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How one of Trump's slogans proves his guilt. [1]
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Date: 2022-12-25
Rally at the U.S. Capitol on November 14, 2020. Source: Wikimedia Commons
What is the most memorable slogan you remember from the aftermath of the very tightly contested presidential election of 2000?
Maybe “Bush v Gore”? That case name wasn’t highly publicized until it got to the Supreme Court, and by then, the contest was almost over.
Could it be “hanging chad”? No one intended for it to become a slogan, but it certainly was a memorable phrase.
During the campaign, you might remember “compassionate conservatism”, which was used by the Bush team to describe his approach to governing. In hindsight, it seems that Bush’s slogan was more memorable than either of Gore’s slogans (“Leadership for a New Millennium” and “Prosperity and Progress”), which may be why Gore lost the election.
Maybe the main reason why we don’t really associate any slogans with the post-election jockeying in 2000 is that the aftermath was really an afterthought. Yes, everyone was hoping their side would win, but no one considered it imperative to invent a slogan to hype up partisan foot soldiers for a long battle that would culminate with cries of “hang Mike Pence” (...as opposed to hanging a non-person named “chad”).
Yes, in 2020, the mere existence of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” slogan is incriminating. Who thought it up? When? Would Trump have found it to be useful from the beginning of the campaign in late 2019? Why not? What if the slogan had become popular well before November 2020? Would red voters have seen its true colors and voted for the blue candidate, instead?
The 2020 election was already over when “Stop the Steal” actually took off. See this article by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRL) for a timeline assembled in early 2021. According to this report, the phrase was “seeded” to the public in the final weeks before the election, but Trump actually started having rallies promoted with that slogan in December 2020.
I think everyone realizes that Trump’s rallies comprise evidence that he wanted to overturn the election result, but inventing a political slogan that had absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the legal challenges in the courts? That’s proof of extra-judicial thinking being used to promote an extra-judicial plan for staying in power.
If a prosecutor must prove the defendant’s “intent” to a jury, the mere existence of the Stop the Steal slogan seems like very damning circumstantial evidence of Donald Trump’s intent to defraud the American people.
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