The Trump Response and his guilty conscience

After reading Trump's two page letter and twelve pages of attached material, I have a few points.

First, Trump's complaints about the Russia and Ukraine investigations are a form of misdirection. He is inoculating his supporters against believing anything that will be said in coming months about his problematic relationship with Vladimir Putin, including the financial benefits he garnered from this relationship extending from Miss Universe to money laundering through Deutsche Bank to contributions to his political action committee through Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

He blames the media for keeping attention on these issues. The reality is that they have largely ignored these lingering cases - although the entire motivation for the Insurrection was to retain office to bury all of what is essentially espionage by a sitting president. Election fraud was a cover story, with the majority running with the cover because no one in Washington wishes to make foreign policy a matter of criminal law, even when we have a criminal president.

That Trump keeps mentioning this topic bespeaks a guilty conscience.

Second, Trump's election fraud claims do not alter the final electoral vote count. If the results of the states he contests are thrown out and their votes rejected, President Biden still got more electoral votes that Citizen Trump. John Eastman made a grave error in his calculations. The 12th Amendment is very clear that the winner is the candidate who has a majority of the votes rightfully cast, not a majority of the possible votes. There is no reality in which Trump wins on January 6th.

The fake electors were presented in the wrong way. No replacement electors could ever have been accepted. If the duly nominated Republican electors from the states Trump contested had put forth their own challenge, submitting their votes as protests and echoing Trump's claims, the claims may have been heard. Pretending that the votes of non-official nominees were the actual votes was both sloppy and stupid. Once the original nominees demurred from Trump's scheme, no replacement was possible. Those potential electors who rejected the Trump conspiracy each deserve the Medal of Freedom for supporting truth over partisanship.

Finally, if the Oath Keepers had staged a bloody spectacle on the House and Senate floors, it would have been rejected by the armed services, the Congress, the judiciary (especially the Chief Justice) and the permanent government, aka, the Deep State. There was never any danger to the rule of law on January 6th. The tragedy of the Trump presidency is that he had no concept of what the rule of law means, nor do his authoritarian thugs - most especially Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. 

There were never any magic words that would have made Trump president, nor will there be any that will keep him from being held accountable for his problematic relationship with the Russian tyrant he loves so much. Once it is made clear that to support Trump is to be SOFT ON PUTIN, the MAGA movement will collapse.