“Election denial” is supposedly a grave sin that places a public figure outside of the bounds of acceptability. Remember how the news media briefly convinced businesses that they had to stop funding “election-denying” lawmakers.
But the case against former President Donald Trump eventually boiled down to weaponized election-denial. New York’s prosecutors and their defenders in the media ultimately argued that Trump’s 2016 win was illegitimate, and this illegitimate win was election fraud, which formed the underlying offense that elevated an accounting misdemeanor to a felony.
The true underlying offense was that Trump cheated on his wife, but Democrats and the news media announced decades ago that such matters were none of our business. They were wrong: Trump’s infidelities, like Bill Clinton’s and John F. Kennedy’s, reflect on his unfitness for the office. But these are the new rules.
The actual crime Trump was found to commit, in essence, was lying to his checkbook. When Trump’s company reimbursed Trump’s crooked lawyer Michael Cohen for his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, the company wrote it down as compensation for legal services.
To make such a picayune victimless crime into a felony, they needed to posit that this misleading accounting entry was in service of another, more serious, underlying crime. Let’s let liberal ethics lawyer Norm Eisen explain:
“A prison sentence would send a message to Mr. Trump and his followers that you cannot get away with conspiracies to interfere with an election.”
Think about that wording: “conspiracies to interfere with an election”! Trump was one of the two contestants in the election. He wasn’t interfering in the election unless you believe the election was Hillary Clinton’s and Trump was just an interloper — and that’s exactly the mindset of Eisen and every other defender of this verdict.
Recall that Hillary Clinton said Trump is “an illegitimate” president. After trying for four years to pretend somehow that Russian President Vladimir Putin rigged the election, they needed some grounds for their election denial, so they came up with the Stormy Daniels angle.
The substance of this argument is that in a fair election, the public would have known Trump cheated on this wife, too — in addition to the earlier wives about whom Trump bragged about cheating on. Again, this might have mattered before Bill Clinton forced the Democrats and the news media to declare extramarital affairs OK.
But prosecutor Joshua Steinglass believed the election was illegitimate because the voters lacked this piece of information about Trump. “Democracy gives people the right to elect their leaders,” Steinglass said in his closing arguments, “but that rests on the premise that the voters have access to accurate information about the candidates.”
Trump’s and Cohen’s actions were an effort “to deny that access, to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinated fashion,” Steinglass argued.
That’s an insane argument with absurd implications, but Eisen and many liberals endorse it. It is election fraud, they claim, to keep some information out of public knowledge during a presidential campaign.
Was it election fraud when Barack Obama pretended in 2008 that he didn’t support gay marriage? Was it election fraud when Bill Clinton didn’t disclose his serial philandering?
Emphasizing the “conspiracy” to keep information secret doesn’t limit anything here. Every single presidential campaign is a conspiracy of the candidate, the running mate, the spouses, the campaign manager, and the whole inner circle of the campaign.
More to the point, did NPR, Facebook, and Twitter engage in fraudulent “election interference” when they worked with Biden’s team to hide damaging information about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in the days before the election?
Maybe the offense is that the establishment sees that its job is to hide “harmful” facts (like that COVID-19 probably began in a lab) and it is furious that Trump stole their job from them.
Do we stop at hiding damning facts about the candidates? What about misrepresenting facts? What if a candidate publishes a misleading autobiography? Or what if a campaign publishes a policy paper that ignores the well-established dynamic effects of tax cuts?
A huge swath of the academic, political, and media establishment has never accepted its loss in 2016. Sure, Democrats don’t always win, but the saying was “the establishment always wins.” In 2016, the establishment lost in the GOP primary, and so the general was establishment vs. insurgent. Hillary Clinton was supposed to win. Those were the rules. By winning, Trump broke the rules.
So when Eisen writes, “Moreover, Mr. Trump has shown absolutely no contrition,” he wants Trump to be sorry for winning.
When he writes, “Finally, sentencing is about not only accountability but also deterrence,” he is hoping this verdict will put upstart candidates in their place.