New indictment provides legacy of Trump’s lies

Former president learning late in game that `buck stops here’

By Ken Tingley

Over four years, President Donald Trump made 30,743 false or misleading statements.

Even by the standard of the most deceitful professional politician, it was a performance of such grand deception, it may never be duplicated again.

We can only hope.

It became routine. He averaged more than 21 lies a day.

We accepted it.

We overlooked it.

His supporters cheered it.

But it was also why he was indicted - again - on Tuesday.

  You can read the 45-page federal indictment if you want, but you won’t learn much that is new.

The January 6 Committee covered most of the transgressions in painstaking detail and Trump committed most of his nefarious acts in full view of the public with no ramifications. His tweets provided a road map and timeline to the daily lying and eventually criminal acts.

He continues to do it.

He was impeached twice and Republicans let him off the hook.

Fox News gave full throat to Trump’s lawyer soon after the indictment was announced, saying the government was taking away his free speech.

Trump predictably called it a “witch hunt,” then compared the United States to Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

The indictment acknowledges Trump’s right to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, there had been fraud and he thought he won. It also acknowledges he had the right to challenge the results.

“But shortly after Election Day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” the indictment says on the second page.

That’s what his supporters need to know. It is what they need to review. What Trump did was criminal and you cannot compare it to any previous president in our history.

He is accused of three criminal conspiracies after Election Day:

• A pressure campaign on officials in seven battleground states pushing them to declare Trump the winner in those states without any evidence of fraud.

• A scheme to use fake electors instead of the rightfully elected electors so Trump could remain in power.

• A scheme to pressure Vice President Pence and install a puppet as attorney general to retain power on January 6.

What is so frightening about the narrative is it could have succeeded if not for a few people - mostly Republicans - who stood up and did the right thing. Some were in the Trump administration, others in state government. All followed their oath to the Constitution instead of an allegiance to Trump and party.

The checks and balances in our government held, but not by much.

We need to remember that.

Harry Truman had this 2 1/2 by 13-inch sign on his desk for most of his presidency that read “The buck stops here.”

That was never true for Donald Trump at any time in his life.

When Truman left office, he was widely disliked after getting bogged down in Korea and the Cold War. Truman, who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb and guided the United States into a peace-time economy, did not hold a grudge. He knew where the buck stopped before walking into retirement.

“The greatest part of the President's job is to make decisions - big ones and small ones, dozens of them almost every day. The papers may circulate around the government for a while but they finally reach this desk,” Truman said in a farewell address to the nation in January 1953. “And then, there's no place else for them to go. The President - whoever he is - has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job.”

That’s how presidents are supposed to think.

But that’s not how Trump thought.

He knew he lost the 2020 election. The indictment makes that perfectly clear. Previously reporting made that clear as well. Yet, he was determined to retain power by any means necessary.

What the indictment cites over and over again is the number of lies Trump told - statements he knew were untrue - about the possible election fraud.

It’s the lies that finally got him.

The phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is mentioned prominently on Page 16 of the indictment where Trump threatens him to find the votes needed to carry Georgia.

On page 28, the acting attorney general refuted claims of election fraud by Trump and told him that the Justice Department would not change the outcome of the election.

“Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump responded.

I wonder if he had Rep. Elise Stefanik in mind.

After briefing Trump on the voting in Michigan, the Michigan House speaker aid, “I fought hard for President Trump. Nobody wanted him to win more than me. I think he’s done an incredible job. But I love our republic, too. I can’t fathom risking our norms, traditions and institutions to pass a resolution retroactively changing the electors for Trump, simply because some think there may have been enough widespread fraud to give him the win.”

That was from a Republican.

That’s what patriotism looks like.

“I fear we’d lose our country forever,” the Michigan house speaker said.

Savor those words for awhile.

Trump leaned hard on Vice President Mike Pence too and when his vice president refused to go along with the scheme Trump told him, “You’re too honest.”

In Trump’s world, that is an insult.

So many people within the administration provided those checks and balances that saved the country.

“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following Election Day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” it reads in paragraph 2 of the indictment. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway - to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Mission accomplished.

We’re still seeing it three years later.

What so many of us do not realize - even now - is how close we came to losing the democracy we hold dear, the freedoms we cherish so much.

You have to go back to the Civil War to see anything similar.

It was on a hillside of a new cemetery in a small town in Pennsylvania that Abraham Lincoln warned us about being vigilant to keep our country.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under god, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

That was in Gettysburg.

We almost lost that because of Donald Trump.

Tuesday’s indictment made that perfectly clear, but then again, we already knew that.