Trump’s dirty little secret

Donald Trump’s disastrous resurrection of the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden was almost an unqualified success for us. Almost, I say, because despite the self-immolating racist jokes and time-wasting blather in a state he cannot win, the event had one dark portent. Trump introduced speaker of the house Mike Johnson with an allusion to a shared secret, an allusion little noticed by the media in the midst of the tumult of hatred and xenophobia.

“We gotta get the congressmen elected and we gotta get the senators elected,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the congressional elections also being contested next week. “We can take the Senate pretty easily, and I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House. Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret -– we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

Politico described the aside as “potentially … sinister comments that could be a reference to the House settling a contested election.” New York Democratic Representative Dan Goldman told CNN “Why did Donald Trump come to New York nine days before the election? The state is going to go to Kamala Harris. The answer is that the House really runs through New York. There are seven races that could go either way in the house, and that will likely determine the majority.

“On January 6, the certification of the electoral college will happen again, and as we know from 2021, whoever is in control of the House of Congress will have a lot of say on what happens on January 6. I suspect Donald Trump’s little secret plan with Mike Johnson is a backup plan for when he loses and he tries to go to the House of Representatives to throw out the electoral college.”

All this might have been a huge threat on January 6, 2021. Back then all that was required to question a state’s election result was a single objection from one Senator and one Representative. But in December of 2022, game-changing legislation was passed requiring one fifth of each chamber to object. Not only are they now required to object in strength, they must give their reasons and those reasons will be open to debate.

All of which is to say, the fusty and arcane 19th century procedure is now much harder to monkey with. So Republicans can threaten dirty little secrets all they want. But their threat is predicated on two unlikely events, their domination of the election in the Senate and the House and a will among a significant minority in both chambers to cheat.

But I’ve got news for them. After new members of the House and Senate are sworn in and seated on January 3, I think the Speaker of the House is going to be Hakeem Jeffries and not Mike Johnson. And the Senate Majority Leader will remain Chuck Schumer. And Kamala Harris will be both the President of the Senate and the President-elect of the United States. So fear not, brothers and sisters. We got this.

Besides, the Madison Square Garden rally was otherwise such a disaster for Trump it probably would have been better for him if he’d never staged it. Puerto Ricans are so incensed by “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe’s xenophobic “floating island of garbage” crack that they will be voting against Trump and his party next Tuesday en masse.

In the final analysis, this whole brackish, underhanded business highlights yet again Republican Accusation in a Mirror. Their constant refrain from 2020 of a “stolen election” is rendered stark hypocrisy by their incessant and sinister hand-rubbing schemes. We should take it very personally indeed that they are already planning to rob us of our mandate. That we will stop them is foregone. That they want to do so in the first place is more than hateful, it’s final proof that they are not patriots, they are not even Americans. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.