Donald Trump still wants to win the 2020 election

Maybe he’s just panicking about the FBI digging into his possession of classified documents, but Trump just freaked out and declared he’d have won in 2020 if the FBI hadn’t buried the Hunter Biden laptop case — so either declare him the real winner or have an immediate re-election. As noted at the link, Fox News is ignoring this claim completely but OAN is enthusiastic.

It is, of course, bullshit. The allegations Hunter Biden’s laptop proves Biden Sr. is massively corrupt don’t hold up. That the FBI didn’t jump on the case as aggressively as they did Clinton’s emails isn’t election tampering by any means. As Dana Milbanks says, what the FBI has done so far is nothing compared to how they handled the email investigation, which did indeed contribute to her losing the election.

And there’s no legal rationale by which “if this happened, I’d have won, therefore I should be president” makes sense. No more than Trump’s supposedt power to declassify any documents he wants to. Even if he did, the redacted warrant suggests Trump’s been engaged in obstruction of justice. And his own lawyers keep contradicting him. Some very suspicious people may have been in Mar-a-Lago while the docs were there.

It says a lot about Trump’s death grip on the Republicans that they’re backing him up — Sen. Lindsey Graham, for instance, is warning that if Merrick Garland dares prosecute Trump, he can expect violence in the streets. Attorney John Yoo, who under W advocated that the president could break any law he chose (Yoo notably did not keep up this stance during the Obama years) says the simplest way to settle the case is for the government to declassify and publish all the top secret documents. Donald Trump Jr. argues it would be good if his dad still had the nuclear codes, because it would make people respect America. Lara Trump’s very troubled. Mark Levin insists that when Biden calls out Republicans’ fascist streak, he’s dehumanizing conservatives.

This is, of course, par for the course for the current Republican Party and its supporters. Mike Lindell claims all votes cast in Utah are fraudulent.  Indiana’s Rep. Jim Banks thinks the bad thing about forgiving student loans is that fewer young Americans will join the military. Arizona senatorial candidate Blake Masters has discovered forcing women to give birth isn’t popular, so he’s scrubbed things like his support for a fetal personhood constitutional amendment from his website.

Some Republicans are still going with the defense that only Democrats have agency — they’re angry and extreme because just like Graham claims, we drove them to it with our cruel attacks. But as LGM points out, the Clintons were accused of multiple murders; Republicans accused Obama of not being a natural born citizen, as well as being a secret terrorist plotting to turn black street gangs into his secret police. People who revere Donald Trump claimed in 2020 they were shocked — shocked — by Kamala Harris’ sex life. Somehow we haven’t reached the same level of loonie.

It’s better to be liberal, I guess.