Writing for the Washington Post, Aaron Blake pointed out an interesting development in what Trump is trying to sell to the public as he faces his next indictment package, the one about the “perfect phone call” of January 2021. The one where he pressured the Georgia GOP election chair to alter the results and declare Trump the winner.
The man literally said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” (He meant, sloppily, that he was facing an 11,779 vote margin of defeat to Biden, and so he wanted GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to hurry up and produce 11,780 more votes for Trump, and do it ASAP. 11,780 more votes. Now. Just “find” them.)
For the past two years and nine months, until very recently, Trump has declared vehemently that the 2020 election was stolen, that he actually received the most votes, and that that is a fact.
Now he is declaring that it’s merely his opinion, it’s what he thinks personally, that the 2020 election was stolen. Check this out, Aaron Blake showcasing quotes from Trump’s Newsmax interview the night before last, with key phrases bolded by me:
Describing the fateful phone call: “I’m telling them that, in my opinion, the election was rigged.”
“I believe I won that election by many, many votes, many, many hundreds of thousands of votes,” Trump said. “That’s what I think.”
“That’s my opinion, and it’s a strong opinion,” he added. “And I think it’s borne out by the facts, and we’ll see that.”
Trump has never before weaseled away from fact-claiming and into subjectivity like this — my opinion, I believe, I think — on the subject of the 2020 election. It suggests a legal strategy, maybe?
But how would that play out? Legal professionals on here may be able to say more, and they have — Trump, as criminal defendant, cannot wrap himself up in a cloak of “my opinion” as an excuse for committing illegal acts. Especially when there is ample evidence that he’d been told, repeatedly, by numerous aides and advisors, that the facts were that he’d lost.
It doesn’t work like that. I can’t sell cocaine “because in my opinion it should be legal”. I can’t steal your car “because in my opinion it looks better in my driveway”. And Trump can’t attempt to overturn the official and accurate results of the 2020 election for President of the United States of America because in his opinion the official result is wrong and he’s not the loser, he’s the winner.
Nope.
But it’s interesting to see him sliding in this direction. It makes me wonder if a few more of his supporters will start to understand what he’s doing here, that he’s no longer confidently declaring it as fact. Maybe some of them, too, will finally get quieter about the Big Lie and begin to slink away from it.
Speaking of supporters — Newsmax itself, more right-wing than Fox, concluded their Trump interview with an on-camera disavowal of Trump’s opinion. That’s a first for them! The interviewer, Eric Bolling, actually cut away from Trump at the end and faced the camera and said, point blank, “Alright, folks. Now, just a note. Newsmax has accepted the election results as legal and final.”
These trials are going to be interesting. Trump cannot afford to plead insanity while simultaneously running for President. But if he does not plead insanity, then he has to go on trial as a defendant who is expected to understand what truth and reality are — and to obey the law, as a citizen who is sane enough to understand that concept.
Trump’s new “my opinion / I think” framing about the 2020 election, and his backing away from claiming the Big Lie as fact, is not going to serve him well in courts of law.
It will also not serve him well in his perpetual $$ grifting from small donors. Recently we’ve heard that as many as 70% of Republican voters say they believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump by Joe Biden. A significant percent of Trump’s donations go hand in hand with that belief. And I lurk occasionally on right-wing forums just to get pulse readings from time to time… honestly, there are millions out there who truly and deeply believe it. They don’t wield it, as Trump does, as a tool to try to ward off the personal narcissistic injury of being Trump and losing your re-election bid. They believe it.
Maybe that, too, will begin to change slowly. At least for some % of them. Because for Trump to now be saying all of that is just “my opinion”— that is some truly weak-sauce backpedaling, after all the furious rhetorical spear-chucking he’s done throughout 2021 and 2022. Pathetic. In my opinion.