This was clear from the start
Once Donald Trump was declared the loser of the 2020 election on November 7th, by far too many votes for the courts to ever even think about overthrowing, it was immediately all over for him. There was never going to be any successful legal battle. No Capitol attack was ever going to magically keep him in power. No sham audits were going to get him magically reinstalled in office. It was obvious all along that all of the actions taken by Trump world after Trump’s loss were merely an attempt at soothing the ego of an insecure loser who couldn’t handle getting blown out by seven million votes.
Of all the things the mainstream media intentionally got wrong while chasing ratings in 2021 โ and the list was disturbingly long โ arguably the ugliest was its ongoing insistence that Trump “almost” managed to keep himself in power after losing. But this was never, ever, ever, even close to being true, no matter how many times the media repeated it. In reality by pursuing the lie that he won, all that Trump and his people did was harm themselves, while creating a lot of pointless carnage along the way.
Now we’re starting to see tangible proof that none of these Trump election antics were ever going anywhere and merely backfired on him. Sean Hannity’s text messages to Mark Meadows, recently revealed by the January 6th Committee, make clear that even Hannity knew Trump’s support of the Capitol attack would destroy whatever remaining future political viability he might have. And now the Cyber Ninjas, who were supposed to kick off a wave of “audits” around the nation that the media insisted would cause unspecified “damage” to democracy, went out of business this week after drowning in crushing audit-related debt.
Meanwhile Donald Trump is now locked away in near-isolation in Florida, unable to tweet, largely unwilling to appear in public, and completely incapable of finding any way to regain relevance, even as he crosses his fingers and hopes New York prosecutors don’t manage to put him in prison. Trump’s top January 6th henchmen like Steve Bannon are now awaiting criminal trial or awaiting indictment. The process is taking longer than the rest of us would like, but it’s clear who’s losing.
So what did Donald Trump and his allies gain by promoting everything from hopeless court battles to deadly domestic terrorism in the name of pretending he won the 2020 election? In short, nothing. That’s because there never was anything to be gained. No one involved in any of these antics ever had anything approaching a viable plan for somehow magically keeping Trump in office. All the crimes that Trump and his people committed to this end were for naught. In the end it was all about merely trying to protect Trump’s fragile ego โ and even that’s backfired, given that the fallout from January 6th has left him cut off and irrelevant. This outcome was clear from the start. All the carnage along the way was for nothing. Now we’ll see how big of a price Trump and his people pay for his insecurity.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report