Donald Trump’s allies begin scrounging as he bottoms out

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While he was president, Donald Trump liked to brag about his “perfect call” that he made when he extorted Ukrainian officials into investigating his political opponent. Despite the event resulting in his impeachment, his phrasing was a quick and easy defense for all of his supporters to use – who didn’t know the first thing about the ins and outs of diplomacy and foreign relations but were able to say that their leader did in fact make a call to Ukraine that was perfectly legal, regardless of what the transcript implied.

Unfortunately, it was far from the first phone call that implicated Trump in committing a crime during his presidential term. A phone call between himself and Georgia’s Secretary of State has been the focus of attention over the last several days – the one that he made during the 2020 election in hopes to win the state based on manufactured votes and throw the entire election’s results into question.

The call made to Brad Raffensperger has been in the news before – but now the audio of it has leaked – and in a poetic turn of events, Trump’s allies like far-right Sen. Marsha Blackburn have dubbed this phone call as “not a helpful call” – presumably not very helpful to their cause of lying about election fraud and trying to get them overturned. Of course, Blackburn is far from someone to join forces with. But her remark, a fairly half-hearted attempt to distance herself from Donald Trump on Fox and Friends – a show he almost certainly watches or hears about with regularity – are part of a pattern we’re seeing among her fellow Republican senators: an effort to see what will work best with unsatisfied voters when the midterms come around. It’s also the clearest reason why we need to drive up voter registration as much as possible and elect Democrats in 2022.