president’s
unprecedented, personal attacks on federal judges were “disheartening” and
“demoralizing.” Within half an hour, this was confirmed by Gorsuch’s White
House–appointed spokesman, who was present for the conversation. CNN also reported that Senator Ben Sasse had heard Gorsuch
say exactly the same thing, with feeling, as did former senator Kelly Ayotte.
The president
nonetheless insisted twice yesterday that Blumenthal had misrepresented his
conversation with Gorsuch - first in an early morning tweet and then, once again, yesterday
afternoon, in front of the television cameras. To add to the insanity, he
also tweeted that in a morning interview, Chris Cuomo
had never challenged Blumenthal on his lies about his service in Vietnam - when
the tape clearly shows it was the first
thing Cuomo brought up.
What are we supposed
to do with this? How are we to respond to a president who in the same
week declared that the “murder rate in our country is
the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years,” when, of course, despite some recent,
troubling spikes in cities, it’s nationally near a low not seen since the late 1960s, and half
what it was in 1980. What are we supposed to do when a president says that two
people were shot dead in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell address - when this is directly contradicted by the Chicago police? None of this,
moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually
doubled down by another lie - along with an ad hominem attack.
Here is what we are
supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is
retracted - and journalists in press conferences should back up their
colleagues with repeated follow-ups if Spicer tries to duck the plain truth. Do
not allow them to move on to another question.
Interviews with the president
himself should not leave a lie alone; the interviewer should press and press
and press until the lie is conceded. The press must not be afraid of even
calling the president a liar to his face if he persists. This requires no
particular courage. I think, in contrast, of those dissidents whose critical insistence
on simple truth in plain language kept reality alive in the Kafkaesque world of
totalitarianism. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik once said: “In the life
of every honorable man comes a difficult moment … when the simple statement
that this is black and that is white requires paying a high price.” The price
Michnik paid was years in prison. American journalists cannot risk a little
access or a nasty tweet for the same essential civic duty?
Then there is the
obvious question of the president’s mental and psychological health. I know
we’re not supposed to bring this up - but it is staring us brutally in the
face. I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in
your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue
things, what would you think of him?
If you showed up at a
neighbor’s, say, and your host showed you his newly painted living room, which
was a deep blue, and then insisted repeatedly - manically - that it was a
lovely shade of scarlet, what would your reaction be? If he then dragged out a
member of his family and insisted she repeat this obvious untruth in front of
you, how would you respond? If the next time you dropped by, he was still
raving about his gorgeous new red walls, what would you think? Here’s what I’d
think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an
alternative universe; he’s delusional. If he kept this up, at some point you’d
excuse yourself and edge slowly out of the room and the house and never return.
You’d warn your other neighbors. You’d keep your distance. If you saw him,
you’d be polite but keep your distance.
I think this is a
fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near
panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That
always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the
linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive,
and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance,
everyone is always on edge. There is no anchor any
more. At the core of the administration of the most powerful country on earth,
there is, instead, madness.
With someone like this
barging into your consciousness every hour of every day, you begin to get a
glimpse of what it must be like to live in an autocracy of some kind. Every day
in countries unfortunate enough to be ruled by a lone dictator, people are
constantly subjected to the Supreme Leader’s presence, in their homes, in their
workplaces, as they walk down the street. Big Brother never leaves you alone.
His face bears down on you on every flickering screen. He begins to permeate
your psyche and soul; he dominates every news cycle and issues pronouncements - each one shocking and destabilizing - round the clock. He delights in
constantly provoking and surprising you, so that his monstrous ego can be
perennially fed. And because he is also mentally unstable, forever lashing out
in manic spasms of pain and anger, you live each day with some measure of
trepidation. What will he come out with next? Somehow, he is never in control
of himself and yet he is always in control of you.
One of the great
achievements of free society in a stable democracy is that many people, for
much of the time, need not think about politics at all. The president of a free
country may dominate the news cycle many days - but he is not omnipresent - and
because we live under the rule of law, we can afford to turn the news off at
times. A free society means being free of those who rule over you - to do the
things you care about, your passions, your pastimes, your loves - to exult in
that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene. In that sense, it seems to
me, we already live in a country with markedly less freedom than we did a month
ago. It’s less like living in a democracy than being a child trapped in a house
where there is an abusive and unpredictable father, who will brook no reason,
respect no counter-argument, admit no error, and always, always up the ante until
catastrophe inevitably strikes. This is what I mean by the idea that we are
living through an emergency.
I’ve managed to see
Scorsese’s Silence twice in the last couple of weeks. It
literally silenced me. It’s a surpassingly beautiful movie - but its genius
lies in the complexity of its understanding of what faith really is. For some
secular liberals, faith is some kind of easy, simple abdication of reason - a
liberation from reality. For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and
often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You see this in the main
protagonist’s evolution: from a certain, absolutist arrogance to a long
sacrifice of pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result, in the
end, of living, of seeing your previous certainties crumble and be rebuilt,
shakily, on new grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and sometimes
most painfully so in the face of hideous injustice or suffering. A life of
faith is therefore not real unless it is riddled with despair.
There are moments - surpassingly rare but often indelible - when you do hear the voice of God and
see the face of Jesus. You never forget them - and I count those few moments in
my life when I have heard the voice and seen the face as mere intimations of
what is to come. But the rest is indeed silence. And the conscience is
something that cannot sometimes hear itself. I’ve rarely seen the depth of this
truth more beautifully unpacked. Which is why, perhaps, the movie has had such
a tiny audience so far. Those without faith have no patience for a long
meditation on it; those with faith in our time are filled too often with a
passionate certainty to appreciate it. And this movie’s mysterious imagery can
confound anyone. But its very complexity and subtlety gave me hope in this
vulgar, extremist time. We cannot avoid this surreality all around us. But it
may be possible occasionally to transcend it.
see also
