Trump’s the bank robber who didn’t want violence
An attempted bank robber who doesn’t hurt anybody is still guilty of attempted bank robbery. If someone gets hurt, though, the penalties are greater even if the robber didn’t intend harm.
This is how I think about what Donald Trump did last week. Of course the violence makes everything worse. But whatever blame he deserves for inciting a mob — and I think he deserves a lot — the ransacking of the Capitol should be understood as merely compounding the original caper: to steal the election he lost.
Let’s look at the record. For months, Trump dodged answering whether he’d respect the results of the 2020 election. Why? Because, as he often says, he likes to keep his options open.
Recall that Trump claimed the election was stolen before his cronies invented evidence of the theft. On election night, he said: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
This was always the plan. Even liberals downplayed the outrage. They said Trump was “undermining the legitimacy of the election.” He was. And yes, it’s true many Democrats have questioned elections in the past.
The difference is that Trump’s questioning of election results was a means to an end, not the end in itself.
Trump assaulted the election’s legitimacy as a necessary first step toward stealing the election. As University of Illinois political scientist Nicholas Grossman laid out, the Trump campaign expected the race to be closer, with Pennsylvania playing the role Florida played in the 2000 election. Months prior to the 2020 election, Trump thundered that votes counted after Election Day shouldn’t count, knowing full well that absentee and early votes would be in
Joe Biden’s favor. (He also knew that Pennsylvania’s GOP-controlled legislature barred counting early votes before Election Day).
The plan was to declare victory on election night while he appeared to be ahead. That’s why the campaign was so furious at Fox News for calling Arizona early — it undercut their ability to claim victory that night. In the days after the election, they wanted the Democrats to be the ones going to court to overturn the election results, not them.
But they tried anyway. The original idea was to have the Supreme Court hand Trump the election. This is why he repeatedly insisted that Amy Coney Barrett needed to be on the court before the election.
So much for Plan A.
Plan B was to have state legislatures steal the election for him or have officials “find” enough votes to overturn it. That failed, too. Plan C ended last Wednesday. At his “Save America” rally, Trump repeatedly called on Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject the certified Electoral College votes, under an insane theory that Pence had such authority.
Trump asked the crowd to show “strength.” The mob promptly marched on the Capitol to intimidate Pence and Congress to go along with Trump’s demand.
A literal lynch mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” A police officer was beaten with American flagpoles. Another was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher.
It’s fine to say Trump didn’t intend the utterly foreseeable violence. But that’s like a bank robber saying he didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt. The intended theft was bad enough. The violence only makes it that much more heinous.