On a regular basis, Donald Trump issues weird public statements, filled with bizarre claims and idiosyncratic capitalizations, most of which are entirely forgettable. But Sunday night, the former president went further than he probably realized, and said something — in writing — that was both new and important.
After a year in which Trump and his allies said they wanted then-Vice President Mike Pence to delay certification of the 2020 election results in order to look for evidence of imagined fraud, the former president confessed that what he actually wanted was for Pence to “overturn the election.”
It was an admission that could carry political and legal consequences, which led the Republican to issue a follow-up statement yesterday, which struck a more narrowly focused note. The Washington Post reported:
Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday advocated a new focus for congressional investigators: why then-Vice President Mike Pence did not take steps on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject electoral college votes from several states won by Joe Biden…. In a fresh statement Tuesday, Trump offered a more nuanced take on what he would have liked to have seen from Pence, saying he “could have sent the votes back to various legislators for reassessment after so much fraud and irregularities were found.”
By any fair measure, yesterday’s statement was utterly ridiculous, even for Trump. For example, the former president used it to accuse members of the Jan. 6 committee of being, among other things, “traitors.” The Republican also made up a quote and attributed it to the bipartisan House select committee, and then ironically accused them of “lying” about vice presidential powers.
But it was Trump’s conclusion that stood out: “Therefore, the Unselect Committee should be investigating why … Mike Pence did not send back the votes for recertification or approval, in that it has now been shown that he clearly had the right to do so!”
First, I get the feeling Trump doesn’t know what “unselect” means, though he uses the word an awful lot.
Second, the electoral votes had already been “approved” at the state level, which is why they were sent to Congress for certification.
Third, no one has “shown” that Pence had the authority to reject election results Trump didn’t like, since no such power exists.
But stepping back, the fact that Trump is badly confused about basic details is probably less interesting than the bigger picture: The former president has now publicly called for a congressional investigation into his own vice president and his decision to follow the law.
In case this isn’t obvious, such an examination is extraordinarily unlikely. The committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack clearly has no interest in Trump’s absurd theories, and even if House Republicans were to reclaim the majority in the fall, they probably won’t see the point in launching an investigation in pursuit of a question that already has a clear answer. So why peddle this at all? Because as a Washington Post analysis noted, Trump appeared to be trying to clean up the mess he made for himself on Sunday. There were basically two options Trump and his allies wanted Pence to pursue: having Pence declare Trump the winner by rejecting certain states’ election results, or merely having Pence declare states’ results to be in dispute and sending the matter back to them. Both were drastic and undemocratic ideas predicated on bogus claims of widespread voter fraud and on the idea that the House, in which a majority of delegations are controlled by Republicans, would follow up by making Trump the winner. But the former was certainly more drastic. On Sunday night, the former president pushed the former, saying he wanted Pence to “change the outcome” and “overturn the results.” Yesterday, Trump subtly switched gears, dropping the “overturning” language, and twice pushing the alternative course. Or put another way, he was effectively saying, “Never mind that other statement. What I actually wanted was….” The trouble, of course, is that it’s too late. Trump can’t un-ring the “overturn the results” bell.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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