The Trump "coup" emails
Emails released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee have revealed that the White House asked then AG Jeffrey Rosen and ADAG Donoghue to investigate election fraud claims.
In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds, British journalist Douglas Murray wrote that people everywhere seem to be desperately seeking their “historical moment”. He writes this in reference to social activism in the United States and United Kingdom, arguing that everyone wants their very own version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington or the Stonewall Inn riots. But this need to belong to a grand historical moment applies just as easily to many in the press who seem obsessed with the idea that Donald Trump was the single greatest threat that American democracy has ever faced.
Trump was a poor leader, an extremely irresponsible one too, but a perfect schemer he clearly isn’t. It seems that the media would like to have it both ways though, on the one hand they pushed stories about his unique incompetence, while on the other they also insist he’s responsible of organizing a sprawling insurrection that continues to this day. It’s hard to sell the idea of both being possible, or at least it should be.
The Trump fear continues to be ever present in the news media, which distracts them from focusing on the abuses of the current government they should be covering like journalists instead of fanatical state-media, but what can we expect from outlets so deeply infiltrated by former members of the security state?
The latest scare comes from documents released by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform pertaining to the Trump administration’s attempts to get officials to investigate claims of electoral fraud around the 2020 presidential elections.
The thing here is that it’s literally just that. The “explosive” information seems to be that then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent emails to Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, right before he was named to the role in order to replace Bill Barr, as well as Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, asking them to investigate claims of electoral fraud. It seems a lot of people are reacting to this information as if they didn’t expect it. Which is rather strange, isn’t it? I mean, what would a different White House have done if they suspected fraud in an election? Not contact the AG and try to get them to investigate?
The Attorney General’s job involves representing the United States on legal matters and producing legal opinions for the President, having the President ask them to find out if there’s been a crime involving election fraud isn’t as crazy as some are presenting it. Like Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney who declared these documents show “…that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost…”, or this piece in The Daily Beast which calls the emails “bombshell documents” (twice) saying that now “…Americans have a clear and unmistakable view of just how far former President Donald Trump went in trying to corrupt our democratic institutions, engage in a violent coup, and overturn our free and fair election…”.
Trump’s fraud claims are baseless, but it seems clear to me that he believes them, why shouldn’t he ask his administration officials to investigate? Moreover, why is this such a big deal all of a sudden? If Trump had been President for the Dems, would the news media make a story out of this? Instead of just reporting on the emails like the predictable behavior that they are, it’s being painted as a “coup” which shows some of these people have never seen a coup.
Beyond Trump’s claims being baseless and this being such a non-story, it seems clear that the media’s obsession with Trump will continue. MSNBC, CNN and a lot of establishment journalists seem far more interested in talking about Trump’s every move than his voters or even his more fanatical followers. They obviously want to pretend they’re still part of the #Resistance, that they’re the “underdog” in this historical fight against tyranny. The worrying part about their fixation with turning Trump into an existential threat is that it helps build the narrative that the US is under a domestic terror threat and therefore we need more military spending, more support for national intelligence agencies and a greater urgency to label those who voted for Trump as “terrorists” or “extremists”. If anything, stories like the Department of Justice’s gag order on The New York Times in order to stop them from talking about the fact that the Trump and Biden governments tried to get access to reporters’ emails show that these people are worryingly focused on the past, when the current government is still a very real threat to freedom.
It’s a dangerous road to take, here’s hoping rationality will win out.
Luis Gonzalez is a lawyer from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (Caracas, Venezuela) currently working in private practice and is founder and co-editor of The Explorer. You can find him on Twitter at @lagm96.