Stolen election: Trump should either have gone the whole hog or shut up. By Douglas Wilson.
Someone in Trump’s position was likely in possession of far more evidence on [whether the election was stolen] than any of us on the outside. … He either had it or he didn’t have it. …
If he had it, he should have done far more with it.
If he didn’t have it, he shouldn’t have done as much as he did.
Trump was in the gray zone in-between “having it” and “not having it”.
It appears from Patrick Byrne’s account that Trump was aware that the statistical evidence was overwhelming that the election was stolen. But he was being informed by a bunch of innumerate lawyers with small attention spans who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand how the election was stolen. Computers and numbers were beyond them.
Trump ended up being convinced that the election was stolen, if only on a businessman’s gut feeling. But he lacked the hard evidence to prove it, in part because his staff weren’t up to the task.
He lacked the hard evidence because he never gave the authority to Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn to seize the equipment that had the evidence. So the Dems won.
I am not saying that Trump should have done something like declare martial law — I am simply illustrating the logic of the competing claims. If Trump had declared martial law, and then laid out “all the evidence” for the whole world to see, then we would have needed to come to only one of two possible conclusions. One would be that the evidence was clear and compelling, and that Trump had prevented a coup, and the other would be that the evidence was lame and halting, and that Trump was guilty of perpetrating a coup. But in either case, Trump would have pushed all his chips to the middle of the table, and he would have won or lost the bet.
But as it stands now, Trump is an outside former president, and he merely has the rhetoric of “stolen election.” This will be sufficient to keep everything inflamed, but it will not be sufficient to bring any healing to America.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
