Byron York’s Daily Memo: Assessing Trump’s disastrous end

ASSESSING TRUMP’S DISASTROUS END. Donald Trump is now the only president ever impeached twice. Yes, that says a lot about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s, and the Democratic Party’s, obsessive quest to remove him from office. But the impeachment is also the result of a disastrous turn in Trump’s presidency since the November 3 election.
 
Before November 3, there was much speculation, much guessing, that Trump would not accept the results of the election. And then, when the day arrived, sure enough, Trump did not accept the results of the election. That one action would lead to catastrophe in his final weeks in office. Still, at the beginning, in the days immediately following the election, Trump was entirely within his rights to challenge the results in some key states.
 
Ironically, while Trump was doing that, he also enjoyed what should have been one of the highest notes of his presidency: the successful development of a COVID vaccine. On Monday, November 9, less than a week after the election, drugmaker Pfizer announced a vaccine that it said was 90 percent effective. That announcement was followed by other, equally effective vaccines. It was a stunning success for Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. He had promised the program would deliver a vaccine in record time. His critics scoffed, and some accused him of lying. And then Operation Warp Speed delivered a vaccine in record time. It was, or should have been, a triumph for Trump — an accomplishment that would be a high point, perhaps the highest point, of any presidency.
 
But the Pfizer announcement also came on the morning of the first business day after all major media outlets called the election for Joe Biden. Even though a few states were still not settled, Biden had cleared the hurdle of 270 electoral votes, making him the next president.

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Trump had a choice. He could concede the election and focus his remaining time in office on getting the vaccine to the Americans who needed it most — subsequent experience showed some states would do an almost unthinkably bad job with distribution — or he could focus on challenging the election. He chose to focus on challenging the election.
 
It was an impossible task. To win, Trump would have had to turn around the results in not one, not two, but three states — say, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Although he claimed massive fraud, he could not find enough irregularities to make a dent in the results in any of those states, or any other state, for that matter. On November 12, I headlined this newsletter, “It’s all over but the lawsuits” and wrote that “there is no hope” Trump could reverse the results in any state. The election was over, even though Trump certainly had the right to take his case to court.

He did so, over and over, and lost nearly every time. Even if there had been hope of successfully challenging the results, Trump did not put together a systematic effort to do it. He chose instead to rely on a ragtag team of lawyers led by Rudy Giuliani. And that effort blew up in his face on November 19, when one of his attorneys, Sidney Powell, alleged that Biden’s victories in some key states were the result of “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States.” Powell presented a theory that the Dominion voting system and Smartmatic software — “created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez” — had been used to steal the election from Trump. “President Trump won by a landslide,” Powell said. Powell offered no evidence, at that time or ever, to support her theory, and she is now facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion.
 
The news conference marked a disastrous turn in the Trump effort. My newsletter headline the next day was “Growing concern about the Trump legal fight.” “Republicans saw the entire exercise as moving Trump’s case backward, not forward,” I wrote. That was an understatement.

Still, Trump pressed ahead. He lost a key case in Pennsylvania. Powell went on to make ever-more outrageous allegations, finally going far enough to be booted from the Trump team. And all the while, Republicans hoped that Trump would find it in himself to help the GOP win the two Senate seats at stake in the Georgia runoff — races that would determine whether Republicans kept control of the Senate. But Powell and an ally, attorney Lin Wood, worked to sabotage the GOP’s chances in Georgia, arguing that the voting system was so corrupt that Georgians should not even turn out to vote. Trump traveled to Georgia on December 6 and delivered a speech solidly supporting Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. But he then immediately resumed the election challenges.
 
The absolute last moment for Trump to quit was December 14. Three days before that, on December 11, the Supreme Court declined to hear the last big challenge made on his behalf, the lawsuit by the state of Texas. Then, on the 14th, the Electoral College met to cast its votes. Biden, as everyone knew, won with 306 votes to Trump’s 232. The Daily Memo headline was simple: “Time for Trump to stop.”

But Trump did not stop. And everything that occurred in his election challenges after December 14 was a fiasco, or worse. On December 17, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn suggested the president could impose martial law to seize election machines and re-run the election in some states. Trump could “order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically re-run an election in each of these states,” Flynn told Newsmax. This newsletter the next morning was headlined, “Dangerous talk about the election and the military.”

But things got even worse. Early in the morning of December 19, Trump tweeted a report by adviser Peter Navarro which Trump said proved that it was “statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election.” Then Trump added: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” That reflected the Trump team’s position that the December 14 Electoral College vote didn’t matter; it was the January 6th congressional certification of the vote that presented the big opportunity to reverse the election results.
 
Then, on January 2, Trump talked for an hour on the phone with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a call that was heard by lawyers on both sides and recorded by Raffensperger’s team. The next day, January 3, the Washington Post reported that Trump had pressed Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes that put Trump past Biden in Georgia. Trump maintained that many times that number of votes had been stolen from him, and all Raffensperger had to do was identify some of them. “I only need 11,000 votes,” Trump said. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

The call was impossible for Trump defenders to defend. And had there been more time remaining in Trump’s term, it might have led to another Trump impeachment. But events were moving quickly in Washington, and attention turned to the congressional session on January 6. Many Republicans in the House, and a few in the Senate, had promised to object to the Electoral College results of some states, meaning there would be a long debate before the ratification could occur. It wouldn’t work, and Biden would win in the end, but January 6 promised to be the last stand for Trump’s “stop the steal” effort.
 
Everyone knows what happened then. The day began with the president speaking at a rally on the Ellipse. At the same time, some of his supporters were preparing to storm and ransack the Capitol. In the ensuing riot, five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died. The sight of rioters breaching the Capitol was stunning to millions watching on television. Trump watched, too, and did not respond until the violence had reached an extraordinary level, and then only in a perfunctory way. Afterward, Congress, led by Vice President Mike Pence, re-convened and ratified Biden’s victory.
 
Trump’s actions led to the second impeachment. It was a quickie job, one that cheapened the idea of impeachment and was possibly unconstitutional: Given the few days left in Trump’s term, Congress will be seeking to remove from office a president who has already left office. It makes no sense. Still, Trump had to know that his actions would bring a response from the same House leaders who had already impeached him once.
 
So now Trump has just days left in his term. And many Republicans are stunned by what has happened at the end of his presidency. Now, they are dividing that presidency into the long period before November 3, 2020, and the short time after.
 
Trump’s term before the election was marked by a remarkable set of accomplishments. He cut taxes and enacted serious deregulation that sparked the economy, led to an increase in wages not seen in decades, and created a foundation for more growth after the disaster of COVID. He appointed three Supreme Court justices and a slew of appeals court judges that were a dream come true for conservatives. He made significant progress toward peace in the Middle East. He strengthened the military. He made progress on illegal immigration. Finally, he pushed and cajoled and pressured pharmaceutical companies to create a COVID vaccine with a speed that many did not believe was possible.
 
Of course Democrats fought Trump every step of the way and began the work to remove him from office before he even took office. And Trump made all sorts of missteps. But the record is the record, and it is an impressive list of achievements.
 
And then, after November 3, one disaster after another.  With the exception of the vaccine, everything Trump did after the election has led to catastrophe for himself, the Republican Party, and the nation. It did not have to be that way. Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the election led to a series of events that cast a shadow on everything he accomplished before.

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