Maybe he was saving the worst for last.
Donald Trump’s demanding, threatening, potentially criminal weekend phone assault on Georgia’s Republican secretary of state is drawing horrified criticism from analysts and opinion writers of nearly every stripe.
“Astonishing new evidence of a desperate … Trump caught on tape trying to steal the election exposes the depth of his corruption and makes his Republican Capitol Hill allies complicit in his bid to thwart the will of voters,” reports CNN.
“There must be a response to a president who exploits his office for the purpose of overthrowing an election” writes columnist Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post. “The evidence is on tape. The next attorney general should move forward, if for no other reason, to deter further attempts at such reprehensible conduct.”
Rubin also called for impeaching Trump again — “which could include a ban on [his] holding office in the future.”
“President Trump urged [Raffensperger] to ‘find’ enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions,” says the Post, which published a full transcript of the call, with audio. It’s worth a read or a listen.
Trump “made monkeys of every Republican official and every conservative talking head who professed to believe Trump’s allegations of voter fraud. The president himself made clear that he had only one end in view: overturning the 2020 election,” writes David Frum in The Atlantic.
CNN Analyst Asha Rangappa says Trump should be impeached again.
“Anyone connected to reality knew it,” Frum writes. “Even most of Trump’s political allies probably knew it. But important incentives induced people in the pro-Trump camp to pretend otherwise. And now, as so often happens, Trump has yanked away the protective deception to reveal the truth.”
In an ABC interview on Monday, “Raffensperger said ‘the truth matters’ and complained of facing a ‘rumor whack-a-mole’ for the last two months,” CNN says.
The Trump White House had sought a phone call with Raffensperger on numerous occasions before it was finally arranged. But not before Raffensperger’s advisers had decided to record it, telling no one.
“So if he’s going to try to dispute anything on the call, it’s nice to have something like this, hard evidence, to dispute whatever he’s claiming about the secretary,” one of those advisers told Politico Playbook. “[South Carolina Senator] Lindsey Graham asked us to throw out legally cast ballots. So yeah … we decided maybe we should do this [record the call].”
In the recorded conversation, Raffensperger “tells Trump that the election results giving Joe Biden the victory are solid,” reports A.J. Montini for Phoenix-based azcentral.
“Trump spouts conspiracy theories and claims to have won by large numbers and Raffensperger tells him, ‘The data you have is wrong.’”
Clearly, Raffensperger is a Republican (and erstwhile Trump supporter) with some spine: he “has repeatedly denounced the president’s claims of election fraud as unfounded,” says USA Today.
But in Saturday’s call, Trump “rants on,” says azcentral’s Montini, claiming he won the Nov. 3 election by “hundreds of thousands” of votes. In fact, he lost the popular vote by millions nationwide, and by 232-306 in the Electoral College.
“During the call, the president insulted, complimented and pleaded with Raffensperger to cooperate with him in altering the election results, USA Today reports.
“Trump called Raffensperger a ‘child,’ a ‘schmuck’ and ‘either dishonest or incompetent’ for not supporting claims of widespread voter fraud in Atlanta,” the Post says.
In a CNN interview Sunday, journalist Carl Bernstein said Trump’s call “amounts to a criminal act and is ‘far worse’ than the Watergate scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency” in 1974.
Bernstein ought to know. He and Post colleague Bob Woodword’s investigative work were at the heart of the revelations of criminal activity that reached all the way to the Oval Office. Denounced by leaders of his own Republican Party, Nixon resigned.
There are other historic parallels.
“The tape recalled the kind of coercive, corrupt behavior that led to Trump’s impeachment over a call with Ukraine’s President, but that all Republican senators, with the exception of Mitt Romney, decided last year did not merit his ouster from office,” notes CNN.
Two Democratic lawmakers want the FBI to open a new criminal investigation of Trump’s behavior.
Certainly, the prospect of facing such charges and a trial present the already distraught Trump with much more to worry about after Jan. 20.
As the Atlantic’s Frum puts it:
“Trump’s thoughts now must turn to a Plan B. Plan B is to protect himself from juries even if he loses office. Plan B points to a self-pardon, and the huge crisis that must ensue.”